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It was definitely Luka. His shaved head and slight figure were easily recognizable. Despite how slight he was, he was more than strong enough to kill. His arm rested limply along the ground, the one with the snake tattoo that wrapped around his elbow.
He didn’t seem to be faking. Eyes that often skittered but seemed to see everything were now closed to the world. Around the right one was a dark bruise she didn’t remember from before.
And his back was soaked with something she didn’t think was sweat.
Alina approached him hesitantly.
Luka’s eyes moved beneath his lids before they slitted open. The pale peridot of his gaze made the bruise seem even darker.
“Alina?”
The way he said her name made her scalp tingle. She hadn’t thought he’d known it, but then again, the other man had called her that before he’d been killed.
Some of her fear receded when his eyes held his own worry.
His arms shook as he tried to push himself up. “Can’t stay,” he mumbled, blinking in an attempt to focus.
Alina’s attention turned to the still-open doorway. No sounds drifted from the darkened space beyond. “Is someone coming?”
He shook his head, but it was more like he was struggling to force cobwebs away. “Not yet,” he said. Then his arms gave out, and he collapsed against the carpet again.
Alina crouched by his side, watching him tense. She didn’t touch him. “Are you hurt?”
His head shifted along the carpet in denial. Sweat had beaded on his forehead, even though without the blanket she could feel the chill of winter in the house all too easily.
“I think you are. Is it your back?” She reached for the hem of his shirt.
“Don’t!” It was a broken cry, not the choked-off one he’d given her before.
“I won’t touch you,” Alina promised. She was careful in how she pinched the hem between her fingers as she pulled his shirt up.
The material stuck in places, causing Luka to hiss out his breath. At first Alina thought something with claws must have attacked him, but the marks were more irregular than that—deep gouges in his skin with no particular symmetry. Some were deeper than others. Most wept blood. There had to have been two dozen of them.
“How did someone manage to cut you this much?” she asked.
The way Luka had moved the night before had been so quick. Oh, he’d let her follow him for a while, but when he’d decided to disappear, he had. And he’d killed the other Bratva while she’d failed to knife her tormentor, almost before she could blink.
The wounds on his back didn’t resemble anything she had seen. They had more rounded edges and were wider than a blade, or at least any blades she’d seen.
Beneath the fresh wounds, older, raised scars marked different patches of skin. They crisscrossed in strange patterns. His back was the only area of his body she’d seen with no tattoos. Even his face had been edged in ink, spreading from his scalp and down his neck.
“Fine,” Luka murmured, trying to shift away.
Alina tightened her grip on his shirt. “No, you’re not. I’m almost certain you have a fever.” She tugged the shirt toward his head. “Arms up.”
Another hiss escaped him as she dragged his shirt off. He collapsed to the carpet after, the side of his face pressing flat as he struggled to regulate his breathing.
She had no idea how it would be best to treat him. The bathroom had more towels. They were all white, but what did it matter if she ruined them? She soaked a hand towel as she moved back into the room.
Luka hadn’t moved. That worried her even more.
There was no reason she should care about a man who murdered people, even if he hadn’t hurt her. That he hadn’t didn’t deserve praise. No, the bar should be higher than that.
But she remembered the way he had held his hand out to her every time. When she was too scared to leave the room she was told to stay in. With a knife that he offered her so she could finish things. And to take the tweezers as he dealt with his own discomfort in order to treat her foot.
Her hand reached for the sanitizer he’d used on her foot the night before.
“No,” Luka said. The pale green of his eyes struggled to focus on her.
