Page 20

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.

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?

I felt as though I was going to be sick. Guilt and grief were the worst companions, yet I felt them. This was my fault.

She’d called me to share the good news, hadn’t she? If she didn’t, then she wouldn’t have been distracted, and none of this would have happened.

She’d made me a huge part of her life, and I didn’t even deserve her.

My legs refused to move forward. My heart, though…my heart kept stumbling backward into memories we hadn’t yet finished living.

She looked so small in there. So still. Tubes tangled across her body like a cruel net. Her skin, once warm and glowing, was now pale and marked with bruises that bloomed like wilting violets along her face, arms, and…everywhere.

I wanted to scream—to beg her to wake up, to just look at me. To tell me this was all some sick joke, that she’d jump out of bed and call me a drama queen.

But if wishes were horses….

Tears came slowly at first, then faster, like they had been dammed up for too long. I sank against the wall, unable to carry the burden of all the things I wanted to say to her.

My soft heart, the one she used to tease me about, cracked right down the center.

“You always cry at movies,” she’d say, nudging me with popcorn. “One day, you’re going to break just watching a dog commercial.”

This wasn’t a movie. This was a real nightmare about my best friend fighting for her life, and it awakened more memories I’d rather forget.

Tuesday night. Heavy rain. Nothing out of the ordinary.

“Ms. Harper?” The voice on the other end was too composed, like the calm before the storm. “There’s been…an incident. Your mother collapsed. Paramedics are with her now.”

I couldn’t process the words. They were sounds without meaning. Collapsed didn’t compute. She’d just texted me that morning, a meme. Something about cats and Tuesdays. I’d sent a laughing emoji. That was the last thing I sent her.

I stood up too quickly. My chair toppled over. Voices around me blurred together. My supervisor at work asked me something, but all I could hear was the thick, unbearable pounding in my ears.

Cold. Everything was cold. My hands. My breath. The plastic of the chair I was waiting in. And then the doctor came, holding a clipboard like it was a bomb.

“Your mother has advanced liver disease,” he said gently. “It’s likely been progressing for a while. There are signs of cirrhosis. We need to do more tests, but—”

I don’t remember the rest.

My knees gave out before my tears did.

Time slowed, the way it did when life decided to test you. I found myself slipping into that frozen moment, where everything became clearer and more unbearable all at once.

I sat in that hallway for hours, my eyes dry yet burning, and my chest tight. Guilt crept in through every crack, poking me fervently each time I asked myself, how had I not noticed? My mother always waved things off. Always smiled through the ache. Always told me not to worry.

And I believed her.

Back then, I thought if I loved someone enough, it would save them. But sitting in that hospital, watching machines breathe for her, I learned something brutal.

Sometimes, love doesn’t stop things from breaking.

The memory of Katya’s laughter echoing through my apartment while we drank hot chocolate with Jasper, engaging in conversations on silly PG-13 topics—too excited and too happy to feel too old—came rushing back, and a pang filled my chest.

I wanted more time with her to create more memories.

I felt bitter and disgusted with myself for being so careless and reckless with her father, allowing myself to live in a fantasy that would destroy something more substantial when I should have been focused on being a good friend to her.

She didn’t deserve to be there; I should have been the one in her place instead.

Now, all I could do was stand there, drowning in guilt, staring at the fragile shell of the second strongest person I’d ever known.

“Come back to me, Katya. I’m not ready for this world without you in it.”

From down the hallway came the heavy echo of polished Italian leather shoes clicking on the linoleum, and, by the aura accompanying those familiar footsteps, I knew it was him.

We had arrived at the hospital together, but he sent me to watch over her first, while he took care of something with the doctors. I didn’t mind; all I could think about right now was Katya.

He was all Armani suits, a shiny black coat, and thundercloud-blue eyes. His towering frame cut through the white hall like a storm rolling into a summer field as he marched past me as if I were invisible to the door of Katya’s room.

The nurses tried to stop him from going in, one reaching out with gentle insistence, but he growled something indistinctly that had them parting to the side like the Red Sea.

I remained outside. I didn’t have that much power or strength to bounce my way through, but I watched him through the glass as he stopped at the edge of the bed.

He looked so out of place in that room, like a mismatched piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

Every time I’d ever seen Damien, his broad shoulders were squared and straight with pride. He carried himself like a man who controlled the world and everything in it.

But now, his shoulders slackened just slightly, like the breath had been knocked from him by the sight of her, and for a long moment, he didn’t move.

