Doctored Vows - Chapter 33

A cold breeze blows through my scrubs, but for the first time since moving to Russia, I relish its coolness. My brain feels like it is on fire, as does every muscle I own.

My symptoms mimic ones of severe dehydration. My mouth is dry, my breathing is erratic, and I have a fever.

Drowsiness is also a sign of dehydration, but the wooziness in my head feels like more than a bit of confusion.

I feel similar to how I did the morning I woke up married.

The reminder has me opening my eyes too quickly for someone with no lubricant in their sockets. They burn from the width of their opening, not to mention my shock at the unknown location I am waking in.

I’m cold because I am outside, and the only thing protecting me from the elements is my surgical scrubs.

When I try to gather my bases, the lady seated a few spots up from me holds her purse close to her body while focusing on a bus approaching the horizon. She shakes like a leaf. She isn’t cold. My presence is scaring her.

I understand why when I catch sight of my reflection in the reflective material of the bus shelter. I look like a wreck. My hair is knotted, my face is covered with dirty stains, and my scrubs have seen better days.

“I… ah…” I clutch my head. It hurts to talk, but I push through the pain. “I need help.” When she tugs her purse in tighter, still scared, I plead, “Please. I don’t know where I am or how I got here…” I scan the unknown location. Even in the darkness of the night, its unkempt state can’t be concealed. Several homeless line the streets, along with a heap of trash and cardboard beds. “Am I still in Myasnikov?”

Her nod is brief, but it offers me immense relief.

“My husband…” I take a break to lube my throat with spit, hopeful some wetness will ease my words out through the burn scalding my veins. “He will be… looking for me. Do you have a phone I could borrow”—another painful breath separates my words—“to call him?”

“No. I don’t have anything. No phone. No money. No jewelry. I have nothing.”

As she returns her eyes to the bus, willing it to hurry up, the moon breaks through a stormy cloud. I squint when its bright rays add to the pounding of my skull.

“What time is it?”

When I shield my eyes from the bus headlights, the stranger replies, “A l-little after two.”

“In the morning?”

Some of the fear she is experiencing trickles through my veins when she nods.

“I… ah… I…”

After drinking in the rock on my ring finger, then the emblem of Myasnikov Private Hospital on my scrubs, she scoots closer. My fear that I’m about to be jumped is unfounded when she whispers, “I-I can pay for your bus fare, but that’s all I can offer you. I don’t have any money. I just have a bus card.”

After again scanning the street and noticing the stranger’s eyes aren’t the only pair gawking at me, I say, “Okay. Thank you.”

It takes a mammoth effort to stand, so there’s no way I will make it onto the bus without the stranger’s help. Mercifully, she comprehends my struggles without me needing to speak. After banding her arms around my back, she hoists me to her side before she guides my ginger walk to the stationary bus.

“Mara, what did I tell you last time? No more druggies.”

The lady placing me onto a cracked vinyl seat pffts the driver before scanning a transport card on the electronic scanner by the door twice.

“She’s a paying customer,” she replies to him in Russian. “That’s all you need to worry about.”

She’s assuring him I am fine, but she still sits a couple of spots back from me.

Her trust is so low, when the driver peers at her in the mirror he uses to keep passengers in line several stops later, she pretends she can’t feel the curiosity bouncing off him.

She doesn’t move, speak, or acknowledge anyone until the Myasnikov Private Hospital stop has her reaching for the yank cord to tell the driver I want to get off at the next stop.

My head is still woozy, and my legs are unstable, but I make it to the front of the bus unaided.

“Thank you,” I whisper to the guardian angel still watching over me.

Mara dips her chin before she shifts her focus to the window like I never said anything.

I barely stumble down the street two steps before I cross someone I know.

Eva sighs like I’m far more presentable than I feel before she cranks her neck to someone behind her. “Get Maksim.”

In less than a nanosecond, an SUV pulls into the alleyway next to us, and Maksim races out. Sheer panic is scoured between his brows, and he looks exhausted.

I more collapse into his arms than throw myself into them, and then I bury my head into his pecs to drown out the frantic situation occurring around me.

I’m poked and prodded, all while still in Maksim’s arms, before I’m asked a range of questions.

