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24

DELANEY

At the hospital Lev orders everyone out of the way, all muscles and aggression, his voice chilling and flat, telling them Yelena has a heart condition. He covers the ground in three long strides and keeps beside her stretcher through the doors, one hand on the rail as though she might shatter, water still dripping off his clothes onto the slippery floor.

“Examine her right now,” he commands the staff with a low rumble, and not one of them questions him. His words land like signed orders no sane person would refuse. He is a man used to wielding control over others.

Yelena’s stretcher is wheeled away, and he pushes a chair out of the way to follow her through the swinging doors with quick, steady steps.

I watch his back disappear, eyes narrowed, without a single backward glance. Again, he doesn’t look at me. The bastard doesn’t even remember that I exist.

You are an asshole, I think after him.

My own paramedics hurry off to help with Yelena, and the ambulance goes quiet around me, leaving me behind like something discarded. Only the persistent beeping of the monitor is left, reminding me that I’m somehow still alive.

A nurse with frizzy hair peers inside and freezes when she sees me lying there. “There’s still a patient in here,” she stutters, startled.

She calls for help and releases the locks on my stretcher with a jolt. “You’re safe now,” she tells me, calm and poised, hanging a bag. “We are going to get some fluids into you. What is your name?”

“Delaney Cox,” I manage, voice hoarse and strange, as though it belongs to somebody else entirely.

“Is there anyone we should call for you?” She has already found the emergency contact on my phone before I can answer. “I will have the front desk call this number,” she adds. I’m too foggy to explain a wrong digit and everything it led to, the whole oddity of it, so I let her do it.

The stretcher rolls inside, my body swaying at a precarious tilt with every bump in the floor. My lungs burn, my head throbs, and my breath stays shallow and thin.

“Are you feeling any dizziness, pain, or nausea?” the nurse asks, and I mumble yes to all three at once. She shows me more care in one minute than Lev, my so-called gangster boyfriend, managed in an hour.

She pulls the warming blanket higher over my shoulders. A stranger’s small kindness sits strangely against everything Lev did tonight, and it makes my throat ache.

They move me into a small single room and change me out of my wet clothes into a coarse hospital gown, and heated blankets are stacked over me one by one.

I flinch and let out a yelp when the IV needle goes in, and then they draw my blood and take my temperature.

“The results will be back soon,” the nurse says, and she ambles off, leaving me alone watching the IV drip, one slow, glittering bead after another.

Time crawls by while I watch figures move up and down the corridor through the glass, orderlies and doctors passing me by, absorbed in their own emergencies.

Then a familiar silver-gray profile crosses the glass, and the sight makes something inside me snap taut. Lev has changed his clothes, presentable again, and even from here he looks exhausted, with a cluster of doctors trailing after him.

He goes into the room directly across from mine, the door sliding shut behind him with a hush, like steel shutters, and doesn’t come out. I hold my breath, a tremor of fear running through me, even though he cannot possibly see me through the glass.

I hate I cannot stop watching for him. This is the danger of getting attached. After all his coldness tonight, and all my stupid fucking decisions, he should not get to take up any space in my heart at all.

My IV is changed twice, and a tray of soup arrives, a sad little girl dinner, and I manage two small sips, squeezing the napkin, before my chest feels too full to swallow another drop.

I’m exhausted straight through to the bone, and still, I cannot sleep when I close my eyes. Rest simply will not come, however much I shift and wiggle under the heated blankets.

Around midnight two nurses come in to check on me. One takes my blood pressure while the other, eyes shrewd and hair pin-straight, changes out my medication.

They whisper to each other about the man across the hall. “He has been in there the entire time,” one of them says, breath wisping out softly.

“He’s so handsome,” the younger one murmurs, the flush crawling up her neck. “A little intimidating, though.” The older one snorts and tells her to lower her voice.

“But so good to that beautiful girlfriend of his,” she goes on, batting her fake lashes, and my fingers curl tight under the blanket.

“He fed her by hand,” the young nurse says. “And his phone kept buzzing, twice, and he silenced it both times without even looking at it. Just some front-desk extension, I think. He wouldn’t let anything disturb her rest. He would do whatever it takes to make her happy.”

I open my eyes and push down the sting behind them, the tears balancing in my lashes, stubborn and hot. Rich men can be briefly kind to a person, just enough to appease their consciences. It means absolutely nothing.