Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 113324 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 567(@200wpm)___ 453(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113324 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 567(@200wpm)___ 453(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
To Sevastyan, he said, “Make her life better . . . for my having been in it.”
Blood bubbled from his lips. His eyes went blank, his chest . . . still.
“No, don’t go!” I sobbed. But it was too late.
Pavel Kovalev, my father, was dead.
CHAPTER 26
“Natalie, get up!”
The siren in my head was back. Sevastyan was standing beside me, but his words sounded distant.
He grabbed one of my blood-coated hands and hauled me to my feet.
“This isn’t happening,” I muttered as I stumbled along, glass from Paxán’s beloved clocks crunching beneath my heels. “This isn’t happening.” My father couldn’t be dead.
Sevastyan dragged me over to where Filip squirmed in pain, blood pooling from his gut wound.
In a broken voice, Filip told me, “I-I didn’t want this. I came tonight . . . because others were already . . . on their way. It was going to happen. No matter . . . what I did. The bounty is . . . unthinkable.”
Hatred welled up inside me, drying my tears. “Goddamn you! How could you do this?”
“Swear to you, I only came for Paxán.” He reached his mutilated hand toward me. “If I didn’t know about Travkin . . . others won’t have heard yet either. They’ll . . . be coming.”
“What does that mean?”
“Travkin also wanted . . . your head.”
With a furious yell, Sevastyan yanked me behind him, drilling a bullet into Filip’s skull.
Two dead. Two. Slain before my eyes.
I couldn’t catch my breath, my lungs seeming to constrict. I felt like the whole world around me was on fire, flames crackling ever closer. Like if I screamed, no one would hear. I was hyperventilating by the time Sevastyan snatched my upper arm in his punishing grip and started dragging me away. “Come on, Natalie!” Gun raised, he led me toward a door at the back of the office.
“We can’t leave Paxán like this.” I gazed back at his still body. His lifeless eyes. Why hadn’t I closed them? Stupid, stupid. “We have to care for him!”
Sevastyan just yanked me along harder. “I’m taking you from Berezka. We don’t know who can be trusted here.”
I was speechless. As the siren in my head amped up, he shoved me into a garage I’d never seen, then tossed me into a dark sedan.
Haze.
A car ride down the wet shell drive, rain pouring from the night sky.
Sevastyan’s bloody rings digging into the steering wheel.
Mud slashing over the windshield, wipers gritty.
The back of the car fishtailed; I remained frozen.
Sevastyan didn’t slow until we neared the river, then slammed to a stop in front of the boathouse. “You’re going to stay here and lock the doors behind me,” he ordered as he reached across me toward the glove box. “The glass is bulletproof. You do not open these doors.” He took out a pistol, cocked it, flicked off the safety, then held it out to me. When I made no move to take it, he laid it on the console. “If someone gets in anyway, you use the gun. Aim for the chest and pull the trigger.”
Sevastyan was heading out into danger? Already the entire world was on fire; if I lost him too . . . “Where are you going? Don’t leave! Can’t we just stay in this car and drive away?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know who’s controlling the gates. Or who’s waiting outside them. We need to leave by water.” In the Casino Royale boat? “I’ll clear the boathouse, then return for you.”
When he opened the door, his own gun raised, I cried, “Please be careful.”
He cast me an odd look. “Don’t worry, your protection will return.” He slipped out into the rain, swiftly closing in on the boathouse—
I spied a muzzle flash out of the corner of my vision. Heard a sharp pop.
Half of Sevastyan’s upper body was wrenched back, as if he’d been punched in the shoulder.
Not punched. Shot.
Lightning struck as I screamed. By the time my eyes adjusted, Sevastyan and another man were grappling for a gun.
In the headlights’ beams, I could see it was the brigadier Gleb. Sevastyan launched one of his anvil fists, connecting with the man’s face. Gleb tottered, overpowered.
Sevastyan couldn’t be hurt too badly if he could move like that, right? He wrested the gun from the stunned man, then pistol-whipped Gleb with it. “How many more are there?” he roared.
Gleb’s face split into a macabre grin. Whatever he said sent Sevastyan into a deeper rage, his fist flying.
I scratched at my bloodstained hands as I watched Sevastyan beating a man to death. Another sizzling bolt forked out above, spotlighting a grisly blow.
I’d never seen anyone fight like Sevastyan. Fighting to kill.
This was Sevastyan at his most raw—and real. He was an enforcer, and killing was what he did.
When Gleb collapsed, unconscious, Sevastyan followed him down, dropping to his knees to continue annihilating the man. It was as if some demon had taken Sevastyan over. Gleb’s face was a pulp; with each of Sevastyan’s hits, blood sloshed up from it as if from a disturbed puddle.
When would this end? I opened the door, stumbling toward him. “Sevastyan, we have to leave!” Freezing rain drummed down. “You have to stop this!”
He peered at me, the headlights glaring in his eyes. I saw madness—and something more. Like he wanted me to stop him—because he was still beating the man.
Between bouts of thunder, I thought I heard bone crunch.
Then I heard something even more terrifying.
Gunfire in the distance. It sounded like a battlefield. The loyal and the disloyal waging all-out war? Sevastyan heard it too. His expression said he was desperate to join that fray.
If anything happened to him . . . if I lost both Sevastyan and Paxán in one blood-drenched night . . . ?
I remembered Paxán’s words: Extreme violence. Extreme vigilance. “You said you keep your promises, Sevastyan. You swore to keep me safe.”
He gazed up at me through rain-thickened lashes, his eyes aglow. I was drowning in them. We were drowning together. I held out my tremulous hand.