No.
I rip at the IV in my left arm, the needle tearing out with a hot splash of blood. The monitor wails in protest. My heart rate spikes. I reach for the second tube, breath heaving, but my hand falters halfway. I am so weak.
The walls start closing in. The machines feel louder. The room smells like antiseptic and old nightmares. The last thing I remember—
The motel.
The scream.
Her voice.
Blood on my hands.
Dominik’s face beneath mine.
My skin crawls. My breath won’t come. I press both hands to my temples and dig in like I can force the memory out through bone.
I stumble out of the bed, every joint screaming, every breath scraping like rust in my lungs. The IV pole crashes to the floor behind me, tubes dragging like veins torn from flesh. I don’t care. I need out. Out of the walls. Out of the smell. Out of my own goddamn skin.
The door isn’t locked.
My legs barely hold me, knees buckling with each uneven step. One hand catches the frame as I drag myself into the hallway, feet numb against cold tile. The corridor stretches out in both directions, dim lights overhead, shadows clinging to the corners like watchers.
I turn right.
I don’t know why. Instinct, maybe. Fear pulling me by the ribs.
My shoulder brushes the wall. The world tilts. A high-pitched ringing rides the edge of my hearing. My blood is still leaking from the torn IV site, trailing down my arm, a slow, thin line that drips onto the floor like Morse code.
And then I see them.
Four figures at the far end of the hall at a table.
Eight eyes staring back.
They freeze. I freeze.
Isabella
I’m still wearing his blood under my nails.
The clinic’s quiet now, the way it always is after something near-catastrophic. The fluorescent lights buzz softly above us, and the only sound is the occasional click of Ada’s pen tapping the chart she’s half-heartedly updating. We’re all too tired to talk. Too wired to rest.
Aslanov’s vitals are stable, for now.
We made it on time.
He’s in one of the back recovery rooms. We sedated him just enough to close the abdominal wound: 8 centimeters, ragged edges, no clean cut to follow. Ada worked quickly, her hands steady even when mine weren’t. We cleaned it with saline and packed it with gauze before stitching layer by layer: subcutaneous first, then dermal. She placed a chest lead to monitor his rhythm, and I started him on broad-spectrum IV antibiotics. Cefoxitin. Vancomycin, just in case.
He had third-degree burns forming around his wrist ligatures. We irrigated the raw skin, applied silver sulfadiazine cream, and wrapped it loosely. The fluid loss was severe—we pushed two liters of saline through the largest-bore IV we could get in him. Another one in his hand for maintenance.
I stitched the cut between his eyes myself. Small, precise. Six sutures. That one felt personal. I don’t know why.
His torso is a brutal canvas of suffering; scars, burns, deep cuts that never healed properly. Some fresh, some old, all of them telling a story of pain too cruel to put into words. Dark bruises litter his ribs, and along his side, there’s a jagged, angry gash that looks dangerously close to tearing open again.
But that wasn’t the worst.
His star tattoo, the symbol of thePakhan, the mark of his power, the mark of the man he used to be, is ruined. The ink is thick and dark, an ugly attempt to erase what was once there.
