Her calm pisses me off more than the pain. I try to stand anyway. The room spins; the floor sways. She presses me back with one palm, firm, unshakable.
“Enough,” she mutters, taping a new dressing over my wound—quick, rough, impersonal. “You’re bleeding again. Congratulations. Sit still.”
I glare at her. “I’m not closing my eyes while she’s like that.”
Vera exhales through her nose, the sound halfway between a sigh and a laugh.
“You men. Always trying to die dramatically.” She reaches for a syringe, draws something clear from a vial. “This is enough sedative to drop a horse, and frankly, I’m tempted.”
“I’m not—”
“Save it.” She slides the needle into the IV before I can finish. “Sleep, Mr. Malikov. You’ll still be a pain in my ass when you wake up.”
I try to fight it, but the drug burns cold up my arm. My vision doubles, then softens at the edges.
Her voice drifts somewhere above me as the world folds in.
“She’ll wake when she’s ready,” she says. “Try not to bleed out before that happens.”
Sukin syn.
My jaw tightens. The sedative drags at my pulse, thick and slow. I dig my nails into the sheet, desperate for one more breath of control.
Not yet. Not until I see her breathing.
The room tilts. My vision fades. Her name burns behind my teeth like a prayer I’ll never say out loud.
Then the black wins.
I wake to the sound of a knife scraping against skin.
Not mine. Something softer. Organic.
My eyes crack open. The room is dim—fluorescents turned low, the kind of sterile quiet that comes with underground clinics and men who don’t ask questions. My chest burns. Shoulder’s locked up tight under bandages.
But I’m awake.
Not loudly. Not the way they imagine. Just enough to see, to hear, to taste the iron again at the back of my throat. Enough to know the room hasn’t burned down while I slept.
Across from me, my boys are holding what looks like a fucking board meeting, and somehow none of them notices I’m conscious.
Lev’s got an apple in one hand, paring knife in the other, peeling it in one long spiral like he’s performing surgery. Dima sits beside him, stone-faced, methodically sectioning an orange with his fingers. Boris leans against the wall, chewing on a grape, tablet balanced on his knee. And Ray Bishop—ex-fed turned whatever-the-hell-he-is-now—slouches in a chair with a banana half-peeled, looking like he’s questioning every life choice that led him here.
“I’m just saying,” Lev says, waving the knife for emphasis, “if the kid’s a boy, I’m teaching him cards. Poker face by age five. Blackjack by seven.”
Dima doesn’t look up from his orange. “You will teach him nothing.”
“Why not?”
“Because you cheat.”
“That’s called strategy.”
“That’s called jail.”
Ray snorts. “Pretty sure teaching a toddler to count cards is the least illegal thing you guys have done this month.”
Lev grins. “See? The Fed gets it.”
