Bratvas vow, p.33
Bratva's Vow, page 33
There was a beat of silence.
Archie smiled again, gentle, patient. “What do you think is going to happen to him while you’re gone? We’re at a hospital, Maxim.”
I didn’t blink. Didn’t repeat myself.
He stared at me. Just stared. Then laughed softly and raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay. I get it. You’re in full bear mode.”
He stepped forward, his hand raised like he meant to pat my shoulder, but I moved back. I probably should have let him touch me to throw him off that we were on to him. But I couldn’t. Couldn’t let any part of him come in contact with me. I was already a second away from shoving him into the wall and strangling him until he told me the truth.
His hand fell back to his side.
Something passed between us. He felt it. His smile faltered, in the hitch of breath that followed. A crack in his armor.
Fuck, he knew I didn’t trust him.
Archie swallowed once and looked away. “I’ll… give Nik the bags.”
He turned without waiting for a reply and walked down the hall.
I didn’t follow.
Just stood there in the quiet, pulse drumming behind my eyes, every nerve coiled.
If he had touched Wren… if even a fraction of this was his doing…
He wouldn’t walk away next time.
When Nik arrived with the two bags Archie had packed for us, I told him to burn them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
WREN
Everything hurt.
Not the kind of pain people expected. Not sharp or stabbing or clean. It was deeper than that. Blunted and heavy, like my bones were filled with wet cement. My muscles ached with every twitch, every breath. My skin felt too tight, too hot, too cold, all at once.
I couldn’t stop sweating. The hospital gown clung to me in damp patches, sticking to my back and chest like a second skin I never asked for. The nurses changed the sheets regularly, but it didn’t matter. Nothing stayed clean for long.
I didn’t know what time it was anymore. Morning bled into afternoon, into night, into another morning. I caught pieces of conversations, nurses murmuring about vital signs, urine output, and blood draws. It never stopped.
They were gentle. I knew that. But no matter how softly they touched me, no matter how carefully they eased a needle into my vein, I still flinched. Still cried sometimes. Silently.
The only thing that kept me going was that Maxim was true to his word and never left my side.
They came for my blood again and again. My hands, my arms, even the tops of my feet when they ran out of good veins. I stopped asking why. Stopped asking for anything.
Sometimes they brought the commode beside the bed because I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. Couldn’t even stand without help. Maxim lifted me like I weighed nothing. Like I was nothing. And maybe I was. I cried that time too. Quietly. Because I didn’t want Maxim to see me this way, but I’d asked him to stay. He refused to leave anyway.
I vomited more often than I could keep track of. It burned. Bitter and sharp, it clawed its way up my throat until my stomach gave out. Then there was just bile. Then blood.
My head spun. My ears rang. My chest felt hollow, like I was breathing through a paper bag. The world pulsed in and out, sometimes too bright, sometimes pitch black.
Everything tasted like metal. Even water.
I lost time. Whole hours, maybe days, vanished into the haze. I’d come to with someone’s hand in mine—Maxim’s maybe—but I couldn’t always be sure. Once it might have been Jess. Nik too. But I was never lucid enough for long.
At times, I didn’t feel like I existed at all. Just a boy in a too-white bed, body breaking down molecule by molecule, while strangers tried to stitch me together with medicine and soft voices.
And sometimes, in the worst moments, when I was too tired to be scared, too weak to cry, I almost hoped they wouldn’t.
I was dying.
Probably.
Definitely.
I felt it in the way my bones ached like they were trying to escape my body, in the sour burn of my stomach, in the relentless pulse of nausea that curled around my insides like smoke. Everything smelled weird. Everything tasted like metal. My tongue felt like it had fuzz on it, and I was pretty sure my teeth were about to fall out.
And yet somehow, out of everything—the machines, the needles, the pain—another reality finally broke me.
“My ring,” I croaked. My hand flopped uselessly against the blanket, searching for the familiar silver band. “Where’s my ring?”
Maxim stirred in the chair beside my bed, bleary-eyed and rumpled. “Wren—”
“It’s gone,” I whispered, horror rising like a flood. “Maxim. It. Is. Gone. Someone stole it. Someone in this hospital stole my ring.”
“No one stole anything,” he said gently, reaching for my hand. “They had to remove everything in case they needed to take you to surgery. I’ve got it safe.”
I blinked, wide-eyed, vision swimming. “You… you took my ring off?”
“Yes, solnyshko.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. “I took it off myself.”
He opened it and tipped the promise ring into his palm. My lip wobbled. All my strength had been building toward this moment, and apparently, all that strength was about to be used… for crying.
“You kept it,” I whimpered. “You really kept it.”
“Of course I did.”
I sniffled, tears slipping sideways into my ears. “For a second, when you gave it to me, I was worried it was an engagement ring. We just fell in love. I didn’t want to be engaged.”
“No? Because it feels like I’ve loved you forever.”
“But now I kind of wish it was an engagement ring!” I wailed, already crying again.
He laughed—laughed—and I shoved my weak, trembling fist into his chest. It barely made a dent.
“Wren,” he said, voice soft and warm and maybe a little wrecked, “it is an engagement ring. We are engaged.”
