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“I go in first to draw his attention,” I whisper. “If he doesn’t know you’re here yet, you can be a surprise.”
I can tell Dima doesn’t like it. He probably wouldn’t mind if I sat in the hall while he handled this all himself. But he made the last call. This one is mine.
“Fine,” he concedes. “Yell out if you need help. Otherwise, I’ll wait for my grand entrance.”
We nod in silent agreement. Then I ready my gun, release a long breath, and push the door open.
The morgue is a long, narrow space. Three stainless steel countertops lie in the middle of the room like metal islands. Matching cabinets cover the back wall and the wall to the right. There are exam tables to the left, surrounded by curtains that hang from the ceiling. Privacy for the dead, I guess. I can’t see what’s behind them.
The door closes with a soft thud behind me.
The next sound is a gunshot.
A bullet pings off the metal wall behind me and I hit the floor.
“Are you alone?” Pavel yells as the echo reverberates.
I can’t see him. He must have been behind the curtains.
I drag one of the tables and turn it over, ducking behind the tabletop. Dima’s head peeks through the windowpane set in the door for just a second. Just long enough for him to see I’m still alive. Then he disappears.
If I can get on the other side of the room, it might force Pavel to change positions. He’d have his back to the door and Dima could take the kill shot.
“Did you come here alone?” he yells again.
“Did you?”
He laughs. “I didn’t, but if you made it through that door, then you already know that. How long did it take you to kill those worthless fuckers? Hopefully, it at least tired you out so it will make this next part a little easier for me.”
“Is that what the men who pledge their loyalty to you get? You serve them up to your enemies on a silver platter?”
“They didn’t pledge their loyalty to me. They pledged it to my father, who you murdered. Then my brother, who you also murdered.”
“Sounds like a string of bad luck for the Gustev family.”
“Maybe, but the pattern ends now,” Pavel hisses. “I’m not leaving this room until you’re dead.”
Another bullet pings off the top of the table. The metal dents and deforms around the shot.
“You haven’t asked about where Dr. Jenkins is. Don’t you want to know what happened when I was in a room alone with him?”
I hear Pavel creep a few steps closer. He might be in Dima’s line of sight now, but he needs to be closer for it to be a guaranteed kill.
“Do you think killing Jenkins is going to save your whore?” Pavel taunts. “I may be young, but I’m not naive enough to put all of my eggs in that shaking sack of shit’s basket. The man was a wreck. He kept reminding me of his fucking Hippocratic oath.”
Waiting so Dima can kill Pavel is getting harder and harder by the second. Everything in me is screaming to flip this table over and charge at the bastard. I don’t fucking care if I get shot so long as he dies.
But I grit my teeth and swallow down my rage. “What if I surrender?”
“Surender what?” Pavel asks.
“Myself,” I clarify. “I’ll surrender to you right now if you promise to leave Luna and our babies alone. You can do what you want to me. But you have to leave them out of it.”
There’s a beat of silence before Pavel responds. “Slide your gun across the room and show yourself.”
“Not until you agree. I’m not moving a fucking muscle until you swear you won’t hurt them.”
As if his word means anything to me. He could get the agreement tattooed on his forehead and I still wouldn’t buy it.
