Chapter 2

The Terms

Lena's POV

The charge nurse on the pediatric floor caught me at the nurses' station the next evening, with an odd look on her face.

"Lena. There's a man in the family lounge asking for you." She lowered her voice. "He's been there forty minutes. He hasn't asked for coffee. He hasn't looked at his phone. He told security he's 'waiting for a nurse' and security let him stay, which has never happened in the history of this hospital."

I didn't need to ask. I put down my chart and walked down the hall.

The family lounge was a cheerful, ridiculous room, with dinosaur tiles on the floor, a bookshelf of battered picture books and a cartoon giraffe painted on the wall. The man sitting on the small blue sofa looked like a mistake someone had made in a painting. He wore a dark overcoat. His hands were resting on his knees, completely still.

He stood when I came in. He was tall, six-two at least and lean the way a blade is lean. His hair was short and black. His eyes were gray, flat and level. They had none of the ease Viktor's had.

"Miss Harper," he said. "Adrian Volkov."

"Mr. Volkov." I stayed in the doorway. "You're on the children's floor."

"Viktor said you wouldn't want me anywhere near the patient." He glanced at the giraffe, then back to me. "I thought this might be the safest place to wait."

I almost laughed. "Safest for who?"

"For you," he said and it didn't sound like a threat. It sounded like a calculation. "Your name was at the bottom of a pink receipt. That's all I have. I don't know where you live, who your family is or what hours you work. I don't like it and I'm trying to be careful about what I do with that."

I stared at him. I had expected a speech. Or a veiled warning. I hadn't expected the confession.

"You want the envelope," I said.

"Yes."

"It's locked up. It stays locked until the patient is awake and signs for it."

"He's sedated for another day, maybe two." His tone didn't change. "I could have it in an hour."

"You could." I stepped into the room and let the door swing closed behind me. "Then there'd be a log showing who opened the cabinet, a charge nurse who knows exactly what a forced property release looks like and a hospital security director who has been looking for any excuse to call the police about last night. A gunshot wound is a reportable event, Mr. Volkov. An officer is coming to interview the staff tomorrow morning."

Something moved behind his eyes. It wasn't anger. It was interest.

"I'm not threatening you," I said. "I'm telling you what happens if you make this difficult. When that officer asks, I'm going to say I treated a patient. That's what I did and that's all I saw. I can keep saying that for as long as nobody makes me say anything else."

"And if I take the envelope?"

"Then the officer hears about the envelope. And about the men who tried to take it."

He was silent for a moment. In the hallway, a child's IV pole squeaked past on its wheels.

"That's a very exact kind of leverage," Adrian said.

"I'm a very exact kind of nurse."

For the first time his expression changed, just slightly. It wasn't a smile, but it lived somewhere in the same neighborhood. "What do you want?"

I had been working on that answer for a full day and I'd rehearsed it in the shower. I counted off on my fingers.

"One. The envelope goes to your man, in his hands, in front of me, when he's awake and can sign for it. Not to you. Not to Viktor. Two. Nobody who works for you sets foot on this floor. Not in a coat, not in a hoodie, not in a waiting room. There are children here and some of them have already watched their whole lives get taken apart. They don't need to look up and see your people." I took a breath. "Three. When I say Dmitri, or whatever his name is, can't be moved, he can't be moved. I don't care who you are."

"His name is Dmitri," Adrian said quietly. "How did you know I would say yes?"

"I didn't."

"I haven't said yes."

"You will," I said, "because you came to the children's floor and sat under a giraffe for forty minutes, instead of just taking it."

A small, brisk voice cut through the silence.

"Excuse me."

We both turned. A girl of about six stood in the doorway, dragging an IV pole almost as tall as she was, a stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm and a gauzy bandage on her stomach beneath her pajamas. Nora, bed eleven, appendectomy, day two.

"Nora, sweetheart, you're supposed to be in bed."

"I was bored." She examined Adrian with enormous, unblinking brown eyes. "Are you somebody's dad?"

"No," Adrian said.

"Are you somebody's uncle?"

He seemed to consider the question seriously. "No."

"Then why are you here?"

He crouched. He did it slowly and without hurry and for a moment he was just a man in an expensive coat on a dinosaur floor, face level with a six-year-old. "I'm waiting for someone to say I can go," he told her.

Nora nodded, as though that made perfect sense. "That's what I'm doing," she said and held up the rabbit. "His name is Gerald. You can hold him if you want. He's good at waiting."

I watched Adrian Volkov, the man whose name I did not yet understand, take a stuffed rabbit in two scarred hands. He held it with exactly the care he must have used on far more dangerous things.

"Thank you, Nora," he said gravely.

"You're welcome." She took the rabbit back and shuffled out, towing her pole behind her.

I realized I'd been holding my breath. I let it go.

Adrian straightened and buttoned his coat. When he looked at me again, something in the room had shifted.

"The envelope goes to Dmitri," he said. "No one from my family on this floor. If he can't be moved, he won't be." He paused. "That's all three."

"That's all three."

"Then I'll wait in the cafeteria," he said. "Until he wakes."

"For two days?"

"I'm patient when it matters, Miss Harper."

He walked past me, close enough that I caught the scent of cold air and cedar. At the door, he stopped without turning.

"Nobody has ever given me terms before," he said. "I wasn't sure what it would feel like."

"And?"

"I find I don't hate it."

He was gone before I could decide how to answer. I stood in the quiet, dinosaur-tiled room and noticed that my hands were shaking, a fine, stubborn tremor I couldn't stop. It wasn't fear. I had spent the last four minutes negotiating with a man I was fairly sure had killed people and I had 'won'.

That was the problem. I'd enjoyed it…