I froze. “We are? I thought you said it was a promise ring.”
“You should know sometimes your Pakhan lies to get his way.”
“And you wanted to be engaged to me?”
“Yes.”
My face crumpled again. “Oh my god, I’m crying again because we’re engaged, and I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay, kroshka. Don’t cry. I’ll propose again when you get out, and I’ll make it big and no lies.”
“But I love our engagement story. It’s sweet. Evil but sweet.”
“Will you stop crying now?”
“I’m crying because I love you!” I sobbed. “And I don’t want to die before marrying you, and I want to wear a veil. A dramatic one. With lace. Like out to here.” I tried to stretch my arms, but one of them was taped to an IV line, so it mostly looked like I was trying to mime an awkward hug.
Maxim leaned in and kissed the back of my knuckles. “You’re not dying.”
“But what if I do, and we’re not married?”
I was crying again. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t. The tears kept falling while he tried to dab them away.
“Wren, please stop crying. You’ll make yourself sick again.” He kissed my forehead. My nose. “Okay, how about this? I find the chaplain, and we get married right here, right now?”
“You mean that?”
“Will it make you stop crying?”
I nodded, smiling through blurry eyes. “Yes, please. I want to be your forever mister.”
I didn’t remember everything.
Just… pieces.
The chaplain’s voice, sharp and sputtering, “This isn’t right! He’s barely conscious—”
My voice, hoarse and cracked and heavy with desperation: “Please. Please marry us before I die.”
Maxim’s hand was wrapped around mine, grounding me through the fog. “You’re not dying.”
But if I wasn’t, why did I feel like a hollowed-out jack-o’-lantern left too long in the sun? Why did everything taste like pennies? Why did my lungs rattle like an old radiator in winter?
Still, I begged. “I want to be his husband before I go. Please.”
I might’ve added something about haunting the hospital and rearranging all the floor numbers so everyone got lost.
The chaplain groaned like he was being personally cursed. There were papers. Some mumbled vows. Or maybe I imagined those. I might’ve called Maxim my “sexy stallion.” I also might’ve promised to obey him and be his forever slut. The chaplain might have had a coughing fit.
Then came the words.
“You may kiss the groom.”
Maxim leaned in.
And just as his lips brushed mine, everything shifted.
“Oh no,” I croaked.
“What?”
“I’m gonna be sick.”
Maxim grabbed the basin like a pro. He’d done it so many times now and never seemed disgusted at the sight of me puking out my guts.
I turned my head and promptly hurled up every drop of blue Gatorade and potassium supplement inside me. The chaplain made a horrified noise and bailed. Probably reevaluating all his life choices. I overheard some hasty congrats before others left as well.
I started crying again.
“I ruined our wedding kiss!”
Maxim wiped my mouth with the gentleness of someone used to violence but choosing softness. “You didn’t ruin anything. It was perfect. Nik got the whole thing on camera.”
But that only set me off crying again. Oh god, crying was exhausting, but I couldn’t help it. A decade from now—if I lived past this wretched illness—everyone would remember the day I vomited when my husband tried to kiss me at our hospital wedding.
“We were married for like six seconds, and I already threw up. I wanted our first kiss as husbands to be cinematic! Instead, it was”—I hiccuped—“puke-adjacent.”
He kissed the top of my head. “It was perfect. You’re perfect.”
“You’re a liar,” I mumbled, tears sliding down my face.
“A very devoted one.”
“I can’t even remember who was there,” I said, eyes wide. What was happening to my brain? It was a constant state of fog in my head these days. “Was Jess here?”
Maxim nodded.
I gasped. “She wore makeup, didn’t she?”
He hesitated. “Maybe a little—”
“That slut,” I whispered, deeply offended. “How dare she look better than me on my wedding day?”
Maxim laughed, and I pinched his arm. Weakly. “Don’t laugh. I was dying, and she still tried to steal my thunder. I swear, if she wore lipstick, I’ll haunt her.”
“I think you said that at the time too.” He wiped my tears. “It was the most memorable wedding I’ve ever attended.”
I sniffled. “I wanted a veil.”
“You can have one when we do it again.”
“You mean that?”
He brushed my hair back from my sweaty forehead. “Yes. When you’re better. A real wedding. With a veil as long as the aisle. White suit. Flowers. All of it.”
“And vows. Real vows.”
“You’ll write yours?”
“Of course.”
He leaned down and kissed my temple. “That sounds lovely.”
“I love you,” I whispered. “Don’t let me die. Please.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” he whispered back. “You’re already mine. You’re stuck with me now, husband.”
I smiled.
Then passed out again.
But somewhere deep in that darkness, I dreamed of vows and lace and kissing him properly next time.
And of Jess in a paper bag dress for balance.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
MAXIM
Wren finally went quiet around two in the morning.
He’d been murmuring for over an hour, broken sentences slurred with sleep and delirium. Whispering to someone who wasn’t me. Someone who wasn’t here. Sometimes I caught fragments.
“Don’t go yet…”
“I’m trying, Dad. I’m trying…”
It gutted me.
