“Doctor?” Viktor asks from the passenger seat.
“Yelena,” Dominik says. His voice is gravel now.
“Are you sure?” Viktor asks, maybe the only time I’ve ever heard him question his boss’s orders.
“Yes,” Dominik replies. “Yelena’s hands don’t shake.”
Yelena. This is the first time I’ve heard the doctor’s name, and for some reason, I think I hate her for being so vital to him.
“On it,” Viktor answers, phone to ear. “Fifteen minutes, maybe twelve.”
The car goes over a bump, Dominik grunts in pain, and I lose my grip for half a second. My palms are slippery. I tear at the hem of my dress without thinking to rip off a long strip of floral fabric. The tearing sound is loud and indecent in the enclosed space, the same as it was the night he ripped my shirt. I press it over Viktor’s tee and tie the ends, layering pressure on pressure.
Dominik looks down. The corner of his mouth twitches up like he’s thinking about my ripped shirt as well.
“You missed your calling as a nurse,” he teases. The jab pokes harder at the stark contrast between my skills and the legendary doctor I’m about to meet.
“Shut up,” I tell him, because if I don’t make a joke I may start crying again and I refuse to do that in front of him again in this lifetime. The tear I shed during the photoshoot feels like it was years ago.
Dominik leans his head back and closes his eyes. A vein jumps in the line of his throat, quick but steady. I can’t stop seeing the place where my mouth would fit if I were a different woman in a different story and there weren’t rules made of bloodbetween us. I only agreed to belong to him at night for a week, not in broad daylight in a vehicle full of his men.
The driver races through a yellow light, sliding us closer together. My hip kisses his thigh. His hand comes over mine, pressing my torn dress into the wound, and I feel the strength in that hand like an argument I would willingly forfeit.
“Don’t die before we get you to your miraculous doctor,Yelena,” I say, and it comes out with less snark than I intended. Instead, it sounds like I’m twelve-years-old again, bargaining to fulfill all my hopes and dreams in the dark because I thought if I were a good girl my prayers would actually be answered. Back when my mother was still alive, so the apartment smelled like cheap coffee and the comfort only unconditional love can provide.
“I’m not dying,” Dominik says calmly. “I have plans for the next week that I refuse to miss.”
“Funny.”
“True.”
The tunnel yawns ahead and swallows us. The noise changes and so does the air. I stare at the ads on the tile panels as we fly by and fixate on a smiling woman selling something stupid, so I don’t have to look at the blood on my hands.
“She knew,” I say out loud before I can stop myself.
“Who?” Dominik asks.
“My mother,” I reply. “She would’ve known. About Archer. About the way he looks at money like it’s going to save him from himself.” I blink hard, feeling my eyes start to sting. “She would’ve known he wouldn’t come today.”
Dominik doesn’t pretend to give me false comfort. “Then she would have known that he will come now that he’s afraid.”
“And what do you do when you’re afraid?” I ask him. It feels like a wrong question, and I ask it anyway. Maybe because I needto believe he has that emotion too, that he isn’t only made of hard stone and sharp knives.
“Fear makes me more efficient,” he says.
I huff a small breath that might be a laugh if you squint. “Of course it does.”
We climb out of the underworld and the city, the sun breathing down on us again. The SUV changes lanes twice and then peels off into a narrow alley and slides through a half-open garage door that might be a delivery entrance for a business. It shudders down behind us immediately, and the sound of the city cuts off abruptly.
There’s a thin woman waiting in the light beyond the first bay, her sleeves pushed to her elbows, dark hair knotted at the nape of her neck. She’s the kind of pretty you only notice if she wants you to. Yelena, I assume, the doctor whose hands don’t shake.
“Put him on the table,” she says, referring to the metal table under a surgical lamp. She’s brisk, with an authoritarian Russian accent, like the female version of Gavriil. “Jacket off. Don’t touch anything you didn’t bring in. Then, get out of my way.”
Petrov and Viktor move like they’ve done this before, which conjures an image I don’t like. They take Dominik under the arms, and he rises with his jaw clenched, weight lightened just enough to say he’s letting them. He doesn’t look at me as they guide him up on the table. He doesn’t have to: his hand finds mine for half a second, squeezes once—I’m here; so are you—then lets me go.
“Out,” Yelena says to the men before pointing a steel chin at me. “Wash until you scrub off a layer of skin with soap and hot water. Then you may help. If you faint, I will let you crack your head to teach you a lesson.”
“I can’t—” I begin and then realize I can at least try because I do want to help. I just don’t want to make it worse.
