“Here. Our truck went over the edge around here.” I circle a section of the map with the biggest change in altitude.
When Trey demands the men reenter the SUVs, a handful of voices grumbles a protest, but one is too loud to ignore. “Are you all fucking clueless? Can’t you see she’s taking us on a wild goose chase, hoping we won’t realize she’s orchestrated all of this?”
“That’s enough, Ethan.”
I swipe my hand through the air, cutting Trey off. “Let him speak.” I step closer to Ethan. The fight I displayed when silencing the guards’ screams is seen all over my face. “Because they may be the last words he ever speaks.”
When Ethan attempts to get up in my face, Trey and Maddox step into his path. Asher doesn’t budge an inch, but he does unholster his gun. Ethan may be a member of Nikolai’s crew, but that won’t stop Asher from taking him down if he steps out of place.
“I get it, alright? You want your king back.” Tears spring in my eyes when a collective hum sounds through the thirty or so men circling me. “So the fuck do I. That’s what I’ve been trying to do since you found me. I don’t want to take Nikolai’s place! I want him to come home! If you don’t want the same thing, then leave, go, but be assured, if you do leave, you’ll never be welcomed back.”
My eyes drift around the men watching me with interest. “The instant I become Nikolai’s, I become a bratva. That means I’m as much your family as I am Nikolai’s. When one of us goes down, we all go down. That’s the bratva way. So you need to make a choice. Either fight alongside me to bring Nikolai home or walk away like a coward. Those are your only two options.”
I dart into the car Trey’s commanding, denying anyone the chance of seeing my tears. I’m not crying because I’m afraid of what state I’ll find Nikolai in. It is the roar of his men as they prepare for battle.
My speech inspired them as much as Nikolai’s honor does. They’re going to bring him home no matter the cost—either dead or alive.
The last part of my statement kills me more than the pain stabbing my stomach.
20
“There!”Maddox points to a divot in the dusty field. It is a similar groove to what tires make when the driver brakes hard.
“Does anything around here seem familiar?”
I leave the vehicle to deliberate Trey’s question more thoroughly. The landscape is different than I recalled in my memory, but we did flee in the middle of the night, so the visibility was poor.
“Over here,” Zoran shouts from his post on the edge of a deep gorge.
Rock crumbles beneath my feet when I and thirty of Nikolai’s men lean over a crumbling rockface to take in a burnt-out truck a hundred yards down.
“He’s here,” I whisper when a sense of home overwhelms me.
“Be careful,” Asher demands when I track down a narrow path on the side of the gorge.
“Get rope, water, and a hoist,” Trey instructs him before following after me.
Although Asher isn’t a fan of being bossed around, he takes Trey’s dominance in stride—barely.
Since Trey’s feet are wider than mine, he has to use the vines and trees growing out of the rock sideways to maintain his footing. Watching him trudge through the hostile landscape has my second memory of the day smacking into me. . .
“Don’t move.” Nikolai’s words are separated by painful breaths, but they also can’t hide the urgency of his statement.
My head is thumping so bad, you’d swear I’ve been knocked out for hours, but the Russian accents above my heads prove that isn’t the case. The men responsible for forcing our truck over the edge are shining spotlights down on us, wanting to ensure the gorge did what they couldn’t. If it weren’t for a group of trees growing through the cracked rocks, they would have spotted us.
Unhappy with the crumpled remains of the truck, a thick voice says, “Send someone down there to make sure they’re dead.”
The crunching of rocks underfoot sounds through my ears a few seconds later. A young boy barely of teen years slowly makes his way down a goat track etched in the side of the gorge. He has a rope wrapped around his waist, but that’s as far as his safety measures go.
“Shh.” Nikolai presses his finger to my lip.
When I nod, he sneaks closer to the boy minutes from discovering our hidey hole. I have no clue what his plan is, but I’m reasonably sure it won’t end well for the teen.
Just as Nikolai is about to pounce, a massive explosion lights up the gorge. The blast is so epic, the smell of singed hair lingers in my nostrils.
“Woohoo!” The teen throws his arms into the air. He acts like an A-grade asshole, like the loss of our lives is worth celebrating. He’s lucky the explosion coincides with his exit, or it would have been me pouncing on him unaware.
The flames roaring up the gorge dim to barely a campfire brightness before the spotlights shining above our heads fade. Within seconds, we’re left in silence. All I hear is the noise of Nikolai collapsing.
