2
Lev
I wake up to the smell of antiseptic and the certainty that I should be dead.
The ceiling is white. The walls, too. Everything in this room is white except the blood dried under my fingernails and the bruise-colored IV line feeding something warm into my left arm. A heart monitor beeps next to my ear at a rhythm that feels too slow to belong to a living person, but here I am. Breathing. Blinking. Alive.
The details come back in pieces. A meeting at the warehouse on Taganskaya that was supposed to be routine. Frol sent me because our father doesn’t waste the heir on logistics runs. That’s what I’m for. I’m his spare, the blade he sends when the crown’s hands need to stay clean.
I was expecting a shipment dispute and walked into an ambush instead. Two of Petrov’s men opened fire before I cleared the doorway. The first round caught my shoulder. The second punched through my hand. A third buried itself somewhere in my gut, and after that, things get hazy.
What isn’t hazy is the order I gave Ruslan while I bled through my shirt in the backseat of his SUV.
“Moscow General,” I told him.
He swore at me. Called me a fucking idiot, which is the kind of thing only Ruslan can get away with. “Botkin is two miles out,” he said. “Sklifosovsky is three. You want me to drive five more so you can bleed out on the way?”
“Moscow General or don’t bother stopping.”
He drove, because he knows that I don’t give orders twice. Ruslan is the only person in my life whose loyalty I’ve never had to question, and the fact that he argued at all tells me how bad I looked. The man doesn’t argue unless he thinks I’m dying.
I probably was dying.
Not much comes back after the second red light he ran, but I remember the panels streaking overhead as someone wheeled me through a corridor, and the voice of a woman giving orders that sounded like she’d done this a thousand times.
But most of all, I remember her face. It was the last thing I saw before everything went black.
Polina Kozlov.
I chose Moscow General because it has the best trauma unit in the city. At least, that’s what I’ll tell anyone who asks. It’s also true, if you only count half of it. The other half is that Polina Kozlov works there, and I’ve known her shift schedule for more than a year. The doubles are the easiest to predict.
That sounds worse than it is. Or maybe it sounds as bad as it is, and I’ve just gotten comfortable with it.
It started two years ago, when I pulled her name from my father’s intelligence files while mapping Kozlov family connections. I expected another bratva daughter coasting on the family fortune, playing house in a penthouse bought with dirty money.
Instead, I found a woman who told the Kozlov name to go to hell and built something that was all hers. Top of her medical class. Residency in trauma surgery. A career that saves lives instead of ending them. She walked away from everything I’ve spent my life trying to earn a place in, and she made it look easy.
She did what I couldn’t. Got out.
Now, she’s saved my life, and the painkiller drip is making it hard to think about anything except the way she looked at me before I went under, with mesmerizing brown eyes and gold flecks near the pupils. Photographs don’t do them justice.
She also falsified my identity in the hospital system. I know this because the chart clipped to my bed says Luka Sorokin, and that’s not my name. The woman broke the law, risked her career, and lied to her own people to keep me alive and anonymous.
That kind of decision gives a man leverage. I should be figuring out how to use it the way my father taught me. Every secret is a weapon.
But I don’t want leverage over Polina Kozlov. I want something far more dangerous, and I’ve wanted it since the first time I watched her cross a parking lot from behind tinted glass and realized I’d been holding my breath.
The door opens, and she walks in with a clipboard tucked under one arm and her stethoscope looped around her neck, and every coherent thought I’ve built in the past ten minutes scatters likeshrapnel. Her scrubs are a different color than the ones I vaguely remember from last night. Her auburn hair is pulled back in the French braid she wears on shift, the one I’ve seen from across parking lots and lecture halls but never this close. A thin gold bracelet catches against her wrist when she flips a page on the chart.
She’s more stunning in person than two years of surveillance have prepared me for, and I’ve spent more time staring at photographs of this woman than any sane man would admit.
“Good morning, Mr. Sorokin,” she says without looking up. “How are you feeling?”
Mr. Sorokin. Not even a flinch. The delivery is flawless, and I’d almost believe she believes this is who I am, except I saw her face last night. She knows who’s lying in this bed, and she’s playing the game anyway.
Fine. I can play, too.
“Like I got hit by a truck,” I grumble. My voice comes out rough, scraped dry from the anesthesia tube. “Or fell onto some debris at a construction site. However you want to put it.”
