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Then he straightens, and he's all alpha again. "You need food. Sleep."

"I need my phone," I say. "Please. I need to call my dad."

My dad answers on the fourth ring, and the second I hear his voice, my eyes burn.

"Baby girl. How are you doing?"

"Hi, Daddy."

There's a pause, and I know that pause. "It's six in the morning. Where are you? Steven called here yesterday looking for you. Cienna Renee Layne, he sounded devastated."

Oh, Steven. You called my dad?

"I'm on a consult," I say, which is technically true and practically a lie. "Emergency case. Overseas. I can't say more, patient confidentiality, and then some."

"Uh-huh." Another pause. His chair creaks as he shifts in it. I picture it exactly, the way he angles his body to compensate, the prosthetic leaning against the armrest where he left it for the night. Above the knee, left side. A cougar shifter's body repairs; it doesn't rebuild. I learned that at nine years old, sitting on the floor of his hospital room.

The doctors told us there was nothing they could do. His cougar would heal the wound, but there wasn't enough left for his body to regenerate what he'd lost. I remember staring at the empty space beneath the blanket, furious that a man who could turn into a mountain lion couldn't grow back one lousy leg. I was nine, and I didn't understand the science. I only understood that somebody needed to figure it out. Eventually, that somebody became me.

"Your leg?" I ask because I can't talk about Steven right now.

"Phantom pains again last night. Woke me up scratching at a foot that hasn't been there in sixteen years." He chuckles, rough and warm. "It itches. A foot I don't have itches, baby girl."

"Are you wearing the new socket I sent?"

"Every day. Fits better than anything the VA ever gave me. My daughter, the doctor." The smile comes through in his voice, loud and clear, before it fades. His tone is softer, quieter, as if we're sharing a secret. "You're okay, though? Whatever this is, you're good?"

Better than ever, my cougar purrs, stretching luxuriously inside my chest.

Across the room stands the six-foot-five Russian mafia tiger king who kidnapped me over his shoulder, growled at my engagement ring, and licked my face with a tongue that wasn't entirely human. "I'm all right, Daddy," I say. "I promise. I'll explain everything when I can. Give my love to—" my voice catches, "—to everybody."

I hang up before he can ask another question and sit in the dark office with the phone in my lap. Exhaustion drags my chin down and my eyelids droop.

I don't get to sleep. Of course, I don't.

The helicopter comes in loud enough to shake the windows, and the compound, which was already abuzz with post-surgery excitement, erupts. I make it down the stairs on legs that feel like overcooked noodles just in time to see the front door open.

The man who enters first is Ivan thirty years from now. Same height, same build, gone slightly from granite to iron, the same reddish-brown eyes, silver-streaked hair that was probably once black. Power rolls off him so thick my cougar flattens her ears. This is not the vor. This is the man the vor answers to.

The woman beside him is tall and elegant. Her nostrils are flaring, and her jaw is set in a hard line, completely at odds with her delicate facial features.

"Two days," she says, in an accent thicker than Ivan's, before she's even fully through the door. "My son is shot. My son is in a hospital bed. He undergoes an experimental surgery performed by someone other than Dr. Roger. And I find out, I find out from the help?"

"Mama—" Ivan starts.

"Don't." Anya Brusilov holds up one finger, and the scariest man I've ever met closes his mouth. "Two days, Ivan. Your father may not run the Bratva anymore. But he still runs his own fucking family. And I am still the mother of it."

"Anya," Vlad says, in quiet syllables, and she rounds on him too, but he doesn't flinch. Instead, his eyes light.

Then her eyes find me.

The room stills. Konstantin and Georgy have flattened themselves against the wall like furniture. Anya crosses the floor to me, and my cougar wants to back up, but I hold my ground. She circles me once. She inhales. Her eyebrows climb.

"This is her," Anya says. "The doctor?"

"My mate." Ivan throws the words like a knife.

A dare.