Doctored Vows - Chapter 37

Hours later, Lev’s tearful plea for forgiveness at the feet of his wife is still playing in my mind.

Agafa immediately denied his begs for redemption before she told him in no uncertain terms that Yulia’s death was no one’s fault bar the men who poisoned the food of people down on their luck, and then wrapped him up in a hug that was so warm it heated my chest.

It’s hard to concentrate on anything, so it takes me longer than I care to admit to realize I don’t recognize this part of Myasnikov whizzing past my window.

I’m seated in the back of one of Maksim’s many cars, being driven to an unknown location.

I told Maksim I didn’t want to go out, but he was adamant. Not even a promise to sign on as the Ivanovs’ chief medical practitioner could persuade him to stay in.

He said I need this closure as much as Yulia’s parents do, and although he’d never force me to do anything I don’t want to do, this is one thing he won’t let me back out of.

I peer at Maksim in confusion when Ano pulls to the curb at the front of a restaurant that has seen better days. Several tiles on the roof are cracked, the wood siding is moldy, and every surface is paint peeled.

“Maksim—”

“No questions, Doc. Not yet.”

He tells Ano to circle the block before he guides me up the rickety stairs.

The inside of the restaurant isn’t as worn as the outside. Patrons fill the tables, and the aromas wafting out of the kitchen are almost enticing enough to encourage the most grief-stricken people to eat.

“Thank you,” I murmur to the hostess when she hands me a menu after seating us near the back of the restaurant.

We’re right next to the kitchen, and although the food carried out by servers gives reason for the number of people eating at the rundown location, it isn’t as appealing as it should be since we’re also near the restrooms.

The only advantage of this table is that you can take in the entire restaurant. It is almost like we are at the king’s table, and everyone below us are the paupers.

I’ve barely scanned the top line of dishes on offer, faking that I plan to eat, when a friendly voice greets us, “Hello, I’m Felecia. I will be your server this evening. Can we start you with some drinks?”

I nod, eager for alcohol to numb the pain in my chest, but Maksim requests to be updated on the chef’s specials before I can order the strongest bourbon on offer.

“I’m not exactly sure what they are today.” If my jealousy weren’t suffocated by grief, I would take offense to the long stare she gives Maksim before she asks, “Would you like me to check with the chef?”

“Please. I heard the potato and leek soup is to die for here.”

Maksim’s reply barely leaves his mouth before Felecia snatches up our menus and skips into the kitchen.

Her chipper personality would usually rub off on me, but I’m not in the mood today. Yulia’s sendoff was beautiful. Maksim didn’t spare a single expense, but I can’t stop pondering ways to make her father realize her death isn’t his fault.

“Can we please go home? I don’t want to be here.” I sound like a spoiled brat. Rightfully so. I am whenever I am in Maksim’s presence.

“Soon,” Maksim promises, his tone lowering from the bark he uses on his staff to the commanding rumble of a husband trying to force his wife back to the land of the living.

After squeezing my hand in silent support, he watches Felecia float across the room. She drops off a bowl of soup at the table near the door before collecting the tab from another.

When I signal for her service, still desperate for a numbing agent, she stuffs a handful of bills into her waitress apron before returning to our table.

“What can I get you?” she asks, forgetting she’s meant to update Maksim on the chef’s specials.

Again, I am interrupted before I can place my drink order. It isn’t Maksim. A waiter at the front of the restaurant is shouting for help.

“Is anyone a doctor? We need a doctor.”

Instincts have me shooting up from my seat without a single thought crossing my mind, but before I can get two steps away from the table, Maksim snatches up my wrists.

He doesn’t pull me back into my seat, but his eyes silently plead for me to consider the consequences of my actions before jumping into the deep end without a life jacket.

“Please,” the waitress shouts, shifting my focus back to her customer. “He’s choking.”

Bile burns my throat when she commences conducting the Heimlich maneuver on a man with a headful of gray hairs and an arrogant expression even while being offered assistance.

“Get off me!” His voice is so familiar it features in my nightmares every night.

None of my dreams in the past week have featured anything but my kidnapping and when Maksim told me I was too late to save Yulia.