None I know how to answer.

“I don’t remember anything. I’m not even sure what day it is.”

I realize we bypassed the ER at Myasnikov Private when I’m placed onto a cool surface and Maksim inches back so we can lock eyes. We’re in the security office of my apartment building, but it is far more fitted out than when I reported a suspected attempted burglary six months ago. The back laundry window had been shattered and opened, but nothing was missing, which led me to believe my return home from a late shift had scared the perps off.

“It’s Friday morning,” Maksim announces. “You collected donuts and coffees from Ano yesterday afternoon and ate them with Alla.” He twists a monitor around to face me. It shows me sitting in the makeshift break room Alla and I set up whenever we’re rostered on the same shift. “Do you remember that?”

He cusses under his breath when I shake my head. “I’m sorr⁠—”

His growl cuts me off—and makes me hot, but I’ll keep that to myself. “Don’t apologize for something those fuckers did to you.”

The pain in his words cuts me deep, but it has nothing on the torment in his eyes when he asks, “Did they hurt you? Are you hurting anywhere we haven’t checked?” The pure terror in his eyes asks the question he can’t speak. He wants to know if I was raped like my mother was when she was taken.

“No, Maksim. I’m not sore. I feel perfectly fine.” My quivering voice undoes the confidence I am trying to portray. “I feel like I just went to sleep and woke up.”

When my words offer Maksim little comfort, Eva reminds me we’re not the only two people in the room. “I can check.”

“No,” I shout a little too loud. “I’d know if I was hurt like that.” Tears gloss my cheeks when I murmur, “My mother’s injuries couldn’t be hidden. She was torn to shreds…”

When a sob replaces my words, Maksim wipes away my tears before shaking his head at Eva’s offer, loosening the valve stopping my lungs from replenishing. “My memories will come back. They’re just buried beneath a heap of fog.”

I must miss a private conversation between Maksim and Eva as she objects to his silent denial as if they shared many words.

I’d be jealous of their ability to communicate without words if there weren’t a heap of similarities I had missed earlier. They could be mistaken as siblings.

“It could take a heap of weight off your shoulders, Maksim, and help us find Ano.”

“Ano is missing?”

Again, Maksim doesn’t look set to lie.

He merely continues to skirt the truth like he has our entire marriage.

“Do it.” Maksim tries to cut me off, but I peer past his shoulder, stare Eva in the eyes, and repeat, “Do it. Do whatever you need to do to get answers.”

“Answers that will leave me no choice but to retaliate,” Maksim sneers. “Do you understand that, Doc? They took my fucking wife from right under my fucking nose. I can’t let that slide.”

“You can, and you will.”

My head snaps to the side so fast I almost make myself sick. I don’t know which way is up when Maksim’s mother starts barking orders seconds after she enters the room.

She takes command, making me realize Maksim isn’t the king of his realm just yet. His mother is.

My throat dries even more when Mrs. Ivanov shifts her focus to me. She stares at me like she is assessing my soul from the inside out before she twists to face Eva. “Digestive benzodiazepine or injectable?”

“There are no puncture wounds in her arms or between her toes,” Eva answers, alerting me to the fact she was the one poking and prodding me during our short commute to my building. “But I don’t believe she ingested it either.”

Her next question exposes that her cover may not be fraudulent. “Rumors have been circling for some time that a biochemist has created a new drug that works as effectively as GHB, but it is dispensed as a vapor instead of a liquid. It makes it almost impossible to trace back to the source since there is nothing to compare it to. Vapors⁠—”

“Burn off,” I interrupt, too intrigued not to include myself in their conversation. “How long was I missing?”

“Nine hours,” Maksim answers. His low tone shreds my heart.

I place my hand over his balled and bruised one resting next to my thigh and squeeze it before shifting my focus back to Eva. “There could still be residue in my nasal cavity or respiratory tract.”

When Maksim’s mother silently questions Eva, she takes a moment to ponder before jerking up her chin. “It will still be hard to trace since the manufacturing is being kept under wraps, but any sample is better than none.”

“Do you have what is needed to test it?”

Eva almost shakes her head, but a second after her lips part, she waggles her brows instead. “I can have everything I need here in under a minute.”

