Doctored Vows - Chapter 36

The cuff of Dr. Lipovsky’s blouse tickles my wrist when she slips her hand into mine a foot from Yulia’s coffin. She doesn’t say anything. She offers me silent support until the baton can again be handed to my husband.

Maksim was my rock throughout the service, never leaving my side until Ano whispered something into his ear a second before the assembly of people paying their respects to Yulia slowly filtered toward her coffin.

He initially told Ano to wait—but then he saw the urgency on his face.

Whatever he had to share couldn’t wait.

I told Maksim to go before waiting at the end of the line.

There are so many people in attendance it has taken almost forty minutes for me to reach Yulia’s coffin. I place down the dusty-pink rose the funeral directors handed every attendee upon entrance a second before Maksim returns to my side.

I smile when he places his rose next to mine before sneaking a bag of donut holes into her coffin.

I told him how much she loved them after her first discharge. That is the only time they were mentioned, yet he still remembered.

I couldn’t possibly love this man more if I tried.

“Is everything okay?” I ask Maksim upon noticing the zigzag groove between his brows.

When he jerks up his chin, I almost call out his lie, but the approach of two parents who have every right to hate me shelves my reply.

If I had just stayed by Yulia’s side or transferred her care to another hospital, they wouldn’t be burying their little girl today.

Maksim’s fingers flex on my hip, soundlessly acknowledging he understands my guilt before his lips brush my temple. “Nothing that happened was your fault.”

He peers at me for several heart-healing seconds, mending my heart as he has the past five days before he strays his eyes to Mr. and Mrs. Petrovitch. “They know that. You know that. You just need a little more time for your heart to forgive your head.”

I should hate how easily he can read me, but I don’t.

I feel guilty about what happened because if Maksim’s team hadn’t altered everything back, my family name would be stained with more controversy than a man protecting his wife.

My concerns I had before I was drugged were spot on. Dr. Abdulov wasn’t working alone. Multiple doctors and medical staff at Myasnikov Private were part of an illegal entity that netted over seven million dollars in organ sales in the prior twelve months alone.

Over three million of those dollars were made from the sale of Yulia’s organs.

A high-up dignity in the Russian political scene was desperate to save his son’s life, and when he warned Dr. Sidorov that there would be hell to pay if he canceled his order, Dr. Sidorov stupidly believed his wrath would be far worse than Maksim’s promise of retribution if any organs were ever sold out of Myasnikov Private again.

He was wrong.

An exact number will never be disclosed to me, but while searching for information about Yulia’s service, I noticed online funeral notices rose by at least four hundred percent the past week.

Knowing patients were left to succumb to illnesses that were curable before their organs were harvested without consent was already shocking, but the angst deepened when Maksim announced how they tried to cover up the blunder of his mother’s near-death.

Dr. Abdulov and Dr. Azores didn’t solely prepare to throw me under Maksim’s bus if Irina’s true lineage was ever unearthed. They sprinkled my name throughout every horrid crime they instigated—crimes I would have paid for by now if Maksim hadn’t married me.

As believed, and even while not operating under his father’s surname, Maksim and his family are protected by mafia law.

They’re untouchable, so if it were ever discovered that a recently formed sanction had “killed” the once matriarch of the Fernandez family under the guise of natural causes, heads would have rolled.

Dr. Abdulov and Dr. Sidorov knew theirs would be the first on the chopping block, so they doctored paperwork to shift the focus elsewhere if the truth was ever discovered.

For the past six months, I was their scapegoat.

That is why Irina’s surgery was placed under my name and why my credentials were tossed at Maksim left, right, and center when he sought the truth behind his mother’s admission.

They didn’t solely tell him it was me and hope for the best. Everything was altered—including Irina’s online paperwork when I stupidly forgot to log out of the HIS system during my last shift at the ER.

They were so thorough, if Maksim’s IT guy wasn’t the best in the business, I doubt anyone would have believed that I hadn’t tried to steal and sell Irina’s organs.

Well, everyone but Maksim.

He trusted his gut, and although occasionally the grief he was almost forced to endure had him second-guessing his intuition, he has assured me time and time again that I was never the first name on his hit list.