They all centered around the death of innocent people, not the man who is meant to investigate and arrest the bad guys, so why was Detective Ivan’s voice included in the flashbacks of me lying semi-unconscious on a cold concrete floor?

My pupils widen when Ivan tries to pull away from the server trying to help him. His bruises have healed somewhat over the past five days, but they still reflect the damage a fist would cause to someone’s face when punched.

“I’m trying to help you,” the server curled around Ivan’s back announces when he rears up for a fight.

The waitress is doing everything right, but Ivan pushes her away from him and commences shoving his fingers down his throat like he knows the foamy white substance bubbling in the corner of his mouth won’t asphyxiate him.

His crimes will.

It takes several long seconds for the dots to commence connecting, but when they do, I’m hit with a savage amount of anger, not solely from how long it takes me to unearth the truth, but from the brutality of it.

“That’s why he looked at you like you were a ghost,” I murmur more to myself than Maksim. I lower my eyes to my husband, gasping when I realize he was almost taken from me by the very people who are meant to protect him. “He shot you.”

Maksim nods before he adds words to his nonverbal reply. “And he drugged you because, according to him, he doesn’t need to follow mafia law since he is the law.”

The pain in his eyes cuts me raw when he murmurs, “He was going to kill you. He was going to kill my wife.” I can’t tell if he’s angry or relieved when he confesses, “But mafia law saved you.” I realize it is both when he sneers, “His name saved you.”

“No,” I deny, grateful for the latest splurge of memories. “You saved me. The man who rolled me onto my side knew I was your wife. That’s why he let me go.”

Before he can confirm or refute the sheer honesty in my reply, my eyes shoot to the front of the restaurant, where the waitress is squealing.

Ivan is on his knees, and a puddle of vomit next to his shiny shoes announces he could be saved, but even with Maksim freeing me from his hold, I can’t force my legs to move.

He hurt my husband.

He hurt the man I love.

He almost took him from me.

If that isn’t bad enough, he drugged me so I wouldn’t remember that Dr. Sidorov had discharged Yulia until it was too late. Her organs were halfway across the country by the time I woke, and her body was cold when Maksim found her.

That is unforgivable, and I refuse to pretend it isn’t.

“Ma’am?” Felecia says, shifting my focus from Ivan’s rapidly whitening face when he spots my gawk. “Was there something you wanted to order?”

I’m so stunned by her nonchalant reply to a customer she recently served being on his knees, fighting for his life, I sound in a trance when I reply, “No.” My tone improves somewhat when I return my eyes to Maksim and say, “I think we should eat in tonight.”

He takes a minute to assess my soul from the inside out before he asks, “Are you sure that’s what you want, Doc? I’ll never force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

I scan the other restaurant-goers, who appear as uneager to help Ivan as I am, before nodding. I’m not the only one sentencing him for his crimes.

Most of the patrons in the restaurant were victims of his. I recognize almost every one of them since I never forget a patient or their family members’ faces.

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“All right.” Maksim excuses the waitress from our table with a tip far too generous for general service before he guides me out of the restaurant via the kitchen instead of the main entry Ivan’s rapidly dwindling frame is blocking.

My heart whacks my rib cage when our veer through the kitchen has me stumbling onto a profile that’s had my grief in a constant state of despair the past six hours.

I’ve struggled to move past my sadness since Yulia’s funeral, so I have no idea how Mr. Petrovitch arrived for his shift today.

Guilt crashes down on me when I remember the tiny little cherub nestled on his wife’s chest when he took the blame for their daughter’s death. Just like me after my mother was murdered, he has to work.

You can’t choose not to when you’ve already spent the money that has yet to come in.

Lev never shifts his head my way, but I know he feels my watch because the heaviness weighing down his shoulders shifts as much as mine does when the frantic shouts of the waitress for help silence at the same time Ivan’s chest stills.

One of the men responsible for the murder of his daughter is dead, and he is as relieved as I am.

After staring up at the ceiling long enough for my heart to recommence beating, he pulls a bowl of potato and leek soup off the serving counter.

“Don’t serve that,” he instructs a sous chef before he moves a soup pot off the cooktop and pours it down the sink. “I think some of its ingredients curdled. I’ll make a new batch.”

