11
Polina
Daria’s name lights up my screen for the fourth time this week, and I swipe ignore without breaking stride.
It’s not that I don’t want to talk to her, it’s just that every conversation we have lately starts withyou sound distractedand ends with her asking questions I can’t answer truthfully. The guilt of that is its own problem. I file it next to the other things I’m not dealing with and keep walking.
Before I can find something to distract myself, fate handles it for me. A gurney bursts through my emergency room doors.
The paramedics are moving fast. A second gurney follows behind the first, this one carrying a man who’s unconscious with his shirt slashed open and a pressure bandage over his left shoulder that lost the fight somewhere between wherever this happened and my ER. I’m not the attending on either case. Dr. Savin is already rushing toward the first gurney with his gloves halfway on and his resident a step behind him. There’s no clinical reason for me to be in this bay, so to keep out of the way, I turn toward my wing.
Then, I see the tattoo.
The first man’s forearm is turned upward while a paramedic checks his radial pulse, and the marking stops me cold. A wolf’s head in profile, with three lines crossing the muzzle at a downward angle. I know every detail of that symbol. I grew up seeing it on the wrists and forearms of men who stood outside our front door, drove us to school, sat at our dinner table, ate my mother’s food, and laughed at my father’s jokes. Most of my cousins have it branded somewhere on their bodies. It was as unremarkable to me as a family name on a mailbox. Background detail. Wallpaper.
They’re Kozlov markings. Both men.
I skid to a halt. Savin glances up from the gurney, reads something in my face, and hands off to his resident without a word. He walks over to me, already stripping off one glove.
“What happened?” I ask, keeping my voice low.
“Shooting. Industrial district.” He matches my volume. “Armed attack on a warehouse operation. One took two rounds to the torso, the second has a through-and-through to the shoulder and significant head trauma from a fall. Police are en route.” “
My eyes burn as I resist the urge to look closer at them, which would only raise more suspicion. “Are they going to make it?”
“The first one, probably. He’s stable enough to go to surgery.” He glances back toward the second gurney. “The other one… we’ll see.”
“Security needs to be notified. Flag the room.”
“Already done.” He cocks his head and looks at me more carefully. “You know them?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I just wanted to make sure we weren’t leaving the room open.”
He accepts this and gets back to work as my legs carry me to the break room.
Someone abandoned a pot of coffee on the burner long enough that the smell hits me in the doorway, dark and slightly scorched, the way it gets when it’s been sitting since the last shift change. I pour a cup anyway, sit on the couch in front of the wall-mounted television, and turn it on.
The news anchor is mid-sentence when the picture comes up. An armed attack on a Kozlov-controlled shipping warehouse. Multiple casualties confirmed. Investigators are on scene. Sources indicate the assault bears the hallmarks of an ongoing territorial conflict between rival criminal organizations. Retaliation is anticipated.
I set the remote on the cushion beside me.
She doesn’t say my family’s name. She doesn’t have to. Anyone in this city with passing knowledge of how power moves through its underground architecture knows which organization the broadcast is dancing around.
Two men with my family’s tattoos are down the hall right now on my colleague’s table because of Lev’s organization. His hands weren’t on a weapon tonight, at least as far as I know, but it’s still his father’s machine. The syndicate that trained him, shaped him, and deploys him. The one he has never pretended to be separate from, because unlike almost everything else about the way he moves through the world, he’s never lied to me about what he is, even if he hasn’t said it outright.
I’ve told myself that that honesty put him in a different category.
Sitting in this break room with burned coffee going cold in my hand, looking at a news broadcast about dead and wounded men who share my bloodline, I’m having a hard time making that logic hold.
I’ve known what he is all along. Every time I let him through my door, I knew. Every late night in my kitchen, conversation that went longer than it should have, and time I let myself believe that the version of him that exists in my apartment is the complete picture, I knew. I’ve been staring at everything around the central fact and calling it sufficient.
But those men in my OR won’t allow that tonight. They’re thirty meters down the hall, and there’s no comfortable distance I can put between myself and what they mean.
I finish my shift the way I always finish hard shifts: By doing the work. A laceration that takes eleven stitches and my attention for nine minutes. A pediatric consult two floors up that requires me to translate a complicated procedure into language a frightened mother can absorb. Discharge paperwork. A phone call with a specialist who talks too fast and has to be slowed down twice. A family in the waiting room who needs me to look them in the eye and mean what I say.
My hands do what they’ve been trained to do. My mouth produces the right words in the right order. Nobody looks at me sideways, and I’m grateful, because I don’t know what they’d find if they looked too carefully tonight.
Savin catches me near the elevator as I’m pulling on my coat.
