One of my men snorts under his breath. Another immediately stops when my friend cuts him a look.
We push through double doors and into a private treatment room with dimmer lighting, cleaner finishes, and none of the frantic public mess outside. Money buys many things. Privacy buys the rest.
My friend shuts the door behind us and finally turns to face me fully. The irritation in his expression doesn’t hide the assessment underneath. He takes in my pallor, the tension in my shoulders, the wet shirt stuck to my skin, the blood on my hands. The old bastard looks me over like he’s searching for structural damage in a building he reluctantly values.
Then he exhales through his nose. “Sit down, Viktor.” He says my name low and clipped and unimpressed, like I’m fifteen again and have tracked mud through his mother’s house after a fight by the river.
I lower myself onto the edge of the bed. Every muscle in my side pulls hot and mean in protest, but I don’t make a sound. I unbutton what remains of my shirt and peel the torn fabric away from the dressing. Blood has glued part of it to the skin. That will be unpleasant in a moment.
Across from me, he pulls on gloves with brisk efficiency.
He’s a surgeon now, at least officially. Has been for years. A very good one. Brilliant, cold, relentless. He could have made a fortune in a dozen private systems and instead built this place into something far more useful. People come here because they trust the medicine. People avoid asking too many questions because they trust him even more.
“You look terrible,” he says.
“I was under the impression silver foxes were in fashion.”
He cuts the towel away from my side and I hiss as cool air strikes the wound.
“That line probably works better when you’re not leaking.”
“Be kind. I’ve had a difficult evening.”
“You got shot.”
“Yes, that’s usually how difficult evenings start.”
He presses gently around the wound, and pain knifes through me. I brace one hand behind me on the mattress and keep my jaw locked.
“Graze,” he says after a moment. “Lucky.”
I say nothing.
Lucky is not the word I would use.
He studies me for a second longer, as if he can tell there’s a thought I’m not sharing. Then his gaze drops back to the wound. “Entry line is shallow. No retained bullet from what I can see, but I’ll confirm with imaging before I indulge your martyr complex.”
“I don’t have a martyr complex.”
He raises a brow.
I say, “I have excellent survival instincts.”
“That must be why people keep trying to kill you.”
One of my men shifts near the door. “We should sweep the place.”
My friend doesn’t even turn his head. “If someone was stupid enough to come here after him, they would already be dead.”
That settles that.
He reaches for saline and gauze and starts cleaning the wound.
I go very still. It burns viciously, an ugly raw heat that spreads under the skin, but he has known me too long to warn me gently or apologize for pain. His hands are precise, firm, familiar. Not tender. Never tender. He has patched me together before. Stitched me in quieter rooms. Reset a finger on the hood of a car once while telling me in great detail what an insufferable bastard I was.
We are beyond bedside manners with each other.
“You always scare your staff,” I say after a moment.
