Page 157 of Secret Heir

Completely unaware she’s been watched every day since.

It’s been two years, three months, and sixteen days since Katerina Sokolov saved my life.

I’d been driving too fast on a wet road.

It was stupid of me, but I’d been angry about a deal gone wrong and I lost control.

The car flipped three times before slamming into a concrete barrier. I should have died.

But then she was there.

I don’t remember much from those first moments—pain, the taste of copper in my mouth, the smell of gasoline, and burning rubber. But I remember her voice.

It was calm and authoritative. Telling me to stay still and keep breathing, that help was coming.

She pulled me out of the wreckage with strength I wouldn’t have expected from someone her size. Put pressure on the artery in my leg that was pumping blood onto the asphalt.

Stayed with me by talking to me, keeping me conscious until the ambulance arrived.

Then she rode with me to the hospital and scrubbed in on my surgery even though her shift had ended hours before.

She checked on me every day during my recovery.

When I first saw her face clearly, I thought an angel had been sent to save me. I learned everything about her after that.

Dr. Katerina Sokolov, thirty-two years old, trauma surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian. She’s one of the best in the city despite her age.

She’d done her residency at Johns Hopkins, graduated top of her class, and turned down positions at every major hospital in the country to come back to New York.

She volunteers at free clinics in her limited spare time and mentors medical students. Hell, she even works double shifts when the ER is short-staffed.

She saves people. It’s what she does. It’s who she is at her core.

And I became obsessed.

Not in the way normal men become interested in beautiful women. This was something that took root in my chest the moment she put her hands on my bleeding body and refused to let me die. She’d touched me. Saved me. She was mine in a way she didn’t even know yet.

But Katerina Sokolov is untouchable.

She’s a Bratva princess. Nikolai Sokolov’s fucking cousin, though she keeps herself carefully removed from the family business. She made it clear years ago that she wanted nothing to do with organized crime.

She’s a doctor. She saves lives. She doesn’t take them.

The Bratva apparently respected that, and in turn they protect her. They let her live in her ivory tower of hospitals and medical conferences and noble intentions. Unfortunately for me, this means I couldn’t just approach her or ask her to dinner like a normal man pursuing a normal woman.

So I watched from a distance.

I learned her routines and where she lived. I found out where she went for coffee, a small place three blocks from the hospital that knew her order by heart.

I know she takes her coffee black with one sugar. I know she’s left-handed. I know she listens to 2000s rap music when she studies medical journals.

I have photographs covering one entire wall of this office.

Katerina leaving the hospital after a long shift.

Katerina at the coffee shop, laughing at something the barista said.

Katerina jogging in Central Park on Sunday mornings.