THE VOW HE BROKE TO KEEP

Chapter 6: Ordinary Hours

The hospital gave her exactly what she asked for that week: more hours, longer shifts, less time to think. She picked up two extra doubles without being asked twice. Helen signed off on them with the particular relief of a manager grateful someone wanted the shifts nobody else did.

Scarlet told herself this was about the money. It was not about the money.

She liked the twelve-hour stretches better than the eight-hour ones now. Twelve hours left less room at the edges, less of that particular grey half hour before sleep where her mind wandered back toward ballrooms and brushed steel letters on a donor wall. She came home exhausted enough to fall asleep without the hallway light some nights. Not all. Enough that she counted it as progress.

Mia noticed the new schedule and didn't comment on it directly, which was its own kind of comment. She started leaving food outside Scarlet's door instead of asking to come in, containers of soup or leftover pasta with sticky notes that said things like EAT THIS, YOU MONSTER, or I WILL KNOW IF YOU DON'T. Scarlet ate all of it. She left the containers washed and stacked outside Mia's door in return, a wordless proof of life passed back and forth between two apartments.

The SUV stopped appearing. Or she stopped looking for it, she genuinely couldn't tell which, and decided she preferred not knowing.

On Thursday, a new patient came into the step-down unit. Older man, cardiac history, sharp eyes despite the tubes and monitors tethering him to the bed. His name was Walter. He liked to talk, the way some patients did when they were scared and didn't want to admit it, filling silence with whatever story was closest to the surface.

"You've got a sad face today," Walter said, on her second round of vitals. "Pretty girl like you shouldn't have a sad face."

"Just tired, Walter."

"Mm." He studied her the way old men sometimes did, unbothered by the rules of what strangers were supposed to ask each other. "Man trouble?"

Scarlet almost laughed. "Something like that."

"He worth it?"

She thought about the ballroom. “Have we met.?”She thought about six years of a voice she'd trusted completely and a face she still barely knew, and the answer came out before she'd fully decided what it should be.

"I don't know anymore," she said, honestly, which surprised her more than it surprised Walter. "I used to think so."

"That's usually the answer," Walter said, settling back against his pillows like he'd confirmed something. "The ones worth it, you know right away. The ones you have to think about that hard. Those ones cost you something you don't get back."

She didn't have a response for that. She adjusted his IV line and moved on to the next room, and the sentence followed her through the rest of the shift, quiet and unwelcome, the way true things sometimes were.

Two hundred miles from the hospital's donor wall, Alexander sat across from three of his father's oldest captains in a room with no windows, listening to numbers that didn't add up the way they should.

"Someone's moving product through the eastern corridor without authorization," Dimitri said, sliding a file across the table. "Small enough that it took three weeks to notice. Large enough that it isn't an accident."

"Sokolov's buyer, or one of ours."

"Unclear yet. Could be both, if someone on our side is selling access."

Alexander closed the file without opening it fully. He already knew, in the specific, exhausted way a man knows a wound is deeper than it first looked, that this was the beginning of something that would take months to fully excise, and that until it was excised, everyone connected to him carried a little more risk than they had the week before.

Everyone connected to him. He made himself not finish that thought in any direction that led back to a hospital forty minutes from where he now sat, a woman in blue scrubs he had not allowed himself to check on in nine days.

"Find the leak," Alexander said. "Quietly. I don't want Sokolov to know we're looking before we know who we're looking for."

The captains filed out. Dimitri lingered.

"Nine days," Dimitri said, without being asked.

"I'm aware of the number."

"You keep track."

"I keep track of everything, Dimitri. It's the job." Alexander didn't look up from the second file already open in front of him. "Was there something else."

Dimitri studied him for a long moment, the way he'd studied him for fifteen years, since before either of them had learned to hide anything from the other.

"No," Dimitri said finally. "Nothing else."

He left. Alexander sat alone in the windowless room for a long time after, the file blurring slightly in front of him, and did not reach for his phone even once, though his hand found its way to his pocket twice before he stopped letting it.