Page 43 of Knocked-up Bratva Bride
I fidgeted with my fingers, clenching and unclenching, and my gut tightened. I didn’t like that look one bit. I didn’t like the tone of her voice.
She ended the call slowly, as if her body had forgotten how to move, and her demeanor screamed an eerie stillness.
“Elena. What is it? Who was it? Fucking say something! Was it Katya?”
She swallowed. Her lips parted, but the words stuck. Then, finally, she managed with tears rolling down her cheeks. “I was saved as her emergency contact, and I coincidentally happened to be the last person she spoke to, so they called me. It was the hospital. A facility somewhere in the city. They said…Katya was hit by a car. And…and it was fatal. She’s in a coma.”
My heart stopped beating, and the panic I’d felt faded, leaving a deafening silence. Around me, sound amplified—the rain, the men running to the vehicles, the tires screeching. All of it. The lobby went cold, and Elena’s image blurred.
I had seen death. Caused it. Ordered it. My hands had been painted in blood more times than I could count. But the last time I’d ever felt something this similar to intense, blinding pain was after I received the news of Irina’s death.
My chest ached at the realization of something else: Elena had been listed as the emergency contact, not me. Elena was the last person she’d talked to, not me.
I turned away before Elena saw it on my face, that flicker of pain and crack in the cold. I didn’t fully understand the extent of how broken our relationship had been until now, and I didn’t like how that made me feel.
I joined the men outside, Elena tailing closely behind me, when Fedor approached me, looking like a murderous machine. He said they’d gotten her location, the exact hospital she was in, and I marched to one of the SUVs, struggling to contain the red-hot fury that threatened to expand and explode from within while the gears shifted and the cars rolled out of the parking spaces one by one.
Part of the lifelong training I’d gone through was to be realistic. I couldn’t change the past or anything that happened between my daughter and me, but I could certainly do something about the future.
And now….
Now, someone was going to pay.
Chapter 14 – Elena
I had a secret I hadn’t shared with anyone, not even Katya.
Hospitals gave me nightmares.
I rubbed my hands together, not knowing what to do with them, or what to do at all, while a cloud of uncertainty hung above my head, pressing in, and crushing heavily by the second.
“Ms. Harper, Katya is currently in a medically monitored coma, classified as a Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score below 8, and that indicates a severe impairment of consciousness. This is consistent with a traumatic brain injury (TBI), likely sustained during the car accident. The mechanism of injury—blunt force trauma—could have caused a diffuse axonal injury (DAI), which is common in high-speed collisions and results from the brain shifting rapidly inside the skull.”
I only made out a few words from the doctor’s diagnosis before, the most prominent one being the word “coma.” I was still stuck on that, hadn’t been able to move past it since I’d received that phone call.
It didn’t help, either, that the hallway was too quiet. That kind of quiet that only existed in hospitals. Faint footsteps, beeping machines, low conversation between the medical officials, but otherwise hollow, like the breath had been sucked out of the world.
I stood frozen outside Katya’s ICU room, with only a thick sheet of glass separating us. Thanks to Damien, after we arrived at the hospital, I received a change of clothes from one of his men: a sweater, baggy cargo pants, and a beanie to keep my head warm so I didn’t literally freeze to death after being soaked by the rain.
But it didn’t stop the chills of anguish from seeping in.
Through the glass, it was a small chaos of a few nurses and doctors swarming the room— gloved hands checking vitals and monitors, a nurse wrapping up more of her in bandages to cover the bruises.
Then, the monitor was a flat line for a second.
Just a second….
But that second was everything.
I pressed my hand to the glass, the cold biting my palm like silent punishment. I couldn’t breathe. “Katya,”I whispered, secretly praying she could hear me. “Please fight.”
And then—
There was a flicker on the monitor. A stuttered beep. Then another. And another.
Someone inside exhaled with relief. Then, they said, “We’ve got a steady pulse again.”
Shaking, I sobbed, and laughed, and sobbed again. How had we gone from celebrating her birthday barely twenty-four hours ago to this? Watching her fight for her life on a fucking hospital bed, wrapped in bandages like someone who hadn’t glowed with life only a moment ago?
