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Chapter 13
“Get up.”
I know instantly that Vanya isn’t the figure I awaken to find standing above me.
Mischa’s clean shaven, his face pale in the dim glow of dawn. Somehow, he looks more unstable this way. Dark circles paint the flesh beneath his eyes, and a muscle in his jaw twitches once he catches me staring.
“The man you say you saw. Did you get a name?”
“What?” My eyebrows furrow. “I…”
“I guess not.” He scoffs, radiating suspicion. “Maybe you’ll remember when that cunning brain of yours decides it’s in your best interest? No matter. It’s time forVanyato give you your bath. You stink.”
I do. Like sweat, from tossing uncomfortably all night. I smell like fear of what might lurk beneath my scars. I smell like Robert’s wife again.
“Where is he?” I anxiously scan the room for Vanya, but Mischa yanks the blankets from me instead.
He nudges the pillow from under my casted leg and slides a hand beneath both.
I suck in a startled breath. “What are you doing?”
Without warning, he pulls me into his arms.
“S-stop!” I cling to his shoulders—but he isn’t being rough. Not even as he swiftly carries me into a hallway.
We don’t go far. A few doors down from the bedroom, he turns into one bathed in shades of black. His.
He takes me into the bathroom, where running water is filling a sunken tub. A plastic bench is positioned beside it, and an array of tools are within reach. But the man who sets me down and tears at my thin nightgown isn’t the patient, calm Vanya.
Tension stiffens his posture as he snatches up a rag and wets it.
“Lift your arms,” he grates.
I want to refuse, but curiosity is a strange thing.
He starts to wash me without waiting for me to comply, dragging the rag over my exposed thigh. His teeth are gritted, his eyes downcast. But even so…he’s careful. Clinical.
And now I know just who cared for me all these weeks.
The thought of it weighs me down with an unexplainable emotion. Shock? Perhaps. Or maybe resignation to one simple fact I’m too tired to resist: I’ll never fully understand him.
And I’m not sure if it’s a good thing.
Or horrifying.
“Lift your arms,” he commands through gritted teeth.
I obey, alarmed to find that I can only raise the limbs to the height of my shoulder without triggering pain. As Mischa peels down my nightgown and starts to unravel the bandages, I see why. Beneath carefully placed gauze is a half-moon-shaped ridge of reddened flesh.
Punctured lung,he said. The kind of injury that I doubt could be safely treated in a mobster’s safe house.
“Was I in a hospital?”
Mischa continues to tug my nightgown off, lifting me with one hand to pull the fabric free.
“I have power everywhere, Little Rose,” he says. Power, meaning control. Spies. A presence, should I ever think of running away again.
Warm water spilling across my lap alerts me to the fact that he’s still washing me, guiding the cloth against the bruised flesh of my hip. I suck in a breath and he pauses, letting liquid drip from the rag onto the floor.
