1
Polina
I’ve been awake for twenty-six hours, and the blood on my scrubs isn’t mine.
I’ve done three surgeries back-to-back-to-back, because Moscow General’s trauma department is understaffed and overworked.
And I’m the idiot who volunteered for the double.
The first was a teenager who wrapped his car around a utility pole. The second was a construction worker who fell four stories onto rebar. The third was an elderly woman with internal bleeding from a fall nobody witnessed.
I saved all three.
That’s what I do. I save people, I wash my hands, and then I save the next one.
My name is on the surgical board more than anyone else this month, which my colleague Dr. Savin keeps pointing out as a compliment instead of a cry for help. I don’t correct him. Complaining about the workload wouldn’t do any good. Andbesides, I chose this life. Every grueling shift, missed dinner, and holiday spent elbow-deep in someone’s chest cavity. I chose this over the alternative.
The alternative is the Kozlov family business.
My cousins run one of the most powerful bratva organizations in Moscow. Dmitri is the pakhan, now that his father has passed. Alexei is his right hand. Their sister Sasha married a former CIA operative who runs their counterintelligence division. My younger sister Daria and I are the only ones who stayed away from that world, but I’ve heard whispers that her ex-husband is involved somehow.
I love my family, but I built my life on the other side of a very thick wall, and I keep it there on purpose. My mother was an outsider who married into the Kozlov name, and the organization treated her like a loose thread. When she and my father died in a car accident sixteen years ago, the official report said the cause was black ice. I was sixteen. I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now.
So, I became a trauma surgeon. I put myself through medical school, graduated at the top of my class, clawed my way through residency, and built a career that has nothing to do with the Kozlov name or the world that comes with it.
My pager goes off at 11:47 p.m.
Trauma bay two. Incoming. Three minutes out.
I toss my cold coffee in the trash and head for the elevator. The fatigue I’ve been ignoring all night settles into my bones as the doors close, but I push it down the way I always do. There’s a body coming through those doors, and whoever it belongs to needs me to be fully functioning.
The paramedics hit the entrance at a near sprint. Two of them are pushing the gurney while a third holds pressure on the patient’s abdomen. There’s a fourth man behind them who doesn’t belong. He’s built like a refrigerator, thick-necked and stone-faced, and he’s wearing a suit jacket that does nothing to hide the bulk underneath. He’s not a paramedic. He’s not hospital staff. Normally, family and friends are instructed to wait in the waiting room.
So, who the hell is this guy?
“Male, approximately thirty, three GSWs,” the lead paramedic rattles off as they barrel through the double doors. “One to the left shoulder, one lower right abdomen, one in the left hand. BP’s tanking. We’ve got two large-bore IVs running wide open, but he’s lost a lot of blood.”
I snap on my gloves and rush to the gurney.
And then I see his face.
The recognition is instant and absolute. It locks my hands in place for two seconds, which is two seconds I don’t have.
I know this man.
I’ve never met him, but I’ve sure as shit seen his photograph in one of the intelligence briefings that Dmitri shared with the family four years ago when the Morozov syndicate began carving into Kozlov territory. He insisted I attend because simply being related to them could potentially make me a target, and he wanted to make sure I could identify the enemy.
I remember gawking at the surveillance photo Dmitri slid across the table. The man in it was leaner then. His hair was cropped closer, and the scar I can see running along his right collarbonedidn’t exist yet. But the eyes were the same. Pale blue, almost grey. Even in a grainy photograph, they stopped me. I stared at that picture longer than I should have, and I made damn sure nobody noticed.
I never told a soul about the things those eyes did to my insides. Just looking at him sucked every speck of air from my lungs and made my stomach lurch.
And that absurd reaction repeats itself as I look down at Lev Morozov. Second son of Vadim Morozov, the pakhan whose organization has been systematically dismantling everything my cousins have built.
He’s on my table with three bullets in him, and the man in the suit jacket is standing in my trauma bay like he owns it.
“Sir, you need to wait outside,” one of my nurses tells the big man.
He doesn’t move. His attention stays fixed on the gurney.
