A knee drove into my ribs. The Crow cocked his fist, grim satisfaction all he had in the face of his fallen brothers.
But his knockout punch never came. The barrel of Alexei’s silencer touched his temple, and in the dark, a cold hand found mine, fingers tangling. Squeezing. Before Alexei loomed out of the shadows, his other hand wrapped around his gun.
“Move,” he whispered.
It took a beat to realise he was talking to me.
I let go of his hand and rolled away from the Crow, lurching to my feet.
Alexei stayed low. He met my gaze, leering through the rage that twisted his ethereal face.
He pulled the trigger.
The shot rang out.
And the last Crow left standing slumped to the blood-stained earth.
My ears were still ringing, both from the smackdown and the suppressed gunshot. I stumbled forward. Alexei caught me, but he wavered and we almost fell.
Almost. Cos there was no way in hell I wasn’t gonna catch him too.
“Shit.” The curse tumbled out of me. Adrenaline dialled down, I was left with a massive fucking mess. And the reality that Alexei had come off his bike at speed and was somehow still standing.
I gripped him hard, sweeping my gaze over him.
It clashed with his. He dug his fingers into my shoulders, eyes wide. “You are okay?”
Are you?
He heard me and nodded. “I bounce, apparently.”
“Are you hurt?”
Alexei shrugged. “Some scrapes. I will live. It is not like I was slashed with a machete.”
He released my shoulders, unzipped my torn jacket, and tugged my T-shirt up, revealing the mark of the blade on my skin. It had barely pierced, but it looked macabre all the same, and I kind of liked it.
Alexei traced his fingertip along it.
I shivered. Let his touch pull me back to earth before reality hit home. They’d run him off the road. He could’ve been killed. And I’d have had to tell Cam.
“Saint.” Alexei straightened my clothes. Brushed mud and grime from my chest, then pressed his face into me with a distressed groan that scared the fuck out of me. “I am sorry it took me so long to get to you. The bike was on top of me.”
I nuzzled his neck, fighting for words, and they came in a rush, spilling out. “I didn’t hear these fuckers coming. This is my fault, not yours.”
Slowly, Alexei raised his head. He shot a dry glance over my shoulder. “Wingman, what else could you have done? You have killed or incapacitated nine men.”
“Seven. You shot the last two.”
“Semantics. We were outnumbered, and yet we stand and they don’t. And I did not hear them coming either. I was distracted.”
“By what?”
Alexei shook his head. “Not now. We have much to do. More than when we left Bristol, no?”
Perspective returned to me. We were at the side of a deserted road with a bunch of unconscious enemies and the dead bodies of their brothers. We needed to clean the scene and run a mile.
Weneededhelp.