I kept my hand in his the whole time, tracing the rise of his knuckles, murmuring gentle reassurances he couldn’t hear. Promising him things I had no power to guarantee.
Then, just like that, he stilled. No more words. No more pleading.
Only the soft rasp of his breathing and the rhythmic hum of the machines keeping watch over him.
I should have tried to sleep. Instead, I sat there, elbows on knees, head bowed. My eyes drifted to his left hand. The ring was back on his finger—our little hospital wedding had seen to that. He’d cried several times during it, called Jess a slut for outdressing him, and vomited immediately after the “you may kiss the groom.”
It was ridiculous. Beautiful. Ours.
The chaplain had refused at first, of course. I couldn’t blame him. Wren had been clammy and half-conscious, his voice trembling with tears and delirium. I’d asked. Then I’d offered money. When that hadn’t worked, I’d promised to personally ruin the rest of his life if he refused to grant Wren’s request.
I was pretty sure I’d broken some kind of law to get married in an ICU. If challenged, our marriage probably wouldn’t hold up anywhere but my own heart. But it didn’t matter.
I was married.
To Wren.
Would he regret it when he was out of the hospital?
My phone buzzed in my pocket, dragging me out of my thoughts. I checked the screen. Sergei.
Carefully, I untangled my hand from Wren’s and slipped into the adjoining bathroom, closing the door with a soft click behind me. I answered on the second ring.
“What is it?”
“We got movement,” Sergei said without preamble. His voice was low, taut. “Archie just showed up at the doctor’s house.”
My pulse stuttered. “Leo?”
“Yeah. He just left. We’re not sure why.”
My blood turned cold. Why the fuck would Archie go there unless he was working with Leo? Leo, whose husband I’d pushed to commit suicide. Leo, who might hold a grudge that Wren and I were involved in his husband’s death. Leo, who now cared for Wren.
“Fuck, Sergei. Leo is working with him. Why did I trust the fucking asshole?”
Why did I keep making mistakes that could cost Wren his life? Was Archie right after all, and love was making me too sloppy?
“We’ll keep an eye on what happens tonight,” Sergei said. “Darius is tailing Archie. He’ll make sure he doesn’t disappear. One wrong move and we’ll take him to the spa.”
I turned to the sink, bracing myself against it with one hand, gripping the phone with the other. The porcelain felt cold beneath my palm.
“They’re working together,” I said quietly. “I’m going to gut the doctor. He’ll be happy to be with his husband again.”
“Let’s see what happens tonight. I’ve got eyes everywhere, Maxim. Trust me on this. I won’t leave any room for error.”
Trust me on this.
I’d have sworn I could trust Archie too, but now this clusterfuck. How could I trust anyone ever again?
“You’ve got to trust me, Maxim. Just because Archie betrayed you doesn’t mean you should stop trusting the rest of us.”
I clamped my eyes shut and drew in a shaky breath. I felt wrecked. Hollowed out.
“Keep me updated. I want to know the second anything changes.”
“You’ll be the first,” Sergei said.
I hung up. Despite the puking, his mobility issues, and the fevers, Wren had been improving. This had to mean the doctor hadn’t tampered with his treatment, right? We had to shut Archie down before he succeeded in killing Wren.
Through the door came the steady beep-beep-beep of the monitors. A comfort. A threat. A promise.
I stared at my reflection in the mirror. I would take Wren away. Bring him to another hospital out of state. No one needed to know where he was. Then I went back to sit beside my husband.
To plan.
The first instinct was to call Archie. He was the one who always executed my plans. Only this time, he was the plan. Archie was no longer an ally but a threat I had to eliminate. But first, Wren needed to be evacuated to another hospital.
I pulled out my phone again and started searching: ICU air ambulance, international medical transport, private medevac, how fast can I fly a critical patient out of state without raising red flags?
An hour passed in a blur of options, quotes, regulations, and loopholes I planned to blow through if needed. My fingers paused over the screen when another text from Sergei buzzed in.
Sergei:
Update. Doctor left his house half an hour after Archie. Took a suitcase. Checked into a hotel.
My brows pulled together. A suitcase? A hotel? What the fuck were they up to?
About fifteen minutes passed before another update hit.
Sergei:
The doc is on the move. Seems to be heading to the hospital. Darius still has eyes on Archie. He’s back home.
I frowned. Earlier, when Leo made his final rounds, he’d told us he would be off duty for forty-eight hours. He’d given us the name of the doctor who would handle Wren’s case. Why was he heading back to the hospital after Archie’s visit?
Sergei:
I was right. He just pulled into the hospital parking lot. I’ll cover from behind.
I looked at Wren, still sleeping, his skin too pale against the sterile white sheets. The nurse’s shift change had come and gone. The new nurse had casually said Dr. Lopez would be covering tonight.
So why was Leo here?
My pulse surged. I stood up too fast, heart thudding against my ribs like a warning bell. My eyes went to the go-bag Sergei had packed, half-crammed under the visitor’s chair. I crouched, dug into the bottom until my fingers found the cold steel.
The gun felt heavier tonight.
I loaded it with quiet, deliberate hands. No shaking. No second-guessing.
