Page 32 of Brooklyn Bratva

I was over to his side in an instant, dropping to my knees in front of him and my hands automatically went to press the towel against his shoulder.

“What happened?”

He scowled, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

I recognized wounded pride when I saw it. “Fine! Don’t tell me! I don’t care. You need to go to the hospital.”

“No.”

“Ivan, you’re bleeding out!”

He grimaced, and I eased the pressure I was applying until the tension in his face eased.

“Becca – look at me. It’s a flesh wound. It didn’t hit anything important.”

“Then why the hell is there so much blood?”

“Because I’ve been trying to dig the slug out.”

The whirl of it all made my brain slow. Nothing he was saying made any sense and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “Slug? What slug?”

“The bullet.”

“Oh my God, you got shot. Why didn’t someone call an ambulance?”

“Becca. Look at me. I need you to be calm.”

Somehow I managed to drag my eyes away from the bloody mess of fabric I was holding to his chest, and when I met his cool, gray eyes, they were steady.

“I’m calm.”

“Good.” He was still talking slowly, breathing slow and far too purposeful for me to think he was anywhere close to free from pain. “I don’t need to go to hospital when I have you right here. Do I?”

“What? Ivan I’m not even in medical school yet! I’ve never done anything more than patient filing and taking blood apart from a first aid course back when I was sixteen!”

“Then it’s good experience.”

I stared at him, feeling the weight of his words sink in. He must have had his reasons why he couldn’t go to the hospital, and why he was asking for my help. Whatever this was a result of, Ivan was tangled up in something he wasn’t supposed to be doing, and I realized I didn’t care.

There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for him, and it was time I started showing him that.

“Okay. I guess it is. But if I’m playing doctor, you’ve got to do what I say.”

Ivan

Whether or not I’d wanted Becca here, I wasn’t in a fit state to do anything to get her to leave now. To her credit, she wasn’t demanding answers. All she cared about was making sure I was alright.

I didn’t deserve that, when all these years she’d been falling in love with a good guy cop who never existed. She deserved more, and one day I’d give it to her.

I’d made it home, but at heart, my apartment was still the cramped and dated one-bedroom I’d moved into. It had always been a temporary residence, to me. My placement here was part of the deal I’d made to move over here for Mama, but Moscow was my home. I intended to go back some day.

At least, I always had until Becca came along and blew everything I thought I knew about myself clear out of the water.

Given I hadn’t intended on staying, it hadn’t made sense to put my money into things I didn’t require. It wasn’t that I didn’t have savings. Even on my legitimate salary, I could have afforded a bigger place by now, but I chose not to. The money that came my way from Russia mostly went into making sure Mama had what she needed. There was more than enough for that, and I had various investments set up in a way that meant I could access the funds without leaving a trail to me, should I need it in the future. But acting as one of the NYPD’s finest meant I couldn’t live the life of other men in the Bratva and still keep my position. I needed to be above suspicion.

That seemed like an impossible hope now that I was sitting on my couch with a bullet in my shoulder that I refused to go to the hospital to get sorted.

“You need to get the bullet out.”

“The slug,” she echoed and I felt my lips pitch into a wry smile.

“Exactly.”

“What do I do?”

“Tweezers.”

“Are you kidding me? It’s not a splinter for crying out loud!”

“What else do you want to use? Sorry, I don’t have a full quota of surgical equipment on hand.”

She let out a tense breath. “Fine. Let me look at it. If it’s welling blood you need a hospital.”

“I told you, I’m not going.”

“When I’ve figured out whether you’re going to keep on bleeding without someone to properly stitch you up, we can have that conversation again.”

I knew she was only being cautious, but I couldn’t stop myself from letting out a low growl. She needed to do this. There was no other way unless she wanted my whole life to start unravelling. Becca’s eyes narrowed.

“Don’t you dare growl at me. Flesh wounds are one thing, but if you’ve torn through blood vessels, they need to be knitted back together and I don’t have a clue how to do that. I’m not stitching you up so you can pretend you’re fine while you carry on bleeding and the whole thing goes septic.”

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