Given their history and fractured father-daughter relationship, when I ran to him to track her down, I didn’t expect him to execute it with much fervor, and inside that room, I expected him to cross his arms, to retreat into an armor of distance and silence, but instead, he stepped closer, so close that the back of his hand brushed the edge of Katya’s sheet.

His fingers curled inward, trembling, before he dropped them to his side again.

I pressed my fingertips to the glass, breath catching at the quick but clear display of vulnerability I witnessed. This wasn’t some wealthy mogul who cared about nothing else but money and power. No, this was a father stripped bare.

Inside, Damien bowed his head. His mouth moved slightly, but no sound passed the glass. Whatever words he said were for Katya alone. Apologies, maybe. Prayers. Regrets. Grief.

My eyes burned, and tears threatened to spill. Before I ever met him, I had detested him for the way he treated Katya, but now, watching him, I realized something that had probably been there all along: Damien didn’t just love his daughter. Like me, he didn’t know how to live without her.

And for the first time, I didn’t feel alone in my pain.

***

Damien was just exiting Katya’s room, wearing a placid expression, with lips in a firm, tight line, when the giant called Fedor breezed past me to stand in front of him, and that translated to blocking my view of Damien.

He looked at me briefly and then at Katya through the glass, and there was a flicker of softness in his eyes, so fleeting that when I blinked, I thought I had imagined it.

The man towered over most men I knew. His broad shoulders and thick arms filled doorways like a human barricade, and his build was brawny and solid, like someone carved from raw stone rather than born.

Low-cut hair hugged his scalp, drawing more attention to the hard angles of his jaw and the cold look in his ice-gray eyes.

Faded tattoos curled up the sides of his thick neck, inked symbols and some other letters I didn’t recognize.

Being close to the man intimidated me, so instinctively, I took a step further away, but not far enough to miss their conversation.

“We found him. The driver.” I eyeballed the broad expanse of his back flexing underneath the stretch of his black shirt when he waved a few papers in front of Damien’s face.

“His name is Jason Monroe, 31, white, American. The cops have him locked up for drunk driving. Blood alcohol was three times the legal limit.”

I sucked in a breath. Drunk driving, seriously? My friend was battling for her life because someone was too careless with his?

A part of me wanted to scream, to run to that man’s cell and shake answers out of him. Why had he taken the wheel? Why Katya?

But Damien didn’t blink once. I sidestepped away from behind Fedor to check his reaction. To know if he was as angry as I was with that driver.

His gaze never left the floor until Fedor finished speaking. Then, he lifted his eyes, and they were steely and unreadable. He nodded once.

“Good,” he said.

Good? Was he out of his mind?

Then, calmly, like he was discussing the weather: “Release him.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What?”

Even Fedor flinched. “Boss, he—”

“I said release him,” Damien repeated. He walked toward a window, looked down at the parking lot below, his hands clasped behind his coat. “A cage is too kind. Let him breathe fresh air. I want him to believe he’s free.”

Then, his tone dropped to something frigid and scary.

“And then I’ll remind him what it feels like to beg for mercy.

To cry for help. To scream when you’re helpless.

I’ll remind him what it feels like to have a taste of your own blood more than water on your tongue every fucking morning.

And when he thinks I’m tired and wary of playing games, that’s when I’ll make him realize he has a more fucking brutal fate. ”

The room grew cold as if all the warmth had been stripped from the air.

I didn’t think I’d ever heard Damien speak that many words in a sentence, let alone issue such a threat. I mean, because it had to be a threat. He couldn’t be serious. Right?

I stood slowly, but my legs moved weakly like they were made of jelly as I tried to speak. My throat was sore from crying, and my mouth was parched.

“Damien…you can’t….”

His eyes flicked toward me. Not angry. Not even cruel. Just hollow and eerily empty. Standing close to him felt like I was destined to become a victim of a bad omen, much like the victims who lingered near villains in horror movies.

“He stole my daughter.” He shrugged. “I’ll return the favor.”

For a long moment, I couldn’t speak. I was familiar with ice wrapped in fury, control masking devastation. I’d read about it in books and seen it in documentaries, but I’d never truly experienced it.

I took a step back, and another, and another, until I was running down the hallway, moving farther away from a harsh truth that stared back at me.

He was powerful, rich, and handsome, and I’d been attracted to him from the moment I saw him. But now, something felt different.

For the first time since I met him, I feared Damien Yezhov.

Truly feared him.