“Shh. It’s okay. You’re here now.” He scans my face, seeking confirmation on his wary words. He still thinks he is dreaming.
“I’m here,” I assure him before lowering his hand to my stomach. “We’re here. We’re safe. You saved us.”
“No,Ahren,” he denies, shaking his head. “You saved me. More than once.”
His eyes reveal he means long before this weekend.
* * *
I maintain my strength the twenty minutes it takes for paramedics to arrive on scene, gurney Nikolai, and ship him to the closest hospital.
I maintain a brave front while doctors update us on the surgery Nikolai will require to extract the bullet from his shoulder and set his broken leg. I even manage to hide my pain while shadowing Nikolai’s bed to the operating room prepped especially for him.
It is only once he disappears from my view do the cramps ripping through my stomach nearly have me kissing the hard, tiled ground outside of the surgery department.
If it weren’t for Trey, the bump on the back of my head would be the only bump I’d be cradling the next nine months.
Epilogue
Four and a half years later. . .
Blood garglingin a windpipe is a fascinating noise. It sounds like death but from a person who hasn’t yet submitted to the fact they’re going to die. It’s their last beacon of hope. Their last endeavor to fight.
You shouldn’t delay the inevitable, though. Death will find you no matter how many years pass. You can’t hurt a man’s family and not suffer the consequences of your actions. It might take them a year to find you—it might even take four and a half—but no matter how often you glance over your shoulder, no matter how well you cover your steps, death will always be there, waiting.
Revenge isn’t something that must be immediately executed. But be warned, the longer revenge festers, the louder the monster inside a once-subdued man will roar.
The man hanging bloody and bruised in the basement of my compound was given plenty of notice. He was stared down and warned that his actions would not be forgotten. But instead of acting like a man, he hid like a coward.
It did him no good. His day before the judge, jury, and executioner has arrived. Rico is about to get his revenge.
Rico’s eyes hold the same devilish appearance they held when Justine discovered him barricading his family in a dingy room at the back of an old airport hangar. They’re just filled with hate now instead of the toxic mix of drugs the Vasiliev crew tried to subdue him with.
The dose they gave him should have been lethal. He had more drugs in his system than I sampled during the entirety of my teen years. He should have been dead, not pinning one of my men to the wall by his throat.
It’s a pity Maxsim’s men misunderstood the strength of a man in love. Just like myAhrenwent to the depths of hell for me, Rico stopped at nothing to keep his family safe. Delusional nightmares, a knife wound to the chest, and half a dozen men couldn’t stop him from safeguarding his family.
He did his job.
Other than a slight case of dehydration and malnutrition, Blaire and Eli were given a clean bill of health after their ordeal.
It was only Rico left suffering.
He wanted to hunt and kill. He wanted the men who hurt his family to suffer. Instead, he set aside his feelings for the greater good. He was so determined to stay by his wife and son’s bedsides, he made the doctors stitch his wound in their room.
They thought he was stubborn, that they’d never handle a more irrational man in their lifetime. They had no clue of the meaning “neurotic” until I entered their realm. . .
Just as my instincts saw me following Justine steps, they warned me something wasn’t right the instant the anesthesiologist began placing an oxygen mask over my mouth.
I’d had a countless number of operations in my childhood, so panic about going under the knife wasn’t the cause of my sweaty palms and erratic heart rate. It was something much greater than fear eating me alive.
My intuition was proven right when Trey burst into my operating room only seconds later. He didn’t say anything, but his ashen face spoke volumes. He had an expression on his face that could only mean one thing: myahrenneeded me.
I’d only removed half the cords dangling out of me when a much more urgent case was rushed into the operating room next to me. Justine was lying lifeless on a stainless steel table. Her pants were covered with bright red blood, and her arm was flopped over the side of the gurney.
The pain rocketing through my body relocated to my heart when I raced to her bedside. I was about to demand an update when a gloved up and ready-to-operate doctor entered the room. “What are we looking at?”
The man inserting a cannula into an extremely shallow vein in Justine’s arm replied, “Internal bleeding from a mass on the lower right side of her abdomen. Believed orthostatic hypotension. Blood pressure is 75/43, and oxygen levels are mid-seventies.”
