The Bratva Captive

Eleven forty-five on a Tuesday night, and the emergency room smells of cheap vodka, antiseptic and somebody's burnt dinner from three rooms over. Brighton Beach does not send its trouble anywhere else. It sends it here, on a gurney, bleeding. Male, mid-thirties. Two gunshot wounds, one through the left shoulder, one low on the right abdomen. Entrance wounds clean. Exit wounds messy. Pupils blown wide and a pressure dropping the way a stone drops through ice water. Katya Vasiliev snaps her gloves on and sees the tattoo before she sees the face. A blue-and-black Orthodox cross, the bottom bar angled left. Russian. Bratva. The resident freezes. Margo reads the monitor out in the flat professional register of a nurse who has worked this room longer than Katya has been alive. Katya presses gauze into the wound, calls for a laparotomy tray, four units of O-neg and vascular backup, and tells the boy in the doorway that the thing on her table is a patient and that is the end of the sentence. It is not the end of the sentence. The phone rings later from a number she does not recognise. *Your father is still alive.* *Who is this?* *My name is Nikolai Volkov. We need to talk about your father's debt.* She has spent her entire adult life saving people. She has never once had to consider that her father might be one of the people others need saving from. What comes after is a prescription bottle that should not exist, a basement under the Red Moon, a turncoat, a brother making demands she cannot meet, a bank account in her name that she did not open, and a highway run in the dark. There is a sponge bath. There is a kitchen table. There is a closeness neither of them will call unbearable out loud, which is precisely what makes it unbearable. A first-person dark bratva romance narrated by a trauma surgeon who keeps making the same choice, which is to stay in the room. Her father's debt does not end when it is paid. Some of it only changes hands. And even after the last goodbye, nobody in this book is promising anybody forgiveness.