Page 36

His smile widens. Oh, Lord. He's going to be a terrible patient.

A cheer goes up outside recovery while I am still pulling my gloves straight, which means Matvey reaches the family before I do. I stand in the infirmary doorway with my scrubs wrinkled and my gloves still on, swaying on my feet. Steven strips off his gown beside me and Dr. Roger hovers over the monitors, chattering in rapid Russian to an intern.

But the celebration — the real celebration — belongs to the Brusilovs. Anya is weeping into Alex's hair, murmuring Russian endearments faster than I can follow. Vlad has both hands on his son's shoulders and his forehead pressed to Alex's, and his face is cracked raw, naked and private. Konstantin and Georgy are roaring — actually roaring, then more roars fill the infirmary, and are returned from others on the compound until the roaring answers itself from room to room.

Alex is still groggy. As the sedation wears off, he still manages to roar back from the bed; the sound is thin, but every Brusilov in the room answers him. The sound of his voice, no matter how weak, is picked up by all and leads to another even louder wave of cheers.

Ivan stands at the center of it all. The vor with his brothers' hands on his shoulders and his father's grip on the back of his neck, held in the center of his family. Ivan speaks in Russian and laughter moves through them. Then Anya speaks, and every face around Alex hardens on the same breath. Another language. Another world, one that is more than miles from everything I've ever known.

Nobody ignores me or is cruel to me, and why does that make the doorway feel wider? Dr. Roger claps my shoulder. Georgy shouts "Our sister!" in my direction and raises a vodka bottle somebody produced, and alcohol pours into squat glasses. Anya catches my eye and presses a hand over her heart until I nod.

Anya reaches for me when I step inside, pulling me into a hug so fierce I nearly lose my footing. She says something in Russian against my hair. I don't understand a word, but her tears are warm against my cheek, and when she kisses my forehead, I know she's thanking me. I hug her back. For a moment, I almost feel like I belong. Then someone calls to her in Russian, and she's swept back into the celebration.

Konstantin starts the next toast, once again in Russian, and they all raise their voices in unison. I stand in my borrowed scrubs while the high drains out of my legs and leaves me braced against the doorframe.

Steven touches my elbow. "I should go."

I nod. My lips pressed close around words I don't speak. I walk him to the helicopter because Ivan is with Alex and somebody should.

The compound is dark, the cold biting through my sweater. Steven looks smaller than I remember — or maybe Ivan has recalibrated my sense of what size a man is supposed to be. We walk in silence most of the way, and it's a comfortable silence, the old kind, the lab kind, and that's what makes it hurt.

Five men trail us from the infirmary, far enough back that their boots barely carry over the packed snow, close enough that Steven keeps glancing over his shoulder while his medical bag bangs against his leg.

He looks back again, lip curling. "So is this your life now? Watched everywhere you go like you're in a prison camp?"

Heat licks the backs of my ears, and the denial comes out too fast to sound like anything but what it is. "That is not what this is. Ivan worries. After Alex, he wants men nearby in case someone tries to use me to get to him."

"Nearby." He nods toward them without lowering his voice, because he wants them to hear. "Will they follow you on stage, too?"

My shoe catches on a ridge of ice, and I right myself against his arm. "What stage?"

"The stage, Cienna." His gaze cuts to me like I'm deliberately wasting his time. "This is an award-winning breakthrough. What we do in that room rewrites what every shifter physician on earth thinks is possible. Your name will be talked about for centuries. Taught, argued over in lecture halls long after we're dead. You will be famous in a way most researchers would kill their own mothers to touch."

The path narrows between the trees and my chest draws tighter with every step, because he is describing a prize laid out on a table and all I can think about is my father at our kitchen table in Minneapolis.

"I don't want that. I want my work to reach the people who need it. I want a shifter who loses the change in an accident or a war to have a road back. I want people like my dad—" My voice wavers, and I force it steady. "My dad will never shift again. I started this because maybe I can help somebody else's family if they get that same phone call."

Steven scoffs, an ugly sound. "And you don't want to stick it to them? Not even a little?"

My feet stop.

The bodyguards stop behind us, and Steven turns with snow gathering on his shoulders. "Stick it to who?"

"Every bastard who rejected you for years while you begged for table scraps to do their work. You don't want to walk onto that stage and make them choke on your name?"

Why does he think that lives in me? Where does the version of me he carries around come from, and how long has he been seeing her while he smiles at me across an operating table?

"Is that why you're doing this?" It comes out quieter than I intend. "Is that why you push so hard to take the results back, because you want them to choke?"

He stares at me like I have insulted a language he speaks fluently. "Do you understand what we have done? Every institution that rejected our grants will come begging. Every company that refused to fund us will want its name beside ours. We will get to choose where the research goes, Cienna. They will open doors before we knock."

Open check. He keeps talking about doors and stages while my stomach hollows out under my coat, and the retreat starts in my body before I give it permission, one step back on the ice, then another.

"I don't want your open check," I say, stepping back.

Steven catches my forearm, his fingers digging into the muscle beneath my sleeve.

"Listen to me, Cienna."