“Fuck off.”
“Thought so. Nine days ago, you would have shoved me for questioning an order. Tonight, you nearly broke my neck for mentioning a woman. You know what that means.”
I lower myself onto the edge of the bed and hold onto the mattress with both hands.
I know what it means.
The thing with Polina has crossed every line I swore I wouldn’t touch. I’ve spent two years telling myself the obsession was operational. That self-delusion died the moment she put her hands on me, and last night obliterated whatever was left.
I’ve never lost control over a woman. Women have always been a variable I could manage, a distraction I could indulge or walk away from, depending on whether they served a purpose. My old man taught me that. Frol practices it. Every woman in the Morozov orbit knows the rules: You’re either useful, decorative, or gone. Nobody gets under the armor, and nobody changes the plan.
Polina didn’t just get under the armor. She cut straight through it without trying, and I’m not even sure she knows she did it.
I keep replaying how close she leaned in when she checked the sutures, near enough that I could smell the antiseptic on her skin mixed with her sweet perfume. Her fingers trembled against my stomach when she thought I wasn’t paying attention, and thelook on her face when she realized I knew what was happening between us won’t leave my fucking brain.
Fuck, the woman nearly brought me to my knees with just that fucking look alone.
I keep picturing myself grabbing her wrist and pulling her onto the bed. Spreading her out on these shitty hospital sheets and finding out if the rest of her runs as hot as that one patch of skin on the back of her hand. Putting my mouth on the racing pulse in her throat and feeling it hammer against my tongue while I slid my hand between her thighs and watched her come apart. To hear the sound she makes when she stops holding back, because I know she’s holding back. It was written all over her, like she was physically bracing herself against what her body craved.
That fantasy has looped nonstop in my head. I’ve been hard more times in the past week than I have any right to be in a hospital bed, all because of her. The way her scrubs pull across her hips when she bends over a chart. The faint scar on her index finger I want to press my mouth against for no reason I could justify to anyone, least of all myself.
But I didn’t touch her. She would have let me, and that would have made me the same kind of man my old man is. Someone who takes what he wants because he can. I refuse to be that person. Not with her.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Ruslan says, pulling me back to the present. “You wouldn’t listen anyway.”
“You’re right.”
“But I will tell you what I see.” He rests his hands on his knees and meets my eyes. “A man who has never once put anything before the job. Not a woman, not a friendship, not his own neck.In the space of nine days, that man is gone. If your old man finds out about her, she won’t survive the week. You’ll go down with her, and I’ll follow for letting it happen.”
I let his words sink in.
Ruslan is never wrong about the things that matter. His loyalty doesn’t come in the form of telling me what I want to hear. It comes as truth, followed by walking into the fire behind me.
“Are you finished?” I ask.
“Are you going to hit me again?”
“Maybe.”
The ghost of a smile crosses his busted lip. “Then no.” He stands and straightens his jacket. “Call Frol. Report the shooting. Get ahead of this before someone gets sent to find out why you’ve gone quiet. If one of those men walks through that door and sees a Kozlov woman at your bedside, nobody leaves this building breathing.”
He heads for the exit and pauses at the threshold. He glances back at me over his shoulder, and for the first time tonight, his face isn’t guarded or confrontational. It’s something closer to understanding.
“For what it’s worth, I get it. She’s the first real thing you’ve wanted. That’s not nothing, Lev. Just make sure it doesn’t get us all killed.”
He walks out and pulls the door closed behind him, and the soft click carries more weight than the argument that preceded it.
I sit alone in the quiet and look at the cracked poster frame. Guilt should be eating at me right now. The man has stepped in frontof bullets for me. He’s driven through ambushes, lied to soldiers twice his rank, and never once questioned my judgment before tonight.
Violence is the only language my world has ever respected, and I speak it fluently. My old man raised me on it. Every lesson, test, and bit of approval I’ve earned came through my fists or the barrel of a gun. Frol got the title and the recognition. I got the jobs nobody cared to acknowledge and the quiet nod afterward that meant I’d bought myself another week of being useful.
But tonight, I didn’t hurt Ruslan because he challenged me. I hurt him because he reduced Polina to a threat assessment, and something in my chest rejected it before my brain could intervene.
That’s new, and it scares the hell out of me. I don’t know if it’s evolution or just a different breed of self-destruction.
My phone vibrates on the bedside table. Frol’s name fills the screen.
You missed the meeting with Father. Where the fuck are you? He’s asking questions, and I’m running out of answers. Call me. Now.
