“Now,” I add without looking up.
He meets my eyes for a beat, and whatever he sees there makes him listen. He backs out of the bay, and I turn my full attention to the man bleeding out on my table.
I know what happens to bratva men in hospitals. I’ve seen it. A name gets entered into the system, a flag goes up, and within hours, someone shows up to finish what the bullets started. It doesn’t matter which family, and it doesn’t matter which side. If the wrong person finds out that Lev Morozov is lying unconscious in Moscow General, he’ll be dead before morning.
I should report this. I should follow protocol, enter his real name, file the mandatory police notification for gunshotwounds, and let whatever happens happen without my fingerprints on it.
Instead, I turn to the admissions nurse.
“Luka Sorokin,” I tell her. “Construction accident. Got in the way of a nail gun and fell off a ladder at a work site.”
She frowns. “Those are bullet wounds, Dr. Kozlov.”
“It was an accident,” I repeat. “Log it.”
She does as I ask, even if she doesn’t look happy about it. We’ve worked together long enough that she understands I have my reasons, even if I don’t want to share them.
My pulse is running about forty beats faster than it should be. I just falsified a patient’s identity. I just delayed a mandatory police report. If this comes out, I’ll lose my medical license, and that’s the best-case scenario. The worst case involves a prison cell or a shallow grave, depending on whether the cops or my family finds out first.
I don’t have time to think about that right now. His blood pressure is dropping, and if I don’t get him into surgery in the next five minutes, my little act of treason will be for nothing because he’ll be dead.
“Prep OR three,” I order. “Call Dr. Melnyk for anesthesia. Hang O-negative now, run his blood type STAT, and have four units ready the second we have a match. That room needs to be sterilized and ready in three minutes.”
My team is as good as it gets. They don’t ask questions when I usethatvoice, and I use it now because the alternative is letting them hear the tremor I’m swallowing.
We get him into the operating room at 12:09 a.m. I scrub in, and the world outside stops existing. This is the thing nobody understands about surgery. When I’m at the table, nothing else matters. Not my family. Not his family. Not the fact that I just committed a felony for a man whose father is trying to destroy everything my cousins have built.
There’s just the work.
The shoulder wound is a through-and-through. The bullet entered below the clavicle and exited cleanly, missing the subclavian artery by less than a centimeter. If it had nicked that vessel, he would have bled out in the back of whatever car brought him here.
The wound on his hand is worse. The bullet fragmented on entry, and I spend forty minutes chasing pieces through the muscles and tissue beneath. He’s lucky he didn’t lose a finger. I say lucky, but luck has little to do with it. At the risk of sounding cocky, I’m just that good.
Better than whoever shot him, thank goodness. They knew what they were doing, but it’s tough to be accurate in the heat of the moment. These weren’t warning shots. Someone wanted this man dead.
The abdominal wound is the one that almost kills him. The bullet tore through his lower right quadrant, nicked his liver, and lodged against the posterior wall. His blood pressure bottoms out twice while I work, and both times, I think I’ve lost him. Both times, I get him back.
Four hours. Three bullets on a stainless-steel tray. More blood in the suction canisters than I want to count. By the time I close thefinal layer of sutures, my shoulders ache, and the muscles in my forearms burn.
He’s alive because of me. And he’s a secret I can never take back.
My surgical team files out, and I stay behind to review the monitors. Heart rate holding. Blood pressure stabilizing. Oxygen saturation climbing. Everything is heading in the right direction, which should make me feel better. It doesn’t.
I pull down my mask and look at him. Really look.
He’s taller than I remember. Six-one, maybe, with the kind of build that comes from training for function, not vanity. Lean through the hips, broader through the shoulders, and the muscle is dense and earned. His hair is longer than his father would probably approve of, almost black, and pushed back from his forehead with dried sweat. Blood is smudged against the wolf skull tattooed on his inner left forearm, and the ink is faded enough to tell me he got it young.
He’s beautiful, and that’s not a clinical observation.
I’m still staring at him when a nurse pokes her head through the recovery room door.
“Dr. Kozlov? The man who came in with him is asking about his condition.”
“Tell him the patient is stable and resting. Once we’ve moved him to the ICU, he can receive friends and family, but for now, his brother is the only approved contact.”
She nods and disappears. I know the man in the suit jacket isn’t his brother. But whoever he is, he brought Lev here, and keeping him close and everyone else far away is the only play I’ve got.
I restrict access to his room, keeping it as private as possible. No resident rotations, no student observers, and no one on his chart who doesn’t need to be there. The restrictions would be standard for gunshot wound victims, but since I fudged his paperwork, he shouldn’t be afforded them. All I can do is hope nobody looks too hard at a construction worker who needs this level of security.
