Igor swallowed audibly, letting out a shaky breath. “They said it might help to get another graft on my back, but at this point, I’m running out of usable skin.”
“I hear donor—”
“Not interested. They already put some fucking fish scales on me when I was in there the first time. Jesus Christ.”
Vaslav cringed, but didn’t question Igor on the topic further. There were some things that men should simply be able to keep to themselves. Undignified—or radical, depending on how someone wanted to look at it—medical procedures were certainly one of those things.
“I’m here because Bogdan called,” Igor admitted.
“Oh?”
Igor shrugged, his gaze sweeping the many monitors on the wall across from theirs. Unless the nurses were in the room, most of the machines and devices were kept silent for the most part. Occasionally, one thing or another would beep, and shortly thereafter, a nurse would enter the room to do something with the IV pole, a lead on Hannah, or whatever else needed their attention.
Someone kept the young woman’s wild, red curls brushed, her lips moist, and the faint hint of vanilla in the air matched the body lotion on the rolling stand next to the bed. The one gash that had been on her face, just above the line of her eyebrow, had been fixed by a plastic surgeon who owed Bogdan a favor. One would need to be studying Hannah’s lax features very carefully to see the way the surgeon had stitched the scar along her brow line.
“Do you think she can hear us?” Igor asked.
“She’s not dead.”
“I know that!”
Vaslav cocked a brow at the slight shout, but he tried to give Igor some grace for it all the same. “I meant, she’s shown responses to some stimuli. Or her brain activity suggests she had responses. There’s research that shows her coma state is similar to others who woke up and proclaimed to have been somewhat lucid or conscious at different times. Can she hear us? It’s possible.”
Between the three people who had been in the villa the morning the bomb blew, Hannah had been the one with the least visible injuries. Perhaps because she had closed the front door just in time and that blocked her from the initial blast, or it could have just been circumstance. Right place, right time.
Except nothing about this was very right.
Igor shifted subtly on the chair, flinching as he did so and letting out a short gasp of breath that spoke of his pain. An agony he otherwise kept quiet. “Bogdan ... he, uh—”
“What?”
“He called me.”
Ah.
Vaslav followed Igor’s gaze to the woman on the bed, but this time, his friend’s stare lingered on Hannah’s slightly swollen stomach under the stark white hospital sheet.
“He said an amnio would confirm—probably don’t need it, but anyway, getting me listed as the biological father would go a long way to ending the legal matter with Hannah’s mother.”
“And then what?” Vaslav questioned.
“Pardon?”
“Are you raising the baby? I heard they did an ultrasound last week. Congrats, it’s a girl.”
Igor turned to him, blinking once, and then twice, slowly. “She could wake up before—”
“At this moment, given what we’ve got to go on, let’s say that she doesn’t wake up before they have to take the kid out of her. What are you going to do then?”
“Vaslav, I’m not in the fucking mood today to do this with you, or anyone else. Okay? You’re goddamn lucky that I’m even here in this hospital right now.”
He wouldn’t deny Igor that.
“Let Bogdan do the amnio,” Vaslav said. “We can figure out the rest later.”
Igor flinched at the comment. “It was just fun. Even that last night—that’s why I went there. She took my mind off the rest. I don’t get it.”
“That makes two of us who are currently confused.”
“No, fuck ...” Igor pinched at the bridge of his nose, muttering, “She said that was the last time as I was leaving. I understood, you know? Shit ends. There didn’t have to be a reason. We weren’t a thing, and I didn’t even have the time to be messing around with her as it was.”
Right.
And clearly, Igor paid the price for that mistake. As every man in their life and position did in one way or another. It was an unfortunate lesson to learn, but Vaslav doubted Igor would allow himself to get so distracted with the personal side of his life that he overlooked the business part that always stayed close behind.
In all their many phone conversations since Igor had felt up to doing so, and more recently, during their plans to handle the bomb situation and the person who planted it, not once had Igor talked about that morning. Not why he was at the villa, although Vaslav had previously thought the reasons were clear, or anything else.
“You didn’t even know she was pregnant, did you?” Vaslav asked.
Igor glanced sideways, shrugging. “I’m starting to think she didn’t want me to know.”
Huh.
Vaslav fixated on the woman in the bed again, wondering how true Igor’s statement might be—or whether it even mattered. “As it were, she wanted it,” he said, earning himself another wince from Igor. “Vera’s sure of that.”
“The coma isn’t affecting the baby?”
“Her brain is regulating everything that it’s supposed to. She hasn’t even been on a ventilator for a month,” Vaslav explained, folding his arms over his chest. “These are all good signs, or so that fucking idiot upstairs with the big office says. Where is Bogdan, anyway?”
“I told you, he had a page.”
Vaslav massaged his pounding head. “Right, right.”
“It bothers me.”
“That she didn’t tell you she was pregnant?”
He really knew better than to assume.
Igor grunted a low no, adding louder, “That we haven’t figured out who set the bomb.”
“Me, too,” Vaslav admitted.
Yet, probably not for the same reason. It’s what made his wife’s worsening phone calls far harder to deal with and get through. He wasn’t being entirely forthcoming with Vera about the happenings in Moscow because there was very little to tell.
“But it definitely came from within the brotherhood,” Igor muttered. “I was too new into the seat for it to be anyone else. Word hadn’t even properly traveled out of the country that a change in leadership had happened.”
Vaslav had another thought, then. One he’d wished he could have had earlier. Many months ago, even.
“Did you even get your dues?” he asked, referring to the money that should be handed down from every vor to their boss. At least monthly, the tradition continued on. It guaranteed protection to the man paying, and if accepted by the boss, the payment also promised continued status and permission to keep territory where said man worked.
A delicate balance.
For years, Vaslav just made Nico or Igor collect his money. He stopped doing his official rounds back when he also wanted to stop seeing people. It wasn’t like any vor in the country complained. With Vaslav, people tended to go with the flow.
“It should have been the next week,” Igor said. “I’ve put it off—the obvious reason.”