“N-no! I’m not—”
“He might lose them! You understand that? You might’ve fucking ruined him!”
“I didn’t —I wasn’t even aiming for … look, I just reacted—”
“Reacted?” he barked, a harsh, disbelieving sound ripping out of him. “You call that reacting? You fuckingmaimedhim!”
The gun pressed harder against my head. My breath hitched, sharp and shallow, and panic clawed its way up my throat as I bit back a whimper.
“Why the fuck should this bitch live after what she’s done?” the man snapped, not even looking at me now, his voice cutting across the space toward the others. “Huh? Give me one good fucking reason why I shouldn’t shoot her right now!”
My heart hammered so hard it hurt.
This was it. This was how it would happen.
Javier stepped forward quickly. “Hey, hey! Stop, man. Listen. Rafael is coming.”
“I don’t give a shit about Rafael!” He shoved the gun harder into my temple like he was trying to make a point with it. “She shot Carlos! She fucking shot him!”
My pulse roared in my ears, loud and overwhelming and impossible to ignore.
“You kill me,” I blurted out, the words tumbling out too fast and unevenly. But I couldn’t stop. “And then what? That was your whole plan, right? Leverage? Congratulations, you just shot your leverage in the head, that feels a little fucking counterproductive—”
I caught sight of something flickering through his eyes, just for a second.
“Rafael didn’t sound like he wanted me dead,” I forced out, my breath hitching, clinging to that tiny crack. “He sounded like he wanted me alive.”
“Shut the fuck up!” he snarled.
“No, I don’t think I will,” I shot back. If I stopped talking, I might start panicking, and if I started panicking, I might die and that felt like a worse option. “Because if you shoot me, you won’t just have a Russian problem. You’ll have a personal problem. I don’t know Rafael personally, but he didn’t sound like the forgiving type.”
The gun stayed exactly where it was, pressed to my temple.
He hadn’t fired yet, though, and all I could do was hope it would stay this way so I could stay alive long enough for Sasha to get here.
Chapter 37
Sasha
Ithadalmostbeentoo easy to track down their location. Addy hadn’t even been gone for a full hour when one of our informants came through with information. By the time we reached the warehouse, I had already calculated exactly how many men I was willing to bury over this.
It was not a small number. The realization settled somewhere deep in my chest with cold, terrifying clarity.
There was no hesitation attached to it — no moral debate, no internal negotiation — only the quiet understanding that if she’d been harmed, whatever happened next would simply be the natural consequence of a very poor decision made by the wrong men.
The drive passed in a strange, distorted blur. The city slid past the windows in streaks of red lights and concrete while I spoke into my phone. To someone who didn’t know me well enough to hear the violence coiledunderneath it, the calm in my voice would have almost sounded relaxed.
Orders were given in clipped Russian, positions were shifted, and cars were mobilized. By the time we reached the docks, there were already enough men moving quietly through the surrounding streets to turn the entire district into a war zone at my command.
Kyrill glanced at me every few seconds from the passenger seat, monitoring me as though I were an unstable explosive.
“You’re very quiet,” he observed at one point.
I shot him a flat look. “Yes.”
“Alright, alright. Gonna keep my mouth shut.”
Under different circumstances, I might have responded to him with a dry remark to ease the tension that had been building in the car since the call came through. But right now, my mind was consumed by a relentless series of images my mind conjured of the worst-case scenario.