39
Polina
Two days after the assault, the compound settles into something close to normal. The men have traded raised weapons for holstered ones and coffee.
Frol is in Kozlov custody somewhere on the east wing. I don’t ask where. Tony has been in the conference room since yesterday morning, coordinating the absorption of the Morozov organization’s legitimate holdings and the quieter, less documented elimination of everything else.
As head of the local police, Boris handles the details with the competence of a man who has done this before and will do it again. Dmitri manages all of it from his office with the door mostly closed, and the compound runs the way a compound runs when the hard part is over and the paperwork begins.
I spend the morning doing what I do. One of Boris’s men has a cracked rib that I strap and send back to bed with instructions he probably won’t follow. A young soldier has a hand laceration, and he squeaks the entire time I irrigate the wound and thenlooks mortified about it once I’m done. I tell him it’s involuntary and not a character flaw, which seems to help.
Ruslan’s arm is the one that takes real work.
The field dressing that got him through the operation did its job and no more, and by the time I get a proper look at the wound, I already know it needs more than I can do at a folding table in the garage. Dmitri clears one of the ground floor offices. The space is imperfect but workable, and I’ve operated in worse. The free clinics I interned at for a while were a shit show, so I mean it when I say I’ve operated in far worse, and I tell myself that while I’m setting up, because the improvised conditions are not the part of this that makes me uneasy.
What I haven’t operated in, in all my years in trauma surgery, is conditions where the patient’s best friend stands in the corner and holds the lamp.
Lev doesn’t volunteer. I ask him, because I need the light and I need it steady, and he’s the only person in this building Ruslan will tolerate close enough. He takes the lamp without a word and positions it exactly where I need it and doesn’t move for the next ninety minutes. He schools his face the entire time. Only once, when I dig into the deepest part of the wound and Ruslan lets out a pained sound through his teeth, does something in Lev’s expression give way for a second before it seals back up.
He’s terrified. He’d rather take a bullet than watch this, and he’s holding that lamp without a tremor anyway.
When I close the last layer of sutures and strip my gloves, I glance over at him. He’s looking at Ruslan, not at me.
“He’s going to be fine,” I tell him.
He nods once. “I know.”
He doesn’t know. He was afraid, and now he’s not, and he’ll never say either of those things out loud. I leave him to his own version of relief and go wash my hands.
The family meeting happens at four in the afternoon.
Dmitri calls it with the whole extended family present, and I sit between Daria and Mila with my hands in my lap while the room arranges itself by instinct around the table. Lev takes a chair at the far end, which is where someone sits when they’re not sure they’re supposed to be sitting at all. Ruslan, who absolutely should not be out of bed, is somehow in the doorway with his bandaged arm in a sling, refusing a chair.
Dmitri speaks for twenty minutes. He covers the operation, the outcome, the current state of the Morozov territories, and what comes next for the organization. Then he addresses Lev, and the room goes quiet, as if everyone has been waiting for this very moment.
“What you gave us, and what you did to end this, won’t be forgotten,” Dmitri says. “There’s a place here for you, if you want it.”
Lev lifts his chin and replies, “I want it.”
The room breathes. Not fully, not yet, because trust takes longer than one conversation, and everyone at this table knows it. But the shape of it is there now, and shapes become real things eventually.
Alexei, across the table, says nothing, but he gives Lev a single nod.
Dmitri turns to me last. “The question about your parents stays open. I’m going to find every answer there is to find, and I’ll give them to you when I have them.”
I swallow around the tightness in my throat. “Thank you.”
It’s not resolution. It’s the promise of resolution, which is all any of us can offer each other right now, and I decide it’s enough for today.
That night, I go looking for Lev.
He’s not in the conference room, not in the kitchen, and not in the corridor outside my room where he sometimes stands when he can’t sleep. The sound of the shower running carries through the closed bathroom door, and I knock once before I push it open.
The bathroom is heavy with steam. Lev is in the shower fully clothed, sitting on the floor of the tub with his back against the wall and the water running over him. He’s looking at his hands.
I don’t say anything. I step out of my shoes, shrug off my cardigan, and open the shower door.
He looks up when I step in with him.
