I did the math before the dinner, the cold, practical sum of what I was willing to put up with to stay alive. I’d braced for a lot. I’d spent three weeks getting myself ready to tolerate a man who was older, or unpleasant, or who’d look at my medical history like a liability and treat me to match. I was ready to be handled instead of seen. Useful and grateful and invisible, because that’s the trade a woman makes when she’s got nothing else to bring to the table.
What I was not prepared for was Akyl.
He is dangerous. That isn’t a metaphor. The Mostovoi family’s position in the world is built on things that don’t get discussed in polite company. I’m not naive about this. I went to that dinner with my eyes open to exactly what these men are, and I chose to walk in anyway.
But dangerous and monstrous are not synonyms, and the man who sat in that chair last night while I ate rice in his borrowed robe was neither cruel nor contemptuous. He asked questions. He listened to the answers with the full weight of his attention.He didn’t flinch at my medical history or look at me with the particular expression I have come to hate most, the sympathetic grimace of someone who has decided you are fragile and are now recalibrating how much use you might be.
He looked at my history the way an engineer looks at a structural problem. With the focused, quiet intensity of a man already designing the solution.
And, since I’m being honest with myself, he is ridiculously good-looking. Not handsome in the polished, symmetrical way rich men often are, all that money applied early and kept up. His face is hard and severe, built for sharpness rather than warmth, and it’d be intimidating if it weren’t for the way he goes when he’s not putting on the power. The stillness of him. The way his attention feels when it lands on something he actually wants to look at.
He settled it on me, last night, for a significant portion of the evening. And I am not entirely sure what to do with that.
Kasimir sets the porridge in front of me in a white bowl, small and plain and exactly right, and beside it a small dish of honey and a few slices of banana and a second cup of tea, this one ginger.
“Thank you,” I say, the words not feeling like enough for the thought that’s gone into what I need. I’ve never experienced it, and my throat thickens with emotion that Akyl or Kasimir, or both of them, have thought about what I need most and then given it to me without question…
Kasimir simply nods. “Akyl will be back soon.”
I eat slowly. It stays down. The tablet dissolves into my bloodstream and begins its quiet work, and I sit in this enormous, silent kitchen and I take stock of where I am.
I slept eight hours with a heat pad and woke to a note and a tablet and a bowl of porridge calibrated to my digestion. Now I’m sitting in the quiet kitchen sipping ginger tea and know that tomorrow might be the day I finally get real help.
Akyl
The consultation happens on Monday as promised. Dr. Asante arranged it with a surgeon named Elliot Marsh, who, according to Asante, is considered the foremost authority on excision surgery for complex endometriosis in the US.
I drive Katriona myself. She sits in the passenger seat of my car, her hands folded in her lap, her posture that careful, controlled stillness I've come to recognize as her default setting. She's wearing a dark jumper and trousers that are slightly too large for her. Her hair is pulled into a low knot at the base of her neck.
"You didn't have to come," she says, looking out the window.
I don’t respond. I don’t know how to tell her that in just thirty-six hours I’ve come to crave to be near her. I spent yesterday showing her around the house and spending time with her. Getting to know her on a deeper level and answering her questions. When the pain grew to be too much, I helped her upstairs and got her settled with a heat pad and a movie. When she fell asleep against my shoulder, lightly snoring, that’s when I felt something inside me change.
All the rage at the lack of help she has received is still there, but it got pushed aside by the urge to protect her. To provide for her. Not just the medical stuff, but everything.
Her quiet strength, the way she hasn’t given up despite years of pain… that’s the woman I want beside me. Raising my family.
Marsh is thorough. The consultation takes two hours. I wait outside in a corridor that smells of antiseptic and over perfumed Pot Pourri.
I think about the doctor who abused his position with her, and likely many other desperate women. Richard Hale.
I have already instructed my people to investigate Hale. Information already dribbling through, building a picture of a life I can’t wait to tear apart.
Katriona emerges from the consultation room. Her eyes are bright, too bright, and her jaw is set in the way that tells me she is holding something enormous inside her chest and refusing to let it out.
"He can do it," she says. "The surgery. He said the damage is significant but he's confident he can excise the worst of it. He wants to operate as soon as possible."
"Good."
"The cost is eighty-two thousand. More than I was originally quoted, because the condition has progressed."
"The cost is immaterial. Whatever you need."
She stops walking and I turn to face her beneath the fluorescent lighting that makes everything look clinical and exposed. I see the exact moment when the gratitude and the anger and the hope collide inside her.
“I need you to know I’m grateful,” she says, pausing to press and rubs her lips together like she is blending lipstick. A tell I’ve learned when she needs more time to figure out her next words. “But I’m angry too. Not at you,” she adds quickly. “At the fact that I’ve had to live with this for so long, until the point where I convinced myself I must be crazy but no one believed meabout the pain…and I’m so angry.” The last words come out as a whisper.
The silence in the corridor is total. I want to pull her into me and let her scream into my shoulder. I want to take all her rage and add it to mine. Instead, I reach for her hand and weave her fingers between mine.