Nicholas’s POV
The mont she hit the floor, everything else stopped mattering.
Not Maxim. Not three hundred witnesses. Not the proceedings, the stripped rank, the eastern border, any of it.
Just her. On the floor. Not moving.
---
I killed Maxim in my head about seventeen tis in the four seconds it took to cross the hall.
The actual killing would wait. That was a decision I made sowhere between watching her go down and watching her try to get up, that horrible, determined attempt to push herself upright with an arm that wasn’t working. The actual killing would happen. That was settled. But right now—
Right now she was trying to stand and her knee was hitting the floor and her eyes were going sowhere I didn’t like.
I caught her before she went the rest of the way down.
Both arms. Her whole weight, which wasn’t much—had never been much, and I’d spent three weeks trying not to be angry about how little she weighed, how little she’d been given to work with.
Her head fell against my shoulder.
"Irina."
Nothing.
"Hey." I pulled back far enough to see her face. Pale. Too pale. The bruise on her cheek looked dark against all that white. "Look at ."
Her eyes were closed.
My shoulder was bleeding. I could feel it—the pull of it, the warm wet spread under what was left of my shirt. Didn’t matter. Didn’t co close to mattering.
"Nadia." My voice ca out wrong. Too loud. Too—not right. "*Now.* I need Nadia now—"
"Already sent for her." Andrei, sowhere behind . "She’s on her way."
"Not fast enough." I stood up. Her in my arms. Light. She was so goddamn light. "Move."
The crowd parted.
They always parted. That was one thing that never changed, no matter the room, no matter the situation—people moved when I moved, cleared the path, got out of the way. I’d never been grateful for it until this exact mont, moving through three hundred people with her limp in my arms and needing every single one of them to be sowhere I wasn’t.
They parted.
I ran.
---
The dical wing was on the second floor, north corridor.
I knew every inch of this building. Had mapped it in my head twenty years ago and updated the map every ti sothing changed. I could have gotten there blind.
I got there in two minutes.
Slamd through the door.
"I need a bed," I said. "Now. And Nadia. Where is—"
"Here." Nadia was already there. She’d beaten sohow. She looked at Irina in my arms and her face did that thing—the specific shift that experienced doctors did, where they stopped being a person and beca a function. Her hands ca up imdiately. "Bring her through. This room."
I put her down on the examination table.
Gentle. That was the word I kept thinking. *Gentle.* I didn’t do gentle. I’d spent my entire adult life being the opposite of gentle, and I was standing there telling myself *gentle* like it was an instruction I could follow if I concentrated hard enough.
I stepped back.
Hard to do. My feet didn’t want to.
"Sir." Nadia’s voice. Firm. Professional. The voice she used when she was telling sothing she knew I wasn’t going to like hearing. "I need you to wait outside."
"I’m staying."
"Sir—"
"I’m staying."
She looked at .
My shoulder was still bleeding. My shirt was wrecked. I was probably terrifying to look at—blood and bare skin and whatever expression was currently on my face, which I had no control over and could only guess at.
Nadia held my gaze for exactly two seconds.
"You can stay," she said. "But you stand there. You don’t touch anything. You don’t speak unless I ask you a direct question. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Good." She was already moving. "Get the tray. Sofia—*Sofia*—get the tray and tell Dr. Petrov I need him in here in five minutes."
---
I stood there.
That was it. That was all I did. Stood against the wall with my arms crossed and blood running down my shoulder and watched Nadia work and told myself, repeatedly, that I was not going to—
*What?*
What exactly was I not going to do?
I didn’t have a word for it. The thing in my chest that was currently doing sothing structural. The thing that had started the mont I watched her step into Maxim’s path and not stop, not brace, just—*move*—like her body had made a decision her brain hadn’t caught up to yet.
She’d stepped in front of him.
She’d stepped in front of a mid-shift alpha wolf to—what? Protect ? Had that been the calculation? Was that what had happened?
