Page 84 of Bratva Daddy
"Get your hands off me! Do you know who I am?"
"Yeah," came a federal agent's flat response. "You're the guy going to prison for the rest of his life."
The young nurse looked down at me, and I saw her making a decision in real-time. She glanced around the room—everyone was fixated on the television, on their phones, on the spectacular collapse of Viktor Petrov's empire. No one was watching the supposed overdose patient who'd caused this morning's earlier drama.
"Please," I whispered, letting her see everything—the fear, the desperation, the truth. "He's been keeping me here illegally. I'm not crazy. Please."
She hesitated, fingers still on my wrist, and I could see her calculating—her job, her career, the right thing to do. On thetelevision, they were showing my father's office being raided, boxes of evidence being carried out, his secretary in handcuffs.
In the hallway, Viktor's voice rose to a scream: "You don't understand! She knows everything! She can testify! Alexei Volkov will kill her before he lets that happen!"
The nurse's face hardened at that. "He's lying about that too?"
"About everything," I managed. "Alexei saved me. My father's the one who—"
"Shh." She was already moving, unhooking my IV with practiced efficiency, removing the oxygen monitor, the blood pressure cuff. Every movement looked routine, like she was just adjusting equipment, but she was freeing me. "There's a stairwell at the end of the hall. Service access, hardly anyone uses it."
"Why?" I had to know. "Why help me?"
"Because I've seen enough actual overdose victims to know you weren't one," she said quietly. "And because any woman who'd fake an OD to avoid ECT probably has a damn good reason." She helped me sit up, supporting my weight as the room spun slightly. "Can you walk?"
"I'll crawl if I have to."
"Good." She grabbed a sweater from somewhere—lost property, maybe—and draped it over my shoulders, covering the hospital gown. "Go. Security's distracted, half the staff is in the break room watching the news. You've got maybe five minutes before someone notices you're gone."
My legs shook as I stood, three days of limited movement and stress making everything harder. But I was vertical, and that was enough. The nurse opened the door, checked the hallway, then guided me out with a hand on my elbow like she was just helping a patient to the bathroom.
The hallway was chaos—staff members clustered around phones, security guards abandoning posts to see what washappening, everyone talking at once about Petrov and corruption and what this meant for the hospital's funding. We moved through it like ghosts, invisible in the disorder.
"There," she whispered, pointing to a door marked "Authorized Personnel Only." "Down two flights, there's an exit to the loading dock. After that, you're on your own."
"Thank you," I breathed, meaning it with every fiber of my being.
"Go," she said, already turning back. "I was never here."
I pushed through the door into the stairwell, and the relative quiet hit like a physical thing. My legs were already shaking, the adrenaline that had carried me this far starting to fade. But I could hear Viktor still screaming in the distance, could hear federal agents trying to contain him, could hear my freedom calling from two flights down.
I made it halfway down the first flight before my knees buckled. The wall was cold against my palm as I tried to steady myself, but the world was tilting, the lack of real food and sleep finally catching up. I was going to fall. I was going to tumble down these stairs and they'd find me broken at the bottom and—
Strong arms caught me before I hit the ground.
"Hello, little one."
Alexei. Really here, solid and warm and smelling like that cologne that meant safety, dressed in an orderly's scrubs that didn't quite hide the controlled violence underneath. My legs gave out completely, but it didn't matter because he was already lifting me, one arm under my knees, the other supporting my back, like I weighed nothing at all.
"Daddy?" The word came out broken, three days of fear and fighting cracking through that single syllable.
"Shh." His lips pressed against my hair, and I felt the tension in his body—controlled but coiled, ready to destroy anyone who tried to stop us. "I've got you. Sleep now. You're safe."
But I couldn't sleep, not yet. My fingers clutched at the fabric of his stolen scrubs, needing the physical proof that this was real. That he'd actually come for me. The stairwell disappeared behind us as he moved with that particular grace that turned violence into art, navigating service corridors I hadn't known existed.
"The drug charges won't stick," I mumbled against his chest, my brain still trying to protect him even as it shut down from exhaustion. "Ivan needs to—"
"Ivan's already handled everything, little one. Just rest."
But resting meant missing things, and I'd been unconscious or pretending to be for too long already. A door opened ahead of us, and I caught a glimpse of gray morning light, a loading dock, and a laundry truck with its back doors already open.
"Took you long enough," Ivan's voice, dry as winter. He was behind the wheel, somehow looking immaculate despite presumably having spent the night hacking federal databases and hospital records. "Mikhail's getting impatient."
