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“Oh my god, are you okay?” a female voice called out. Her heels clicked as she ran toward me, sounding more like steel-toed boots than designer heels.

I raised my hand toward my head. Shit. A white-hot streak of pain shot through my arm, and I clenched my teeth against the urge to scream. But I must have moaned because Nika clutched my face, worry dancing in her eyes.

“Are you okay, Sev?” she asked as Kaz growled.

He did not like her touching me, so I purposely raised my hands and caressed her upper arms. Mostly for support, of course, but the added benefit was that it pissed Kaz off to no end.

Everyone knew that Kazimir Kaloshin loved Veronika Morozova and somehow had fucked it all up.

It was a will-they-won’t-they that had gone on for nearly twenty years. Far worse than Xeniya and I had been—at least we fucked and said I love you by the time we were twenty-one. Only thirteen years for us to their twenty.

But their romance was simply doomed. If it were going to happen, it would have already, and I had no idea why it hadn’t.

“Sev?” Nika’s voice felt really far away. “Sev? Stay with me, okay? Okay?”

Darkness sank into my bones, and I heard someone say, “We’re going to have to take you to the general hospital because the Bratva surgical ward doesn’t have a burn unit.”

Then I passed out completely.

Thirteen days later, I was conscious and mostly levelheaded.

For the first six days in the hospital, I was in a medically induced coma. The doctors were worried about damage to my throat from the smoke inhalation.

When I woke up, utter agony greeted me, but I didn’t remember much of it because the medical staff sedated me again with fentanyl.

My doctors jokingly informed me that having second-degree burns on 10% of my body was significantly more painful than having third-degree burns, since my nerve endings were still functional and exposed to the air.

So that was fucking lovely.

And I had second-degree burns along the right side of my torso, the top of my quad, and my right wrist. In medical speak, that meant burns covered 10% of my body, and I had blisters across nearly all of the affected skin, which had to be scraped and washed.

These burns were by far the worst injury I’d ever experienced in my life. I’d been shot twice before, and neither gunshot wound came close.

These burns were pure, unfiltered agony. Unrelenting, untamable agony.

The worst came when the nurses cut into my blisters to clean and wash my wounds. Each movement sent waves of agony through my body. I wanted to scream, but my damaged throat made any noise impossible.

I couldn’t update my men on what happened for the first week because my voice was, at best, a ghostly whisper. Even now, my voice had a deep rasp. I wished it were sexy, but it wasn’t.

It was a sign of my failure—and how deeply I’d underestimated my enemy. Not that I could have predicted a literal ghost.

I did remember that correctly… right?

A fucking translucent woman.

I didn’t imagine that, right?

I rubbed my head with my wrist that was covered in thick bandages. Every movement hurt, but if I wanted full functionality back, I needed to keep moving my muscles. I couldn’t balk at the pain.

Besides, this was just physical.

I’d endured far, far worse in my life.

But now that I was coherent enough to hold a meeting, I’d asked Nika to pull the footage from that night and meet me here at the hospital with the rest of her family, Maks, and my brother.

I needed to brief the Morozovs. Yes, they could still be traitors in the Bratva, but I doubted it. Keira was looking into them, and she was brilliant at her job. So soon enough I would know for certain.

At the very least, she could rule them out.