Chapter Text
03:44 a.m., Moscow – Apartment on Tverskaya
Boris had been asleep for less than an hour when the secure phone rang once, then cut to silence.
He stared at the screen: missed call, Valery’s home line.
He called back. No answer.
He called again. Nothing.
Something cold slid down his spine.
He was dressed and in the car within ninety seconds.
Seven minutes later he shouldered the apartment door open; the lock gave like paper.
The flat was dark and reeking of blood, fear, and female Alpha rage.
He found Valery in the bedroom.
Valery was unconscious on the floor beside the overturned bed, naked, limbs at wrong angles.
His head rested in a small pool of blood from a deep gash above his left ear.
Dark fingerprints ringed his throat so tightly the skin had blanched beneath them.
Both cheekbones were split and swollen; one eye already black.
His torso was a map of boot prints and belt lashes, ribs visibly deformed on the left side.
Wrists raw and bleeding from restraints (the torn belt still lay nearby).
Between his thighs: torn skin, heavy bruising, blood and semen streaking the inside of both legs.
He had been raped, beaten, and left to die.
Boris dropped to his knees.
“Valery.”
No response.
Breath was there (shallow, wet, too fast), but barely.
Boris’s scent exploded through the room: furnace-hot, murderous, protective.
He slid one arm under Valery’s shoulders, the other under his knees, and lifted him as gently as possible. Valery’s head lolled against his chest; a faint, pained sound escaped cracked lips, but he didn’t wake.
Boris wrapped his greatcoat around the naked, broken body and carried him down the stairs himself (no time for ambulances, no one he trusted tonight).
In the back of the Chaika he cradled Valery close, pressing a folded handkerchief to the head wound, murmuring low and fierce.
“Stay with me, Valyusha. I have you. You’re safe now.”
Valery’s pulse fluttered under Boris’s fingers (weak, but there).
The driver broke every speed limit to the Kremlin clinic.
They took him straight into trauma. Boris carried him all the way to the doors, coat soaked with Valery’s blood, refusing to hand him over until the surgeon met his eyes and swore they’d save him.
Six hours of surgery: ruptured spleen, four cracked ribs, dislocated shoulder, severe concussion, internal tearing, massive blood loss.
Boris never left the corridor. He stood in blood-stained clothes, still smelling of the Zone and now of Valery, staring at the operating-theatre doors until they finally opened.
“He’ll live,” the surgeon said quietly. “But it was close.”
Boris exhaled once (a sound like a dam breaking), then walked into recovery.
Valery was unconscious, intubated, swathed in bandages and bruises that looked even worse under the harsh lights.
Boris pulled the chair as close as the tubes allowed, took the one unbruised hand in both of his, and rested his forehead against Valery’s knuckles.
When Valery finally stirred twelve hours later, the first thing he felt was Boris’s scent (warm, steady, furious, safe) and the gentle pressure of Boris’s thumb stroking across his wrist.
The first thing he heard was Boris’s voice, low and deadly calm.
“I found her scent all over you. Irina is finished. By tomorrow she’ll be in a cell so deep she’ll never see daylight again.”
Valery’s swollen eyes fluttered open, met Boris’s, and filled with tears he didn’t have the strength to shed.
Boris leaned in, pressed his lips to Valery’s forehead (soft, reverent), and stayed there.
“I’ve got you now, little one. No one will ever touch you again.”
And for the first time in years, Valery believed it.