Her Rustanov Bully: the (possibly romantic?) tale of how I pucked around and found out
Her Rustanov Bully: Chapter 17

Anything?

I hesitated. Anything was a lot to promise a merciless hockey player who was on record as hating my guts.

But another pitiful whimper from P.M., lying half in and half out of her doghouse, was all it took to push me out of my indecision.

“Okay.” I swallowed a lump of fear I hadn’t realized was forming in my throat. “Anything.”

Artyom studied me for a short-but-still-incredibly-tense beat. Honestly, it was like getting stared down by a granite statue. Then he… pulled out his phone and started texting!

“Are you serious right now?” Outrage replaced my sense of dread as I watched him click away with his thumbs. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“Anything. You make this promise to me, and you will not break it,” he answered without looking up from his phone. His voice was as cold as the winter wind passing between us, and I couldn’t tell if he was asking me a question or delivering the terms of his ruthless ultimatum.

Either way…

“Yes, I promise you. Anything. Anything you want if you help me save this innocent⁠—”

“Alright, we have agreement.” Artyom stuffed his phone back in his coat pocket and closed the distance between us with a speed that didn’t match his large size.

“I am picking you up, and it will not feel good. But you are strong puppy, and you will survive,” he informed P.M. before scooping her out of her literal doghouse and ferrying her across the yard.

I couldn’t help but marvel at his prowess as he led the way through the back door into the small house. If he was this fast in the snow, I could only imagine his speed on the ice. No wonder it had been such a rout when he played that one team whose name I could no longer remember. Confession: despite my father owning the Minnesota Raptors, I remained a terrible hockey fan.

Speaking of hockey, though… I squinted as I followed him out of the front door. “Aren’t you supposed to be at a game right now? Did it end early or something? How did you—oh, hey, my car’s over there.”

I pointed toward my Mini Cooper when we reached the curb, but Artyom kept walking in the opposite direction. The next thing I knew, he was depositing P.M. in the back seat of his truck, an intimidating mix of black-on-black and gigantic.

I guess I’ll have to come back for my car, I decided as I scrambled into Artyom’s truck after P.M.

“Okay, the shelter isn’t open, so we’ll have to take her to my place,” I told Artyom after I settled into the back seat with P.M. “Just head down Highway East until you get to Oak and make a right. That’s where I live.”

In a rented house with a no-pets-allowed policy.

But the landlord would just have to make an exception. I had a few bandages and other supplies at home that I could use to tend to her until the shelter opened tomorrow.

P.M. whimpered again and, with what appeared to be a Herculean amount of effort, settled her head in my lap with a wheezing sigh. My heart twisted with worry. Was it me, or had her breathing gotten even worse?

No, tending to her myself at my place wasn’t the optimum solution to this situation at all. I’d much rather get P.M. checked out by an actual vet, especially considering she might have a broken rib, and the closest 24-hour emergency vet was hours away.

As Artyom pulled away from the curb, I tried the veterinary clinic the shelter worked with Monday through Friday, hoping that maybe Dr. Kovacs had an after-hours answering service.

“Heya, there! This is Dr. Kovacs!”

I let out a breath of relief when Dr. Kovacs’s hearty Midwestern voice came down the line.

But then he said, “With a message to let you know the office will be closed until Tuesday in honor of a very special holiday—my twenty-seventh anniversary!”

My heart sank as Dr. Kovacs’s apparently recorded voice laughed at his own gotcha joke. “But if you need anything before Tuesday…”

Hope swelled in my chest…

“…you’re outta luck because Janine and I will be ice fishing in a remote, undisclosed location.”

…then deflated like air from a balloon.

“But leave a message after the beep, and we’ll get back to you when we return to the office. Signing off, Dr. Kovacs, your dependable local vet.”

Dependable, my ass. I nevertheless left a detailed and urgent message before switching over to see what YouTube tutorials I could replace for tending to dogs after they’d gotten into an altercation.

There wasn’t much, but I watched a few things and put what I could replace in my queue.

I didn’t realize I’d fallen into hyper-focus until a message from Trish suddenly popped up on my screen. I squinted to read.

TRISH: Hey, whatcha doing? Want to go get some consolation ice cream with me?

Consolation ice cream was what my lactose-intolerant bestie called eating entire pints of Ben & Jerry’s Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream when she was between girlfriends because she didn’t have to worry about the smelly consequences.

I began to text her about what was going on, but then I noticed two things:

One: Artyom was talking to someone in Russian through his car’s infotainment system, and

Two: Even taking my general time blindness into account, I’d been in the car for way longer than it should’ve taken to get to my place.

“Oh, no!” I cursed when I glanced out the window and saw that the truck was zipping past dark rows of trees instead of the postcard college town where I lived.

“I’m so sorry!” I called over P.M.’s head to Artyom in the front seat. “But you need to go west on East—not east. I know that’s confusing, but we have to turn around.”

“Hold on,” Artyom said to whomever he was talking to on the phone. Then he turned to me. “Nyet, we will go this way.”

“But this is the wrong way,” I started to argue—only to cut off when he made a sharp left onto a dimly lit access road. “Wait, where are you taking me?”

