“Lower it,” Maverick said. To Gregory. The word came out with the particular authority of a man who had spent decades making rooms obey him and was making one final attempt to make this one do the same.
Gregory lowered the gun. Inch by inch. His eyes never left Maverick’s face.
His jaw was set, and his hands were steady with the specific steadiness of a man whose stillness was not calm but was something that lived on the other side of calm, something that had passed through calm and come out somewhere colder and more absolute.
Maverick’s grip on me tightened, and I felt his chest move with a breath that was not quite steady, and I understood in that fraction of a second that his certainty was performing itself now rather than actually present, that the gun at my temple was the action of a man who had lost the initiative and was trying to buy time with the only remaining currency available, and that currency was me.
Gregory’s gun was almost at floor level.
His eyes moved—one fraction, one controlled shift—from Maverick’s face to mine, and what was in them in that quarter of a second wasn’t calculation. It wasn’t the strategic assessment of an enforcer managing a hostage situation. It was something that had no operational purpose and no useful function and existed entirely outside the architecture of a man who didn’t have emotions, and I saw it clearly, and my chest did something it had no business doing in a moment like this one.
Then his arm moved.
The shot was exact. He had fired into a thigh, into the large lateral muscle, a location that would drop without killing, that would release without permanently ending, that was as far from my body as the geometry of the situation permitted.
Maverick’s arm fell. His weight went sideways. I stepped forward—or tried to—and the room tilted in a way that had nothing to do with the explosion and everything to do with days of insufficient food and sustained physiological stress and a body that had been managing more than it should have been asked to manage, and the floor came up in a way that floors shouldn’t, and I’d time to think with the detached clarity of someone observing from a slight distance:This is what fainting feels like,and then the light went out.
The last thing I remembered wasn’t the floor. It was arms—solid, immediate—the warmth of a body that had been moving fast and was suddenly still, the sharp trace of gunpowder threaded with something beneath it my mind recognized before I could stop it: the apartment, the dark, his arm across my waist, the unmistakable weight of a presence that, after six days, felt like safety.
Then there was nothing.
Chapter 18 – Gregory
She was too light, lighter than she had been in the dark of her apartment with her hair against my jaw and her weight settled into me like she’d decided I was worth trusting, and that difference—the distance between that weight and this one—registered somewhere in my chest as an accusation. Six days. I’d been building a case file, mapping delivery routes, and sitting in Matvey’s office talking operational strategy while she was in the basement getting smaller.
I held her against my chest and looked at her face and told myself to breathe.
Behind me, Maverick was on the floor, making sounds I had no attention left to give to. Tomas and his men were coming through the stairwell—I could hear them, the thunder of boots on concrete, the barked orders.
“She’s breathing,” I said, to nobody in particular, or to myself. I said it again anyway. “She’s breathing.”
Tomas hit the bottom of the stairs at a speed I hadn’t expected from a man his age, and the sound that came out of him when he saw her wasn’t a word. It was something that existed below language,
“What did they do to her?” Tomas said.
“She passed out.” I shifted my grip so he could see her face. “Exhaustion. She’s—they didn’t—” I stopped. Recalibrated. I was not a man who stumbled over sentences, and I was not going to start now. “She’s physically intact, Tomas. She’s going to be fine.”
“Hospital,” he said. To his men, to me, to the room.
“My car,” I said. Because it wasn’t a negotiation.
***
I held her the entire ride.
She was unconscious in the back seat, and I was in the back seat with her. My hand was pressed against the side of her neck, where her pulse moved with the steady, reliable rhythm of something that didn’t know it had recently been at considerable risk. I sat with that pulse against my fingers and breathed.
Yegor was in the passenger seat. He said nothing. He understood, at some level I hadn’t examined closely, that anything he said right now would produce a response from me that neither of us would enjoy.
Tomas followed in his own vehicle. I could see his headlights in the rear window—close, closer than was strictly necessary at these speeds, the following distance of a man who needed visual confirmation at all times that his daughter was still in the car in front of him.
Sofia made a sound somewhere in the dark near my shoulder. Not words—just a sound, a small thing that could have been discomfort or the beginning of consciousness or simply her body rearranging itself in whatever internal way bodies did when they were coming back from somewhere. I looked down at her. Her lashes were dark against her face, her breathing had steadied, and the gray had faded from her skin to something closer to her actual color, the warm olive I’d been cataloging without permission since a fundraising event that felt like a different life.
“We’re almost there,” I said quietly. To the top of her head. She didn’t respond, which was fine. I hadn’t said it for a response.
The hospital moved fast when we came through—which was, I’d always found, the precise advantage of arriving at an emergency entrance with a Bratva enforcer carrying an unconscious woman and Tomas Alvarez walking two steps behind. Doctors appeared. A gurney appeared. I transferred her weight from my arms to it with a care I was not examining too closely, and stepped back because she was in the right hands now, and I was not going to be useful in a treatment room.
I stood in the hallway.