"You'll need to move on, sir," Rurik rumbles menacingly. "This area is occupied."
"Don't be ridiculous. I know these ladies."
Kevin. It's fucking Kevin.
Like a viper, Priya rears up. "Move on, you dickwad."
He's red faced, and I know him well enough to see that his wide eyes are glittering with shock and maybe fear. Is he that worried I'll rat him out for bragging about having 'broken me?'
"Ava." He straightens his tie. "I thought you'd left town."
"Sorry to disappoint you," I say acidly. "Excuse me. We were having a conversation."
Matvey steps in front of the table, effectively blocking the sight of an aggrieved Kevin. "Miss Blue has asked you to move along," he says, his Russian accent thickening.
"This is my fiancée!" Kevin blusters. He's really going to drag this out? Does he have no sense of self-preservation?
"You did not just say that!" Priya is outraged. "You're embarrassing yourself, asshole."
"Why are you still here?" Kevin asks me, completely forgetting that two seconds ago he was claiming I was hisbelovedfiancée. "Are you that pathetic that you have to keep crawling back?"
NowI'vehad enough.
Standing up, I touch Matvey's shoulder, just enough for him to move a full two inches. "You need to listen to me, very carefully." I'm proud that my voice isn't shaking. "I am not here for you. You do not exist in my world. You're a miserable excuse for a human being and a mediocre surgeon."
Kevin sucks in an outraged breath and coughs it back out. Yeah, that surgeon comment got to him.
"I am on leave from the hospital right now, but when I return, we will not have any interaction outside of the most marginal professional ones, is this clear? If I find that you are slandering me again, I will file a complaint with HR. You'd be surprised at how talkative people are,Kevin, because you're not very selective about who you spread your lies to. Now, kindly take your fragile masculinity, shove it up your ass, and leave."
There's a boisterous round of applause behind us and I see a big group of nurses from the hospital giving me multiple thumbs-up.
Kevin's blandly handsome face is pale, his mouth slightly open as if he can't imagine anyone couldeverspeak to him like this. At least in public, I'd always been polite.
"I believe you heard Miss Blue," Matvey says, and for the first time, I can feel the dark undertone in his words, a barely simmering violence that makes me suspect he might be even more lethal than Rurik.
Kevin comes back swinging. "You're a laughingstock at the hospital, Ava. I don't think your reputation can get much lower. You might want to consider applying somewhere else." He leaves, happy to have had the last word.
There's a ringing in my ears that drowns out the sounds of the sandwich shop. I stay focused on the slice of bacon poking out the side of my sandwich.
"I want to come back," I whisper. "I'm terrified that I'm never going to be able to work at Bellevue again."
Priya hands me my water bottle. "You need to drink this. People at the hospitalareworried about you. There's been no criticism, though. They may not understand what happened, but no one isjudging you for being gone. I know you hate this, but it's not safe. Even I can see that."
"I'm living in this blissful sort of twilight in a multimillion-dollar penthouse, working at a luxe clinic with one of the kindest surgeons I've ever met," I whisper. "But this isn't real. This is all going to pop like a soap bubble and I won't have a place to live. I won't have a job and-"
"You're spiraling," she says sharply. "Pull your shit together. I think you need stern and no-nonsense Priya right now instead of kind and understanding Priya, am I right?"
I stifle a half-sob, half-chuckle. "Yeah, that's on point. There's the harsh Priya I know and love."
"Good. The medical profession is desperate for physician assistants and you will never have trouble finding work." She gives me a dark little grin. "And if you don't mind sleeping in my walk-in closet, you can always move in with us. "
Picturing brushing my teeth next to her mother-in-law, and fighting over the last of the hot water with her poor husband Kabir makes me let out a snort. It is distinctly unattractive, and I slap my hand over in my mouth.
"Feeling better?" she says sternly, but her dark brown eyes are twinkling.
"Yes." I shake out my hands. "You're so good at this."
"I know," she says. Half an hour later after aimless gossip and a debate about the merits of Bad Bunny vs. Feid, she stands up with a groan. "I've got to get back to work. I have an appendectomy scheduled in twenty minutes, and it-"
