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I turn on his shower and then focus my attention on helping him out of his clothes. He groans as he raises his arms to let me pull his shirt over his head. And when it’s off, I gasp at the horror of what my brothers did.
Deep purple-black bruises cover the left side of his ribcage and abdomen. I have no doubt he has several cracked ribs. And from the looks of it, possibly some internal bleeding. A long but thankfully shallow cut stretches across his pecs.
It starts just above the corner of the Cyrillic lettering and travels all the way across the far side of his chest, drawing a line through his demonic mask tattoo. I’m glad at least his father’s tribute tattoo is unharmed.
But several more cuts crisscross his abdomen and shoulders. And god, his poor face. His lip is split, his left temple swollen and bruised, but the worst of it is the impressive lump on his cheek and the bruising along his jaw.
“They really did a number on you,” I observe.
Pyotr shrugs. “If it means getting to take you home at the end of the day, I’d say it’s worth it.”
My heart warms, and I lean up onto my toes, careful not to disrupt any of his injuries, to press a kiss lightly to his cracked lip.
Then I refocus my attention on removing his pants. “I don’t know about removing the belt,” I state, worrying my lip. “What if you lose too much blood?”
“I’m fine, Silvia,” he assures me, reaching down to unbuckle it himself. He releases an agonized groan as soon as the belt falls free.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, my hands fluttering uselessly over the rip in his jeans as I debate how I can possibly help.
“Nothing. It just feels strange to have the sensation coming back to my leg. It was starting to go numb.” He flashes me a devilish grin, then gets to work on his pants when I don’t volunteer for the job.
I help him as much as I can, but when I see the inch-long wound in his thigh, my heart stops. “They stabbed you,” I breathe, noting how much he’d bled from the leg puncture.
At least it didn’t seem to be gushing blood anymore. But I can’t imagine that it’s okay to leave without stitches.
“We’ll super glue it and tape it up for now,” he says as if reading my mind. “If it’s still a problem tomorrow, I’ll get a doctor to stitch me up.”
I nod slowly, wishing he would agree to go now. But that’s just not going to happen.
“Help me wash off?” Pyotr suggests now that he’s naked and flashes me a devilish grin.
“Of course.” I strip my clothes efficiently, not worrying about how sexy that might seem.
Then I pull my hair up into a messy bun before following Pyotr into the shower. Now that his makeshift tourniquet is off, he seems much more capable of moving around.
I scrub his body carefully, using a loofah and soap to wash away a shocking amount of crimson liquid. When it comes to his hair and shampoo, he lowers onto his knees in front of me to give me access to his head. I cautiously massage shampoo into his hair and around the gash at the back of his head, where someone had hit him.
Once I’ve rinsed the last of the soap from his body and cleaned him up as best I can, we step back out of the shower. We each towel dry, Pyotr’s towel coming away with spots where his wounds have opened up and bled a little after the warm water.
Only after we patch up his wounds do Pyotr and I start to discuss what had happened. He breezes over how my brothers jumped him in the parking lot below, hitting him over the head with a bat and knocking him unconscious.
“Think I’ll need staples?” he jokes lightly, reaching up to delicately prod the cut in his hair.
I teasingly swat his hand away so he doesn’t stick his fingers into the antiseptic I just applied. “Only if you keep picking at it.”
He chuckles.
“It looks decently shallow,” I add, “though it must have bled quite a bit when it first opened up. You had a good amount of blood in your hair.”
As he goes on to describe waking up in the unknown warehouse, I move on to his other cuts. I smooth triple antibiotic onto the deeper ones on his chest and arms before covering any necessary spots with a gauze bandage. Meanwhile, he talks about the words he and my brothers exchanged–how he knew he would die today because of how fiercely Nicolo, Cassio, and Lucca love me.
It makes my heart ache to hear him talk about his experience and trips in and out of consciousness from the pain.
“You probably have a concussion,” I add as he describes the vision of me that had filled his head.
Most of his injuries are manageable. Painful, but not deep enough to need stitches, and nowhere that a doctor might have something more to help him. However, his leg is a different matter, and he sits on a stool to give me easy access while I sanitize the deep wound. Then he has me seal it with glue.
His story of the day comes to a conclusion shortly before I finish patching him up. When I finish concentrating on his leg, Pyotr reclaims my full attention.
