Still, a wound is a wound. Bleeding has rules. Pain has numbers. A body either needs pressure, stitches, splinting, or transport. There’s comfort in problems I can solve with my hands.
I spend the next hour cleaning cuts, checking pupils, setting one ugly wrist fracture while the patient curses at me in three languages, and warning a twenty-year-old idiot not to flirt with me while I staple his shoulder.
I’m taping fresh dressing over the last of the shoulder wound when the garage door opens again. Cold morning rushes in, along with Boris and three more men from the perimeter. One limps. One has blood down the front of his shirt that doesn’t seem to be his. The third ducks his head while Boris says something I can’t hear.
Then Lev steps inside behind them.
Every part of me reacts before I can stop it.
Anger comes first. Then heat. Then that sick, helpless pull my body refuses to let go of just because my heart has better reasons.
He looks like hell. Dirt streaks one side of his face. Dried blood cuts through his brow and down his temple. His shirt clings to him in damp, sweaty patches, and seeing him walk into my makeshift clinic like he still has any right to be near me almost makes my hands shake.
Boris points at the empty chair across from my table. “Sit. She’ll handle that.”
Lev looks at me once, then crosses the garage without speaking.
I hate that my pulse jumps.
He lowers himself into the chair and says nothing. I say nothing back. Around us, the room keeps moving. Somebody groans from the far table. A radio crackles. Boris barks for more clean towels. None of it matters once I step in front of Lev and tip his face toward me.
The cut starts just above his eyebrow and runs into his hairline. Not deep, but ugly. He must have taken a glancing blow from something metal.
“You’re lucky,” I comment.
He scoffs and replies, “That’s one word for it.”
I wet a pad with antiseptic. “Hold still.”
I press the gauze to the cut, and he sucks in a breath through his teeth. My hand is steady. I’m proud of that, because the rest of me is a mess. He sits there with his knees spread and his shoulders squared and his face inches from mine, and I can smell his cologne under the blood and smoke on his clothes. The familiar scent cuts through every defense I’ve erected around myself.
I want him.
That truth is vile. It is humiliating. But it’s also there.
His eyes stay on my face while I clean the wound. I keep mine on the cut because that’s safer than his mouth, safer than his eyes, and much safer than remembering exactly how those eyes look when he loses control.
“Were you outside all night?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Did you know they were coming?”
“We expected movement soon. Not this soon.”
I set the bloody gauze aside and reach for fresh. “Your father does enjoy dramatic timing.”
Lev gives a humorless laugh. “That he does.”
I should leave it there.
Instead I ask, “Did he come himself?”
“No.”
“Coward.”
His mouth moves like he wants to say something and thinks better of it. Good. I don’t need comfort from him. I don’t need agreement. I need him to sit there and let me fix his face so I can forget, for one minute, that he ruined my life.