I’d been about to handle it. I’d been three seconds away from shifting—I’d been *ready*—and she’d moved and then I’d had to track two things at once, her on the floor and Maxim still coming, and so part of had registered her going down and that part had been louder than everything else.
That was why Maxim was still breathing.
That was the only reason.
I looked at her face.
Still pale. Still too still. But Nadia was talking to her now—low, professional, the run-through—and Irina’s eyes were open, just barely, and she was responding, and the thing in my chest did sothing complicated that I didn’t examine.
Sofia appeared in the doorway. Another staff mber behind her. Nadia spoke in low, quick bursts.
I stood against the wall and bled and waited.
---
Roman arrived about ten minutes in.
He ca through the door at a controlled pace—not running, which ant he’d gotten himself together before he got here, because Roman running anywhere ant sothing had ended the world—and he took one look at and stopped.
"She’s being seen," I said.
"Good." He crossed the room to . Looked at my shoulder. His face did that thing where he was calculating damage and deciding what to say about it. "You need that looked at."
"I need it not looked at."
"Nicolas—"
"What’s the status." I looked at the door. "Maxim. Tell ."
Roman’s jaw worked.
"We lost him in the service passage," he said. "He knew the layout—or soone told him. He was out a side exit before we could get anyone to the periter." A pause. "He’s not in the city. We’re fairly certain."
"Find him."
"We’re—"
"Roman." I turned. Looked at him. "Find him. Everything we have. Every resource. Every contact. I don’t care what it costs and I don’t care what it takes." I held his gaze. "I want him found."
Roman didn’t blink.
"Yes, sir."
"When you find him," I said, "don’t kill him. Bring him to ."
Sothing moved in Roman’s expression. He knew what that ant. He’d known long enough to know exactly what that ant, and he was too professional to let his reaction show, but I saw it anyway.
"Understood," he said.
"And the room," I said. "The hall. Three hundred people."
"Being managed," Roman said. "Andrei’s handling the imdiate debrief. The alphas are—" He paused. Chose his words. "Appropriately unsettled. Which works in our favor, given the circumstances. The formal record still stands. The stripping is official regardless of what happened afterward." He looked at . "Maxim running doesn’t change anything legally."
"It changes everything else," I said.
"Yes," Roman said quietly. "It does."
He looked at the door.
"How bad is she," he said.
I didn’t answer. Because I didn’t know. Because Nadia hadn’t co out yet. Because the answer to that question was sitting in the room behind that door and I hadn’t gotten to hear it yet.
Roman had the sense not to ask again.
---
The shoulder had stopped bleeding by the ti Nadia ca out.
Sealed. That was the convenient part—the part that made everything else worth it, sotis. The body just *fixed itself.* A half-hour for sothing that would have taken anyone else weeks.
I looked at Nadia’s face the mont she stepped through the door.
I was good at reading faces. That was part of the job—the most important part, maybe, the thing that had kept alive when everything else was going wrong. You learned to read what people were managing, what they were holding back, what they were about to say versus what they’d already decided not to.
Nadia’s face had sothing on it.
Not bad news. Not the face she’d make for bad news—I’d seen that face on doctors before, I knew the shape of it. This was sothing else. Sothing she was sorting through. So piece of information that she was deciding how to deliver.
I crossed to her in four steps.
"Tell ," I said.
"She’s going to be fine," Nadia said imdiately. Like she knew that was the first thing. "The shoulder is dislocated—we’ve reset it. Two cracked ribs on the left side. Bruising. Nothing that won’t heal with rest and ti."
My shoulder dropped half an inch.
"Good," I said. "What else."
Nadia looked at .
That look.
"The impact," she said carefully, "and the way she’s been presenting physically over the last few weeks—I ran so additional tests when I had her here."
"And."
"And I want you to understand that this doesn’t change the injury assessnt. She’s going to be fine. Physically, she’s going to recover fully."
"Nadia."
She took a breath.
"Sir," she said.
"She’s pregnant," Nadia said. "Just a few weeks. But I’m certain."
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