Chapter 5
Alina's POV
Lowell had said he was hiring me to look after his grandmother. By the end of the first day, it was the other way around entirely.
He hadn't been gone long when a nurse came in for rounds, took one look at me sitting in the chair beside the bed with my cast still damp, and her expression closed over like a shutter coming down.
"Miss, you're a patient too. You can't sit like that. Let me raise the bed for you—come and lie down properly."
"Really, I'm fine—"
"You have cracked ribs." She pressed the control button without further discussion, and the bed began to rise. "Doctor's orders are bed rest. If the fracture doesn't heal correctly, you could end up with a permanent limp."
I opened my mouth. In the underground circuit, I'd trained through broken ribs without a second thought. I wasn't someone who needed to be handled.
But something in the nurse's expression made me swallow the words.
She moved to help me into the adjoining suite. I shook her off.
"I'll rest on the sofa. That's enough."
The nurse looked at me, decided this counted as a compromise, sighed quietly, and helped me settle onto the couch.
Lowell's grandmother—Mrs. Vadalishi—had been lying still since they'd brought her in, receiving fluids through an IV. By now some color had come back into her face.
Once the nurse left, she turned her head and looked at me directly. "How do you know Lowell? What's your name?"
She was nothing like him. Her voice carried authority the way some people carry height—naturally, without effort—and even flat on her back in a hospital bed, her eyes were sharp enough to cut.
The abruptness of it caught me off guard. I swallowed before I could manage an answer. "Alina."
"And?"
Her gaze was like something raptor-like trained on me from above. I couldn't quite hold it. The weight of being assessed by someone like that pressed down on my chest in a way that made breathing feel deliberate.
I steadied myself and tried again. "I… Lowell and I met at an auction."
"An auction." Mrs. Vadalishi's thin lips pressed together.
"Yes." My hands were damp. My breath wasn't entirely even. She was an old woman in a hospital bed, and she was almost more than I could manage. But I had decided on honesty, and I kept to it. "I was being auctioned. Lowell intervened—he got me out."
She said nothing. The silence that settled between us had a specific quality to it, the kind that presses on you.
I felt the unease spreading before I could stop it.
"I'll pay back what he spent," I added, reaching for something solid to stand on. "I'll find a way to repay him properly."
She gave me a sideways look. Despite everything, she was recovering quickly—there was a restlessness to her that illness hadn't quite managed to subdue. Her aged hands reached for a cigar on the bedside table, lit it, and brought it to her lips.
The room was quiet for a long moment.
"Repay him," she said at last. "With what, exactly?"
I bit down on the inside of my cheek. "I'll earn money. I'll pay him back."
Mrs. Vadalishi made a sound—not quite a laugh, but close enough. "Women who look at him the way you do—like they're already drawing a line between themselves and him—I've seen plenty of those."
"Every last one of them ends up doing whatever it takes to get into his bed."
The words hit me like something thrown. Humiliation and anger moved through me at the same time, tangled together. I held both down, deliberately, because the fact remained: the treatment I was receiving had been paid for with Lowell's money.
"You're right not to trust me yet," I said, keeping my voice level. "I'll show you, over time, that I mean what I say."
"My feelings toward him are nothing more than respect."
Mrs. Vadalishi raised an eyebrow. She took another slow pull of the cigar and didn't speak again.
The pain in my leg had built to the point where I couldn't sit with it anymore. I needed something from the pharmacy. I was used to handling my own affairs, so I didn't call for a nurse—I picked up the prescription slip and went down myself, moving carefully on my crutches.
On the way, my mind kept circling back to Mrs. Vadalishi.
I had never had any illusions about belonging to Lowell's world, or any world like it. Men and women of that class existed in a different register entirely—one I had no interest in forcing my way into. But being dismissed so completely, treated as something negligible before I'd even had the chance to prove otherwise, had lodged in me like a splinter I couldn't get at.
I picked up the medication, made my way back, and pushed open the door to Mrs. Vadalishi's room—
And stopped.
Lowell was inside. He and his grandmother were in the middle of something, their voices low and intent.
"Don't let that woman's harmless face fool you."
"Grandmother, I don't think Alina is like that—"
"Do you know why every bodyguard on your detail has to pass through me before they're allowed near you? Because you lead with instinct. You always have. You're exactly like your father in that regard." A pause, weighted. "Have you forgotten how your father died?"
I stood in the doorway and forgot to move.
Both of them noticed me at the same moment.
"Alina?" Lowell's face opened briefly—something close to relief—and then shifted when he registered the bag in my hand. "Did you go to the pharmacy yourself? Why didn't you ask a nurse to go for you?"
I gave him a slightly awkward smile. "I needed the walk. Good excuse to stretch my legs."
He looked down at my cast, the furrow between his brows deepening. "Are you actually all right?"
"I'm fine, honestly." I waved a hand—lighter than I felt. "Don't worry about it."
The atmosphere in the room had a particular tension to it that I was fairly certain had existed before I walked in and had not improved since. I was already angling toward the door when a nurse appeared behind me, pushing a cart with three covered dishes arranged on it.
Lowell reached out and steadied my shoulder as I moved to leave. "Stay and eat first. Then go rest."
I looked at him.
I nodded.
