He didn’t want to leave her, to leave that place where he wasn’t alone.
“Come on now. Wake up.”
Nikolai surfaced as if he’d been trapped under water for days. Brain sluggish, eyes bleary, mouth full of cotton. He gasped and choked as he tried to make use of his thick tongue.
“Nikolai?” Mikhail’s voice sounded as if from a distance.
In the dim light of the room, Nikolai struggled to make sense of the shapes around him. Slowly, too damn slowly, his eyes regained the ability to focus.
Elbows braced on his knees, Mikhail sat in a chair by the side of his bed. Or, a bed, anyway. White walls and blankets. This wasn’t his room. The infirmary, and not the one in their city headquarters. They’d brought him to Vasilievskoe, his ancestral estate about an hour outside Moscow.
In that moment, as their gazes met, his friend’s brown eyes looked as ancient as he actually was. His head sagged on his shoulders and he clasped his hands where they hung between his knees. “I want to kill you.”
Nikolai chuffed out a breath. “Mishka,” he said, infusing an apology into his friend’s nickname.
“Don’t Mishka me.”
He deserved the other man’s anger. What could he say? “I’m sorry.”
Mikhail cursed and shoved out of his seat, the chair screeching against the tile floor. He paced and muttered under his breath. The other man still wore his fighting gear from the night before, twisting Nikolai’s gut with guilt.
“How long have I been out?” Nikolai managed to say, pushing himself into a sitting position with a groan. The movement made him aware that IVs were attached to the crooks of both arms. And, damn, but everything hurt.
“It’s early afternoon. About ten hours.” Mikhail whirled on him. “Ten goddamn hours I didn’t know if my king, my friend, would die or live to see another night.”
He winced at the volume of his friend’s outrage. “I was stupid.”
“You were fucking moronic.” He braced his hands on his hips and glared.
The situation wasn’t funny, not in the least, but Nikolai felt the corners of his lips rise. “I’ll concede the point.” Few others had the balls to talk to him this way, but he and Mikhail had always been close, almost like brothers. His stomach plummeted. Kyril and Evgeny were gone, but Mikhail was here, and Nikolai was going out of his way to piss on his friendship. “Look, Mishka—”
“Save it. I know, all right? I lost them, too. I loved them, too. They might not have been brothers of my blood, but they were still my brothers. Like you. Since we were young. So I get it. I do. But I swear to Christ—” He covered his mouth and turned away.
Nikolai cleared the lump from his throat, cursing himself for failing Mikhail exactly as he knew he would, and dragged them back to safer ground. “So, give me the rundown on my condition.”
Mikhail turned and crossed his arms. “Broken femur and scapula. Bullet passed through the former, lodged in the latter. Doc got it out on the table. Hit to the right side of your neck took out your jugular and nicked your carotid. Lost half your volume of blood. He patched you up, though, and set up the transfusion before we brought you here. Says you’ll survive to be a pain in the ass another day.”
Ignoring the gibe, Nikolai frowned. How the hell had he survived such injuries? No doubt about it, Anton was a master surgeon, but the blood loss alone…not to mention the poison. A deep sense of something like déjà vu came over Nikolai. He frowned, suddenly certain he’d forgotten something important. He scrubbed a hand through his hair, hampered some by the connected tubes. “Jesus. What a mess.”
Mikhail sighed. “Yeah. Understatement of the century, my friend. Even more complicated by the girl. We need to decide what to do with her. She’s seen a lot.”
Nikolai narrowed his gaze and tried to decipher the words, but he had no idea what Mikhail was talking about. “What girl?”
Staring at him, Mikhail dropped back into the chair beside the bed. “What girl? The one who saved your life.”
Chapter Five
Kate woke up disoriented, hurting and pissed off.
She eased into a sitting position, the back of her head throbbing harder as she rose, and tried to make sense of her dim surroundings.
Small, spartan cot, rough stone walls, an empty wooden table. She looked to the right and gasped. Bars. An iron-barred door.
Was she in jail?
She flew to her feet and moaned. The small room spun around her. With her head in her hands, she sucked deep breaths until the dizziness passed. Clenching her eyelids, she prayed she’d been having a nightmare. She opened her eyes.