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I don’t spare her another glance, because Lev is falling in front of me, folding toward the floor. I cry out and reach for him with both hands, catching at his coat, his arm, anything that will hold him up.

His weight drags me down with him, and we hit the ground together. My palm lands over the wound in his chest, and warm blood floods across my fingers, an obscene amount of it.

Every other sound in the room drops away into a high, sharp ringing. I’m calling his name, pleading for this chaos to end, and I can barely hear my own voice.

He doesn’t answer me, and my lungs feel crushed flat, my heart caught in a fist mangling it into bloody ribbons. I press down hard on the wound with both hands to slow the bleeding.

His eyes drift, then slowly focus on my face. “Are you hurt?” The question grates out of him, hoarse and thin.

“You’ve been shot, and you are asking me that?” My voice cracks, and my chest feels split straight down the middle.

His gaze drops to my stomach, and he lays a palm reverently on my belly. “The baby,” he says.

“We are fine,” I exclaim. “We are both fine.”

I cannot feel anything at all except his blood pouring out warm and endless under my hands. It burns me alive from the palms inward.

“Good,” he breathes.

“It is not good,” I warn. “Keep your eyes open. Look at me and keep them open.” The word stings on the way out.

“I know,” he says, and his voice comes out so terrifyingly weak that fear closes around my throat.

“Why did you do that?” I curse at him, livid and terrified, my teeth chattering together. “What the hell were you thinking? Why would you take that bullet? Why?”

“Because it is you,” he says. “Because I love you.” The stubbornness is still in him even as his eyes glisten and lose their focus.

My heart nearly stops from the pain of it, from the plain, impossible fact of him saying it here, bleeding out on the floor of a warehouse. His eyelids start to fall shut, and I grab a fistful of his shirt to drag him back.

“You don’t get to sleep,” I tell him. “I swear to God, you are going to stay awake, and you are going to owe me a hundred explanations, and one sentence is not going to cover a single one of them. That bullet is a debt, not a gift.”

Maksim drops down beside us, bloodless in the face. “The ambulance is coming,” he says. “Lev, hang on. Do you hear me? Hang on.”

Yuri kneels on Lev’s other side and examines the wound, pressing a wad of folded fabric down under my hands. There is a cut bleeding at his own temple.

“The bullet is high, off to the side,” Yuri says, reading the blood and Lev’s color with a soldier’s flat calm. “He makes it to the hospital if the pressure holds.”

I hate the loathsome little word if, and I hate even more that Yuri will not soften it for me. It only stokes the fire in me. Maksim is frantic beside us, shoving his own folded jacket under Lev’s legs to lift them.

The men lowest on the totem pole bring a stretcher and lift Lev onto it with careful, practiced hands. I keep my palm pressed to the fabric over his wound the whole time.

I walk alongside them, one hand holding the pressure and the other gripping his fingers, and I don’t let go of either.

The ambulance waits outside with its back doors open, and the paramedics transfer him onto the gurney inside. Red and blue lights slice through the dark.

The doors seal the chaos out behind us. Under the white lights Lev lies ashen, a bruise gray I have never seen on him, electrodes taped across his bare chest.

For the first time I see all his old scars layered together, ridged across his body, a lifetime of them. Watching him hurt like this is so much worse than any hurt of my own has ever been, and I understand that I have been falling in love with him all along.

A paramedic leans in to reapply pressure, and Lev moans something in Russian, low in his throat. I squeeze his hand tighter, as if I can hold him here by force.

The ambulance swings hard into the emergency entrance. They throw the doors and wheel him inside at a run.

I chase after the gurney down the trauma corridor until a nurse, thin as a rail, steps into my path and holds me back. The surgical doors swing shut in my face.

The red light above them clicks on, and something inside me hollows out completely. Yuri and Maksim reach me a minute later and find me still standing there, staring at that light, the careful mask I have perfected cracked wide open.

The surgery drags on for hours, and every long minute of it scrapes another layer off my raw nerves. I cannot sit down for a second; I’m dying to do something, anything. I pace to the doors and back, to the doors and back, over and over, until Maksim, making a face, stops watching me and just lets me go.