The sound is wrong. Too sharp. Too deliberate to be rain.
I don’t move. I don’t breathe.
Another faint sound—metal shifting. The latch.
My pulse roars in my ears.
“No,” I whisper, barely audible, more instinct than word.
The glass splinters with a sharp crack, spiderwebbing outward—and something punches through.
I flinch back as it hits the floor with a dull, ugly clatter and spins once before going still.
I stare at it.
A bullet.
Flattened at the tip. Deformed. Stopped.
My gaze jerks to the window. The reinforced glass holds, fractured but intact. Head height. Exactly where I’d been sitting seconds ago.
My knees weaken.
I stumble backward, the chair scraping loudly as panic floods my veins, hot and suffocating. My chest constricts. Each breath feels too shallow, too fast.
“Help,” I whisper, then louder, my voice shaking. “Help—”
No answer.
Just rain. Shattered glass. And the echo of a warning I can’t unhear. I press my back against the bookshelf, hands trembling, eyes fixed on the broken window.
They found me.
Not to scare me.
To show me they can.
Footsteps thunder down the hall.
I suck in a breath so sharp it hurts. My knees nearly give when the door flies open.
“Raelyn.”
Konstantin.
He’s in the room in seconds, breath heavy, eyes wild. His shirt is half-buttoned, hair undone like he didn’t bother with appearances—like he ran. His gaze sweeps the window, the spiderwebbed glass, the bullet on the floor—
—and then it lands on me.
Something dark and feral crosses his face.
“Bozhe…”he mutters, and then he’s moving.
I barely have time to register it before his arms are around me, lifting me clean off the floor. I gasp, fingers clutching his shirt as the room tilts.
“I’ve got you,” he says, rough, urgent, like a vow torn out of his chest. “I’ve got you.”
He turns sharply, carrying me out of the library as if the ground itself is unsafe. Over his shoulder, he barks rapid Russian into the hall.