Chapter 3

The Envelope

Lena's POV

Dmitri woke up thirty hours early.

I was on my break when Brenda called me from the surgical ICU, her voice flat and quick. "He's asking for the nurse who 'held the artery.' Says he won't say another word until he sees her. You'd better come."

I took the stairs two at a time. Dmitri lay propped against the pillows with tubes in both arms and a gray, sweaty tinge to his skin that I did not like. He was younger than I had thought, maybe thirty, with a boxer's nose and exhausted eyes.

Adrian was already there. He stood at the foot of the bed, quiet as a shadow. Viktor leaned in the corner by the window with his arms folded and a hospital security officer hovered in the doorway pretending not to look at anyone.

"This is the nurse," Adrian said.

Dmitri's cracked lips curved. "You're smaller than I thought," he said, in a thick accent. "I remember hands."

"You were busy bleeding," I said, checking his monitor. "Don't talk. I need you to sign something."

Brenda produced the sealed property bag. I broke the numbered tag in front of everyone, slid out the envelope and held it up so Dmitri could see the tape was still intact. Brenda witnessed. Dmitri signed the form with a shaking hand and I placed the envelope on his chest, exactly as I'd promised.

"Thank you," Dmitri breathed. He looked at Adrian. "It's only for you. Please. Only you."

Adrian took it and, without a word, slit the tape with his thumbnail and drew out six or seven pages, covered in columns of figures. I watched him read. His face stayed still for the first two pages. By the third, something had gone out of it, a color I hadn't known was there.

"Dmitri," he said, very softly. "Where did you get this?"

"I did what he told me." Dmitri's eyes were fixed on the ceiling. "They shot me anyway."

'He.' The word hung in the air. Viktor straightened in the corner. Adrian didn't look up from the pages.

"Who else has seen this?" he asked.

"No one," I said. "It was sealed when it came in. Brenda and I logged it sealed."

"Brenda's name is on the form." He folded the pages and slid them into his coat. "So is yours."

My stomach dropped. "I don't know what that is and I don't want to know."

"That," Adrian said, "is exactly why you're in danger. Whoever shot Dmitri knew he was carrying it. They'll check who handled him. It won't take them long."

Behind him, Dmitri's monitor gave a thin, sharp warning chirp. I turned. His pulse was climbing and sweat had beaded along his hairline. I laid the back of my hand against his forehead. It burned.

"He's febrile," I said. "Brenda, get the resident."

"We're moving him," Adrian said.

I turned slowly. "Excuse me?"

"A private clinic. We have a doctor who doesn't file reports. Viktor can have him out of here in ten minutes."

"No."

The room went very quiet. The security officer in the doorway developed a sudden interest in his shoes.

"He has a fever and a drop in pressure, which means there's infection or a second bleed," I said. "If you move him now, he dies in the back of your van. I don't have a vote on who you work with, Mr. Volkov. I do have a vote on whether my patient lives. We had a deal. Number three."

Adrian looked at me. Viktor, in the corner, made a small noise that might have been a cough.

"How long?" Adrian said at last.

"Give me four hours and the resident. If the numbers turn, he stays in this bed under a different name and your people can sit outside the unit all night if they want. That's the best I can do."

"Do it," Adrian said and I realized he had made the call in half a second. He was a man who commanded entire streets and he had just yielded to a nurse in a rumpled scrub top, in front of his own enforcer.

It took the resident two hours to find the abscess and one more to drain it. By the time Dmitri's fever broke and his pressure leveled out, it was well past midnight. When I finally came out of the unit, Adrian was waiting in the corridor, leaning against the wall with his coat over his arm.

"He'll live," I said.

"I know. Viktor told me." He paused. "I wanted to hear it from you."

I was too tired to be careful. "You can't just keep standing in my hallway."

"I know." He straightened. "I came to make you an offer and I'd like you to say no if you want to."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Someone shot a man for those pages and they may know your name. I'd like to put a driver in the staff garage when you start and finish your shifts. One man, in his own car. He'll never come onto the wards, or near your friends or your patients. That's all. Nothing else."

It was the careful phrasing that undid my first instinct to refuse. He had thought through every place I might push back and he had walled each one off in advance.

"Not outside my apartment," I said.

"Not outside your apartment."

"He never goes inside the hospital."

"Never."

"And I tell you if I want him gone. Not Viktor. Not him. You."

"Agreed." He met my eyes. "I won't ask where you live. If your driver needs to know, you tell him."

I considered it for a long moment and then I did something I'll never fully understand. I took a pen from my pocket, tore a corner off a lab requisition and wrote my address on it in small, careful letters. Then I held it out. Not to Adrian. To Viktor, who had materialized in the corridor behind him.

"For the driver," I said.

Viktor took it, glanced at Adrian and for the first time that day I saw him lose his composure completely. He looked startled and then amused and then, oddly, almost moved.

"He didn't ask," Viktor said, turning the scrap of paper over in his thick fingers. "I've worked for him for twelve years. In twelve years, I never saw him ask anybody for anything."

"Viktor," Adrian said, in a mild warning tone.

"I'm just saying." Viktor tucked the paper into his jacket. He looked at me. "You owe me twenty dollars, by the way. I bet him you'd say yes."

"You bet he'd say yes," I corrected, "not me."

"Same thing," Viktor said and he went off down the corridor, whistling under his breath.

Adrian stayed where he was. The hospital hummed around us, soft and ordinary. For a moment he looked like he wanted to say something that wasn't an arrangement, or a term, or a favor.

"Good night, Lena," he said instead.

It was the first time he had used my first name. I stood in the empty hallway long after he was gone, with a mug of cold tea in my hand and Nora's rabbit-sized smile in my head and tried to remember when I'd last felt this awake…