“No.” My voice jumps before I can stop it, and he flinches. “You do not get to walk in here and tell me your solution is to hand me over to my cousin like I’m a fucking package, Lev.”
“I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“You’re trying to drag me into the one thing I’ve spent my entire adult life staying out of.” I jab a finger at him, furious now. “Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
I push harder because I don’t believe he does. “Going to Dmitri means I become what I swore I’d never be. I show up on his doorstep with a Morozov at my side and ask for protection because I made a stupid choice and slept with the wrong man. I stop being a person and turn into a problem.” The next words taste like acid, but I hurl them at him anyway. “A liability.”
Lev throws his hands in the air, then drops them again. “You’re out of options, Polina.”
My laugh comes fast and ugly. “Do not tell me what my options are.”
“Then tell me what you want to do.”
“I’ll disappear.” The answer comes out immediately because I’ve been building it since the coatroom. “I’ll transfer hospitals or take leave. Leave Moscow if I have to. I’ll change my number, my routine, everything. I’ll stay somewhere your father’s men will never find me.”
Lev looks at me with that same grim expression he had earlier, and I hate what comes next.
“That won’t work.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.” He takes one step closer, and I hold my ground. “You don’t know how he works.”
“And you do?”
“Yes.” He delivers it without ego or room for argument.
“Then explain it,” I snap.
He watches me for a moment. “I found your name in my father’s intelligence files two years ago.”
My heart seizes.
His eyes stay on mine as he adds, “I’ve been tracking you since then.”
My brain takes a second to process it, and then the meaning arrives all at once.
“What did you just say?” I whisper.
“I knew who you were before the hospital. In fact, I directed my men to take me to Moscow General because it was your hospital.”
I laugh because the alternative is screaming. “No. That’s not what you just said.”
“It is.”
I take two steps back and hit the counter with my hip hard enough to bruise. I barely feel it.
“You tracked me,” I breathe in disbelief.
Every memory I have of him starts rearranging itself. The flowers. The restaurant. The review. The things he knew and delivered like jokes. The way he watched me as if he’d practiced.
Because he had.
And then something worse than anger moves through me. If he knew who I was all along, then every moment I thought I was making a choice, he already had more information than I did.
The flowers. Coming to my hospital. The Georgian restaurant. The book. I thought I was deciding. I thought this was mine. And the whole time, the ground was already laid.
