Page 8 of Beautiful Ruin

He grunts once, the sound low and pained when they lift him. Then he’s gone, swallowed by the open doors of the ambulance, its lights flashing across my face as it tears away from the scene, its sirens howling into the night.

For the first time in years, something cold and unfamiliar coils in my chest.

Fear.

Not the sharp twist in my gut from a gun held to my forehead or a blade pressed at my throat. This is so much deeper.

Ivan Kuznetsov isn’t just my Pakhan. He is the one who gave me purpose. A name that meant something. A gun in my hand and orders that made the chaos in my head make sense. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a father.

I’m not ready to bury him.

The hospital is a sterile fortress in the heart of the city.

Ivan is taken to an operating room in a private wing with armed guards at both ends of the hallway. None of the staff on this floor ask questions. There is no reason to when bills are easily slid into their hand to buy their silence.

I pace the hallway outside the operating theater for the six hours the surgery takes. My ribs ache from the crash, but I ignore it. Pain is background noise at this point.

They wheel him out just before dawn, still unconscious with tubes wrapped around him. I follow the gurney to the private suite and stand like a statue while nurses hook him up, adjusting the drips for pain medicine and antibiotics. They murmur updates I barely hear.

Three days crawl by so slowly, they stop feeling like time and start feeling like punishment.

I do not leave the room except to piss and scrub Ivan’s blood off my hands in the attached bathroom sink, and even then I never go far enough to lose sight of the bed for more than a few seconds. The blood comes off in stages, first bright red swirling down white porcelain, then the darker residue caught in the whorls of my fingerprints and clinging stubbornly beneath my nails. By the second day, the skin across my knuckles is raw from soap and scalding water.

It never feels clean.

Nothing in this room does.

The private recovery suite is expensive and quiet, cut off from the rest of the restlessness within the hospital. Machines hum and blink around Ivan’s bed with cold, mechanical indifference, reducing his survival to numbers and sounds. Every line on every monitor becomes another thing for me to memorize, another enemy to study.

I sleep in the chair beside his bed but never more than forty minutes at a stretch. Every time a monitor changes pitch, my eyes snap open, and my hand goes for the gun at my hip before my brain catches up to where I am. There is a constant grainy fatigue behind my eyes that makes everything feel slightly unreal.

Medical staff come and go at every hour. I spend too much time staring out that window between updates, not because the view holds any real interest but because the alternative is watching Ivan lie motionless under those hospital sheets. The first time I saw him after surgery, something inside me recoiled so violently, I had to lock my jaw hard enough not to throw up.

Ivan Kuznetsov is not supposed to look breakable.

On the evening of the fourth day, I’m standing at the window watching snow dust the rooftops when I hear the sheets shift behind me. Drifting down over the city and muting everything beyond the glass, Moscow looks almost peaceful from up here.

I turn and find Ivan’s eyes are open. For half a second, I simply stare at him in disbelief, my mind stalling out as it tries to catch up to what I’m seeing. His face is drawn with pain, skin pale under the muted light, but his gaze is clear.

There is irritation in the set of his mouth too, as if unconsciousness has inconvenienced him.

“Report,” he rasps.

Relief hits me so hard, my knees almost buckle.

It slams into my chest with enough force to hollow me out, and for one dangerous second I have to lock my spine in place before I actually do collapse. I cross the room in three strides, stopping at the foot of the bed because getting any closer feels like I’m invading his space.

“We were hit leaving Malyshko’s compound. Two shooters in an ambush. Both of them are dead.” My voice sounds rougher than I expect, scraped raw by days of underuse and too little sleep and not enough fluids.

He studies me for a long beat. Even drugged and wounded, he still has that way of looking at me that feels like I’m being assessed. “The reason?”

Wordlessly, I reach into my jacket and pull out the folder I found at the scene and hand it over. It has been with me since the night of the ambush, folded against my chest through sleepless hours and a dozen calls I barely remember making to our syndicate. The edges are bent now, the cover creased deeply in a few places. There is dried blood crusted along one side, dark and ugly against the paper.

His blood.

The sight of it turns my stomach in a slow, unpleasant roll.

Ivan takes it, his movements weaker than usual, slower. He opens the file and begins reading. From where I stand, I can’t see the pages anymore, but I don’t need to. I know exactly what’s on them. His expression doesn’t change much, but I see the moment he finds her name by the slight tightening around his mouth and the way his fingers curl around the edges of the paper.