Instead of answering, Artyom stopped the truck in front of a dark-wood lake house with sleek, angular lines and huge glass windows that gleamed under the night sky.

I stopped arguing when I saw the group standing under the lake house’s brightly lit entrance.

There was a man and a woman, who looked to be college students around my age. They wore open leather jackets over matching egg-yellow University of Gemidgee hoodies. But unlike regular college students, they had stone-cold expressions, and they each had a hand wrapped around the upper arm of an older man dressed in plaid pajamas and a fuzzy pink robe.

“Oh my God.” My mouth dropped open. “Is that Dr. Kovacs?”

“You are welcome,” Artyom said from the front seat.

Two hours later, I stroked P.M.’s sole undamaged leg as she lay sound asleep on the dining room table in Artyom Rustanov’s enormous house. Dr. Kovacs had thoroughly cleaned her wounds, stitched up the worst of the bite marks, and applied antiseptic to prevent infection. He’d also wrapped her chest in a snug bandage to stabilize the broken rib and administered pain medication to keep her comfortable, along with a mild sedative to help her rest.

“Thanks so much for coming to see P.M. on a Friday night,” I told Dr. Kovacs as he packed up his medical bag.

“It wasn’t like I had much choice,” Dr. Kovacs grumbled, throwing a sideways look at the two “college students” who’d been hovering at the dining room’s periphery since Artyom carried P.M. into the house. “I was hoping to get a solid eight before Janine and I left for our dream anniversary ice-fishing trip, but those goons woke me from a dead sleep. I was so confused I ended up putting on her robe instead of mine!”

Dr. Kovacs didn’t sound nearly as friendly now as he had on his answering machine. I didn’t know whether to feel more sorry for him or Janine. I highly doubted Dr. Kovacs’s front office assistant/wife, who favored kitten heels and all things pink, had chosen ice fishing for her “dream anniversary trip.”

“Well, have a wonderful vacation, and I hope you know how grateful I am that you came through.”

Dr. Kovacs glared at me. “Again, it wasn’t like I—” he started to say, only to abruptly cut off and finish with, “wouldn’t hesitate to come through for one of our four-legged friends. I was more than happy to help out this poor pooch.”

The doctor’s sudden change in attitude let me know that Artyom had re-entered the room.

Also, all the hairs suddenly standing up on the back of my neck.

Still, my breath caught when Artyom came to stand beside me. He’d obviously taken a shower. His wet hair smelled of expensive shampoo, and instead of the blood-stained training hoodie he was wearing before, a plain white t-shirt hugged his torso. His ridiculously ripped torso. Were t-shirts supposed to be so thin that you could see every single muscle?

“Anyway,” I said, quickly averting my eyes to Dr. Kovacs. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“No problem at all, Lydia,” Dr. Kovacs insisted with a beaming smile. “Just remember to keep her bandages clean and dry, and limit her movement as much as possible. I’ll give you a call to check on her when Janine and I return to the office on Tuesday.”

“You will check tomorrow,” Artyom corrected him, his voice firm as granite. “And you will come back here right away if needed.”

Dr. Kovacs looked to the side. “Well, we’re going to be in Canada, so…”

Artyom stepped forward and folded his arms over his well-defined chest. “So?”

“I’ll make sure I have reception when I call you tomorrow, Lydia,” Dr. Kovacs said with another smile—though this one had lost much of its wattage. “In fact, let me write down the number to my personal cell, just in case you run into any trouble….”

Gotta admit, I felt a little torn as I watched Dr. Kovacs bend over the table to scribble his contact info on the back of one of his business cards. As a social worker, I never wanted to see anyone get bullied or intimidated. But my chest filled with relief when he handed me his card, knowing I’d be able to call him if I needed any help with P.M.

Either way, I was happy to inform both of them, “Okay, well, I finally got in contact with Val, and she has a bed ready and waiting for P.M. at the shelter. Um…”

I glanced toward Artyom but found I couldn’t actually look directly at him. “Could you or maybe one of your friends give me a ride to the shelter? And I’ll ask Val to give me a ride back to my car.”

Artyom stared back at me for a granite, dead-eyed beat before answering, “Nyet.”

“What do you mean, no?” As shy as I felt just a moment ago, I had to turn to face him fully.

“Puppy should not be moved,” Artyom said, unfolding his arms. “And we are still not having discussion about terms of our ‘anything’ deal.”

“That…” My cheeks burned with embarrassment that he would bring up his bully ultimatum deal in front of Dr. Kovacs. “That shouldn’t interfere with getting P.M. to the shelter.”

“Actually, your boyfriend is right,” Dr. Kovacs interjected in an apologetic tone, glancing between Artyom and me.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said at the same time Artyom said, “I know I am right.”

Dr. Kovacs glanced between us again, this time with a confused expression. “Well, considering the extent of her injuries, she’ll need around-the-clock monitoring, and you definitely won’t want to move her for at least another forty-eight hours.”

“Forty-eight hours?” My stomach dropped, and my head filled with static, somewhere beyond which I heard Artyom say, “I will show you to room where you sleep tonight.”

So, just to recap, not only had I promised my Rustanov bully “anything” in exchange for his help, but it looked like I’d be stuck living with him for the next two days.