He will never admit to my next admission, though.

I know he initially married me so I’d be protected under the same laws that shelter his family, but I will ensure he stays married to me for completely different reasons.

The people who ran the operation out of Myasnikov Private were pissed they had been placed under Maksim’s spotlight. He was too powerful for them to push aside like they had other sanctions.

When his interrogation into their trade arrived with a ton of attention they didn’t want, they sought revenge on the person they believed responsible for his interest in Myasnikov.

That person was me.

How do I know this if I’ve never met the people helming the sale of organs on the black market? The scar on the jaw of the man who woke me in the middle of the night, drenched with sweat, was extremely telling.

My memories are still hazy from the day I was drugged, but the occasional memory breaks through the fog—usually when I’m sleeping.

The man who said I had sanction before his fist cracked into another man’s face had the same scar along his jaw as the man I saw gawking at Maksim and me in the poolside cabana Zoya hired for Aleena’s hen party.

I’m also reasonably sure he’s the same man who placed me on the bench at the bus shelter, but those memories are hazier since they occurred directly before my memories were stolen by a secondary benzodiazepine.

Maksim’s response last night when I woke up gasping for air and with a ton of unlocked memories exposes that he wouldn’t have offered the scarred man a second leniency even if my memories had arrived earlier.

Leaving me defenseless is as bad as hurting me in Maksim’s eyes, and the rules that stop rival families from wiping each other out agree with Maksim, leaving him free to prosecute without fear of punishment.

Although Maksim hasn’t openly admitted that he killed the people responsible for my kidnapping, I don’t think he’d lie to me if he were asked outright.

He has no issues being honest, particularly when it comes to his protectiveness of me. It is merely his belief on whether I am strong enough to hear the truth that guides his replies, hence me only learning about the organ sales being placed in my name days ago.

I’m drawn from my thoughts when Yulia’s father stops in front of me. “Dr. Ivanov, this is my wife, Agafa.” His voice is low and on the verge of breaking. “Agafa, this is the doctor I was telling you about. The one who helped our baby girl when no one else would.” He chokes on his last few words.

I squeeze his hand, soundlessly promising him the pain will eventually lessen. It will never go away, but it will get better. I shift my focus to Mrs. Petrovitch. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Yulia was…” I struggle to find the right words, so I settle with one. “Perfect.”

“She truly was,” her mother agrees, burning my eyes with new tears. “Thank you for helping her.” My tears almost tumble when she drifts her eyes to Maksim and praises him for not leaving her child alone in the cold. “Knowing she wasn’t alone makes the hurt not as devastating.”

Maksim looks prepared to say he doesn’t deserve her praise, but a baby’s coo stops him.

My lips quiver when I drink in the tiny features of a newborn baby in a stroller at the end of the pew. She is the spitting image of her sister, just several years younger.

“I’m sorry. She is due to be nursed.” When Agafa returns her eyes to me, it dawns on me why my parents made the promise they did when Stefania died.

They were returning the silent pledges I shrouded them with when I gave them a reason to hold on. They wanted to perish with Stefania, but they lived for me. “Please excuse me.”

When Mr. Petrovitch attempts to follow his wife, instincts have me snatching up his wrist.

He looks as broken as my father did the night following my mother’s death, and as hurt as Maksim was when he wondered if I had been injured the same way my mother had been, and it unlocks the words I couldn’t find only seconds ago.

“Nothing that happened was your fault. Yulia’s death isn’t on you.”

He shakes his head, sending tears tumbling down his cheeks. “I gave her the food. I fed her their poison.”

“Because you placed her first.” His sunken eyes and the looseness of his skin announce he went hungry so his daughter wouldn’t. That makes him a man—an honorable one. “Don’t ever feel guilty for doing that.”

“She was my daughter. My baby girl,” he murmurs, his heart breaking before my eyes. “It was my job to protect her, and I failed.”

He tosses over the holy water at the edge of Yulia’s coffin, startling the people who have yet to file out of the church before he falls to his wife’s feet to apologize for a wrongdoing that doesn’t belong on his shoulders.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. It’s my fault. Our little girl is dead because of me.”