As he scrubs the pot to ensure not a single residue of the poison he used to avenge his daughter’s murder remains in the pot, Maksim places a suitcase I didn’t realize he was holding until now onto the stainless steel counter between Mr. Petrovitch and us before he ushers me outside.

I rear up to protect Maksim as ruefully as he will forever protect me when our exit is eyeballed by the second half of the duo investigating the wrong people.

Lara is standing next to an unmarked police cruiser, scanning notes in the notepad she is rarely without.

When she notices she has caught my watch, she stores her notepad away before straying her eyes to Maksim. The interrogation I am anticipating doesn’t happen.

She accepts Maksim’s chin dip as if he spoke a thousand words before she calls in a possible officer in need of assistance on her radio.

Her words aren’t hurried, and neither are her steps when she approaches the restaurant where one of her colleagues lies slayed.

“She knew you weren’t lying about being drugged with a benzodiazepine,” Maksim murmurs as he signals for Ano to pull up at the curb in front of us, “because your symptoms mimicked hers to a T.”

As he assists me into the back seat of his ride, he says, “She got too close, and Ivan wouldn’t let anyone stand between him and his share of the proceeds.”

We make it halfway home before my bewilderment lifts enough for me to speak. I don’t take our conversation in the direction you’d anticipate for someone who took the Hippocratic oath. “How much of a tip did you leave the chef?”

Maksim smiles like he’s as obsessed with my nosiness as he is with my body before he replies, “Enough that he’ll never have to work another day in his life if he doesn’t want to.”

When I rest my head on his shoulder, needing his closeness, he tugs me over until I sit side-straddled on his lap. “It won’t ease their pain, but it will give them time to grieve.”

When he lifts my head and our eyes lock, I fall in love all over again. He isn’t solely offering the Petrovitches a lifetime to grieve.

He is giving me the same crutch, and although there will be times when I will believe I’ll need more than a lifetime to get over my losses, the burden will never feel as heavy with Maksim carrying a majority of the load.

When I say that to Maksim, he twists his lips. “You’d have to hand over some of the load first, Doc. I don’t think you’re ready for that just yet.”

“I am. I have no issues accepting help.” He almost calls me a liar, but I continue talking before he can. “I’m even considering taking you up on your offer. There are just a few matters I need to take care of first.”

He waves his hand through the air, giving me the floor. I’m reasonably sure he did the same when trying to convince me to marry him, but the memory is still a little cloudy.

“I have to finish my studies. I didn’t come this far to give up now.”

“Not an issue,” he replies without pause for thought.

I doubt his response to my subsequent demand will be as carefree.

“I want to finish them at Myasnikov Private.” His growl sets me on edge and dampens my panties, but we will keep that between us. “The patients there deserve better.” Since he can’t deny my claim, he remains tight-lipped.

“It is also a ten-minute walk from our apartment, and since your security team hacked into the surveillance system the day we met, it will almost be the same as having me at your side twenty-four-seven. You can spy on me as often as your heart desires.”

He maintains his quiet front, announcing what I’ve always known.

He’s been watching me from day one.

Aware my demands are not yet over, Maksim says, “And?”

“And?” I pause to build the suspense, boiling the tension that will never evaporate between us. “You need to leave my alarm clocks alone. I set them for a reason.”

He laughs, but instead of remaining quiet like he did when he couldn’t deny his security team hacked Myasnikov Private’s servers, he says, “I learned from the best.”

It takes several long brain-frying seconds for me to unravel his riddle, and when I do, my jaw drops.

My grandmother greeted him like she knew him because she did.

They’d met previously.

When I stare at Maksim, demanding an answer, he smirks before revealing, “She snuck to your bedside to turn off your alarm clock the night we met. I didn’t think she could see me in the shadows, but she told me she’d kill me if I hurt you. I believed her enough to play nice.”

His chuckles rumble through my chest when I murmur, “You’re a shit liar, Mr. Ivanov.”

He hits me with a frisky wink before murmuring over my lips I’m praying are about to become kiss swollen, “I learned that from the best too.”