Mrs. Ivanov gives her silent permission to do what needs to be done before she devotes all her attention to me. Well, more my wedding rings than me as a whole.

“Mrs. Ivanov⁠—”

“Mrs. Ivanov?” she interrupts, scoffing. “I believe the only person in this room with that title is you, dear.”

“Ma,” Maksim snaps out like his mother’s tone is rude. It wasn’t. She sounds more pleasantly surprised than frustrated. “She just got back from God fucking knows where. Now is not the time.”

“Yes. I suppose you are right.” It is a highly inappropriate time for me to smile, but it can’t be helped when she adds, “I’m sure future grandbaby talks can wait. However, this can’t.” Her tone takes on a serious note as she twists to face Maksim. “She is here. In front of you. Safe and protected. So stop acting like she’s not.”

“She is my wife,” Maksim snarls, banging his chest. “It is my job to protect her, and I fucking failed.”

She acts as if his last four words didn’t shred her heart to pieces like they did mine. “You have an entire team at your disposal⁠—”

“It. Is. My. Job,” he repeats, shouting.

There is so much shame in his voice. So much disappointment. He truly believes he has failed me. I know that isn’t the case, but I learn where Maksim gets his spitfire stubbornness from before I can say anything.

His mother pulls him to the corner of the room without a single bead of sweat breaking onto her neck before she gets up in his face.

“Your job is to protect her. I agree. That is precisely what you’ve been doing the past several weeks and the exact reason they let her go uninjured.”

Without taking her eyes off her son, she points to me. “If she were anyone else but your wife, she would be dead. You saved her, Maksim. You protected her as promised.”

“If I don’t defend her honor, if I don’t respond to what they did, they won’t stop. I’ll be seen as a mockery, like a coward who can’t defend his own wife.

Is that what you want, Ma? Do you want the legacy we’ve been building since he left us to crumble back to the pittance he wrongly believed we deserved?”

She doesn’t shake her head, but you can see the wish to do precisely that in her eyes. “You promised her there would be no more violence.”

I assume she means during our elevator reunion, but I am proven wrong when she says, “That’s why she agreed to marry you.”

She steps closer, her expression nurturing, her eyes wet. “She picked you, warts and all. Now you need to do the same. What is more important to you, Maksim? Revenge or her?”

With memories of my confrontation with my father rolling through my head like a movie, I miss what Maksim replies, so I am eternally grateful when his mother asks him to repeat it.

“Her,” he replies louder, the honesty in his tone unmissable. “It will always be her.”

Irina’s smile could warm the coldest heart. “Then do what needs to be done.” After flattening her hand where his heart thumps, she aligns their eyes.

“And trust your intuition that brought you back here time and time again.”

They share a handful more unvoiced words before Maksim shifts on his feet to face me.

I pretend I wasn’t eavesdropping, but my ruse only lasts as long as it takes for the heat of Maksim’s gaze to remove the chill of spending hours in the cold in the equivalent of tissue paper.

I return his stare, my heart squeezing when his eyes relay every emotion pumping through him.

There’s so much hurt in his narrowed gaze, so much pain and shame, but since there is also a love I never thought I’d witness again in my life, I say the last thing I ever thought I would say, “Go.”

My words are choked by the sob I refuse to surrender when I add, “But if you don’t come back⁠—”

“I’ll come back.” He’s at my side in an instant. His hand is in my hair, his lips brushing my mouth. “Nothing could keep me away from you. Not even the Grim Reaper himself is stupid enough to come between us. I will be back.”

“Promise me?”

My words echo the ones I said to my father when I discovered him sneaking out of the front door of my grandparents’ apartment, but since they’re not coming from a man who just lost the love of his life, I trust them. “I promise.”

I hold back my tears for the hour it takes Maksim’s team to put plans into play while he showers and dresses me with a tenderness his agitation shouldn’t allow.

And I keep them at bay for the additional two hours it takes for Eva to administer medication we’re hopeful will reverse the benzodiazepine I was forced to take.

But I lose the ability the instant the elevator doors of my grandparents’ new abode open, and my best friend walks through them.

I break, and Zoya holds me like she did when I lost my entire family within weeks of each other.