Page 147

“Yuriy, are you sure you don’t want me to carry you? You’re barely walking.”

“No, I can—” I crumpled against him as the world went black.

The next time I clawed my way to the surface, consciousness came in fragments with the steady, maddeningly serene beep of a heart monitor, the squeak of a wheel somewhere down the hall, and faint voices drifting in and out like static I couldn’t quite tune into. Light pressed against my eyelids. I groaned, cracked them open, and immediately regretted it. The last thing I remembered was being in Yelena’s room. Talking. Holding the baby. How the hell was I back in mine with no memory of getting here?

I tried to lift my hand. It didn’t move. Something rattled, sharp and metallic.

I frowned, tried again. Nothing.

A slow dread crawled up my spine. I turned my head—carefully because a streak of white-hot pain lanced from my neck down into my shoulder—and looked at my wrist.

A cuff.

A literal metal handcuff, gleaming under fluorescent lights, locked around my wrist and clipped to the guardrail of the hospital bed like I was some violent criminal instead of a lightly concussed national treasure.

“…you’ve got to be kidding me.”

“It’s for your own good,” a voice said, calm and infuriatingly unbothered.

I whipped my head—well, attempted to—toward the bathroom door as Stas stepped out, wearing the exhausted scowl of a man who hadn’t slept since last year and fully planned to blame me for it.

“You handcuffed me.”

“Yes.”

“This isn’t funny.”

“It is not meant to be.” He walked forward, each step full of very controlled anger. “You tore the stitches in your side by wandering across the hospital. The doctor had to redo half of them.”

I glared. “They were barely⁠—”

“You were dripping blood on the floor!”

“That could’ve been anyone’s blood.”

He leveled me with a stare that could’ve cracked cement.

I huffed and tugged the cuff, rattling it dramatically. “You do realize this is illegal, right? Somewhere? In some universe? Since apparently this one’s got nuts living in it?”

“Good. Maybe that universe will keep you in the damn bed so you don’t hurt yourself even more than you already have.”

I let my head fall back against the pillow, dragging in a breath. Then—very casually—I let the blanket slide off my hip. Just enough to bear a stretch of thigh.

“Stas…” I murmured.

His eyes flicked down and widened. Good. I shifted my leg, slow and unhurried, like I had all the time in the world and no cracked ribs to prove otherwise. The cuff jingled softly as I adjusted my arm, the sound almost obscene in the quiet room.

I lowered my voice to a sinful whisper. “Since I’m already handcuffed… maybe you’d like to take advantage of the situation…?”

“Absolutely not.”

My jaw dropped. “Wow. Rejecting me in my moment of helpless vulnerability. Cold.”

He leaned down. “You want sex, you get well first. Stop taking unnecessary risks. I told you I’d bring the baby to you. Didn’t I? Yet you got out of bed anyway.”

“You were taking too long.”

“I was gone five minutes. You’re as impatient as you’re impulsive.”