Chapter One
Jozef marked the woman for pickup, pointing to where she stood. Alone, vulnerable, and fragile against a backdrop of ruined concrete and military tents.
Havel’s eyes followed. Once he caught sight of her, a frown wrinkled his thick brows. He wasn’t comfortable with what they were about to do. It bothered him. Though it shouldn’t. He’d snatched plenty of people in his time, cut them up too, and shot some of them. Why this one woman should bother him was beyond Jozef.
“You sure?” Havel asked quietly, his eyes following her as she finished her break, stood up and stretched, arching her back and tipping her head from side to side, loosening tight muscles. Then she reentered the tent building she’d exited ten minutes before.
Jozef grunted an affirmative.
He wanted to follow her, to watch her while she worked. Those elegant fingers, touching her patients, healing them. She was a goddess. Striking and beautiful in a sea of ugly. Amidst the ruins of what used to be a permanent hospital, now a bombed-out shell, she was a thing of true beauty. Since the area was still considered central to the war efforts, the military had decided they would rebuild a makeshift hospital on top of the old one. She was foreign, she didn’t belong in Ukraine. She was providing medical assistance to those caught up in the war. It was almost a shame to mark her.
She was the best he could find. Unlikely to have family or friends in the area, no one to miss her. She would disappear as quietly as she arrived. Others would assume she went home, back to wherever she came from. Her family back home would believe she’d keen killed here. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it would work for as long as they needed her.
Jozef would force her to help them, to heal the man who had information about his uncle’s abduction. Jozef’s uncle, Krystoff Koba, head of the Czech Koba crime family, had been taken from his vehicle in downtown Kiev by armed mobsters while visiting a family friend. The kidnappers were demanding a token ransom, but Jozef suspected deeper motives. His uncle ran a vast and complex crime syndicate; he was king of his empire. A hard man to deal with for everyone except his close family members. Once out of favour, always out of favour, and the man who took Krystoff had fallen from favour years ago. The war in Ukraine further complicated an already strained relationship.
Revenge was not the motive or Krystoff would’ve been killed in the street in a brutal and bloody statement of might. No, the person responsible for Krystoff’s abduction wanted something else, something valuable. Jozef needed to know the motive, needed to play the game carefully. He didn’t need the kidnapper getting jumpy and murdering his uncle. He also didn’t want the other Vory finding out. Jozef needed to get his uncle back and figure out what the fuck was going on, especially since the only person who could possibly gain from Krystoff’s death was Jozef, and Jozef sure as fuck hadn’t taken the old man.
While Jozef and his team made plans to infiltrate their enemy’s territory, Jozef’s brutally intelligent aunt, Krystoff’s wife, was distracting the kidnappers with promises of wealth and trade deals. Dasha would dangle them on the line until Jozef was ready to make his move. With any other woman, Jozef might worry about her giving away the game. But not Aunt Dasha. She would hold onto her icy poise even as the rival family mailed pieces of her husband’s body to her.
So far, they had only mailed a finger, the small one, cut at the knuckle. It was a clean cut and had obviously bled, indicating Krystoff was alive when the finger was removed. After a brief discussion with his aunt, Jozef had made his way into Ukraine, close to the front lines of the war on the Russian border. He hunted until he found the weasel who’d sent the package to Aunt Dasha; a shopkeeper by the name of Gustav, who had a good side hustle mailing objects of a sensitive nature.
Unfortunately, Gustav had collapsed under interrogation before giving up any information he might have had on the person who hired him to send the finger. Now the man was in a basement, in an abandoned village outside the city of Luhansk. Terek was with him, making sure he wouldn’t slip away while Jozef and Havel picked up a doctor. The man was refusing to speak. If he died, they would lose their only lead to finding Krystoff.
Jozef stared at the door she went through. He needed a doctor. A woman would be easier to capture. No family on that continent, easier to get rid of when they were done with her. She was the one Jozef wanted.
Chapter Two
“Mom, I’m fine, really.”
Shaun took a long thirsty gulp of water before hurriedly wiping her mouth and putting the bottle back in the fridge. She flexed her shoulder blades, wincing a little at the crackling sound and the tight, pinched feeling in her neck. She was on day three of a four-day twelve-hour rotation. She shook her head. It wasn't like she stuck to her working hours. She worked when there was work to be done, and she went back to her tiny boarding room when she could no longer stand up and keep her eyes open.
“I read in the news that there was a bombing close to the hospital last night. Did you hear it?” Fatima asked anxiously over the phone.
Shaun frowned in concentration. She tried to get her tired brain to remember if anything had happened the evening before. Usually after long shifts she would go home and eat a quick, cold meal, take a lukewarm shower with appalling water pressure then pass out until her next shift began.
Still, she had to reassure her mother. It was the only way to keep Fatima sane while her daughter willingly ventured into the hearts of war zones. “No, Mom, it was nowhere near here. Trust me, I’d have noticed if a bomb went off near the hospital. We’re not all that close to the front lines, and the town is no longer being targeted.”
Shaun was telling the truth. Partly. It was true that the hospital wasn’t a target, but it was located closer to the front lines than Shaun knew her mother would be comfortable with. Luhansk, or Luhansk People’s Republic, was rebel-held, which automatically made the area more dangerous. The government couldn’t step in to provide law and order in the now lawless, rebel-held no-man’s-land.
“I hate that you aren’t safe at home.”
“I know, and I’m sorry, but this is what I need to be doing.” They’d had the same conversation dozens of times, almost without deviation. It was pointless, but Shaun understood her mother’s need to express her fear. “How’s your garden doing? Are the sunflowers taller than you yet?”
Fatima perked up and chatted about her garden for a few minutes, giving Shaun a chance to eat her snack of almonds and fruit before she got back to her rounds.
Doctors were scarce in that part of Ukraine, having been killed in the fighting or fleeing to safer areas as the war advanced, taking down entire cities in the process. Doctors Without Borders came in to help manage the humanitarian crisis on the front lines. Shaun, a neurosurgeon, had been called in from her home city of Montréal, Quebec, Canada, along with two American nurses and a Brazilian radiologist. They worked alongside the skeleton crew of hospital staff who had elected to stay behind.
The hours were long, the accommodations were awful, and the future was uncertain, but being part of the Doctors Without Borders team was one of the most fulfilling things Shaun had done with her life. She’d put herself through med school, she’d put her time in at the bottom of the pond in order to pay off student loans, and now she was free to pursue her passion: providing medical care to people in need ‒ people in desperate situations. Additionally, Doctors Without Borders was a chance to immerse herself in another country, culture and language. It was fulfilling on so many levels.