THERE'S A PROBLEM

Nadia's POV

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He was not a good patient.

Not in the dramatic, thrashing way — Kane didn't move an inch he hadn't calculated first. But there was a stillness to him that wasn't cooperation. It was tolerance. Like he was enduring me rather than accepting help, which was a distinction I felt every time my hands moved and his jaw tightened and he said absolutely nothing about it.

"Breathe," I said.

"I am breathing."

"Deeper. You're holding it every time I touch the wound and that's making your muscles tense and that's making this harder than it needs to be."

A pause.

He breathed deeper.

I worked quickly, cleaning the wound thoroughly, irrigating it with saline until I was satisfied, then packing it carefully with gauze. The bullet was seated deeper than I wanted — too deep for what I had — but I could stabilize him enough to buy time. That was the goal. Stabilize, close the surface, manage bleeding, prevent infection.

"You've done this before," he said.

"Treated a gunshot wound?" I didn't look up. "No. But the anatomy is the same. Wound is a wound."

"You're not shaking."

"I told you. I'm better at this than I am at panicking." I reached for the surgical tape. "I'll panic later, in private, like a normal person."

Something shifted in. I couldn't name it exactly. It wasn't softness — I doubted this man did softness. But it was something adjacent to it. Something that felt almost like attention.

I focused on the wound.

Closing the surface took longer than I wanted because I was being careful. Each step deliberate. I talked myself through it quietly, the way my professor had taught us — narrate the process, keep your own mind anchored, don't let the situation become larger than the task in front of you.

Kane didn't interrupt. He watched me work with those dark eyes and said nothing, and I found his silence easier to exist in than most people's conversation.

"Almost done," I said.

He nodded once.

I was reaching for the bandage when his phone rang.

The sound cut through the apartment like something sharp.

He was on his feet before I could process the movement — one second sitting, the next standing, hand already pulling the phone from his trouser pocket with the ease of someone whose body hadn't just been through what his body had just been through.

I sat back on my heels and stared at him.

He didn't say excuse me. Didn't glance at me. Didn't acknowledge that I was mid-procedure with my gloves still on and his blood still on my hands. He just — stood up and answered it.

"Talk," he said into the phone.

I pulled my gloves off slowly, one finger at a time, and told myself this was fine. This was completely fine. I had not just spent forty minutes on my knees on my own living room floor treating a stranger who didn't even have the basic courtesy to say 'one moment'.

I began packing my kit.

His voice was low — deliberately low — but the apartment wasn't big enough for privacy and I wasn't trying hard enough not to hear.

"When." A pause. "How many." Another pause, longer this time. His back was to me but I watched his shoulders settle into something harder. "And the car?"

I stacked the gauze packets neatly.

The voice on the other end was tinny and distant but I caught the shape of the words even if not all of them. Something about a location. Something about a search.

Then clearly, close enough to the phone that it carried:

"Boss, the car is gone. Someone moved it. And there's a problem."

The silence that followed had a different texture than the ones before it.

Kane turned.

Not toward the window, not toward the door.

Toward me.

And the way he looked at me — slow, recalibrating, like something he'd filed under one category had just moved itself into another — made the back of my neck go cold.

I met his gaze steadily.

"What kind of problem?" he said into the phone. But he was still looking at me.