I chose K.
I should have always chosen K.
A familiarthud, thud, thudbooms into my ears when for the quickest second, my eyes collide with K’s in the mirror. Although she appears to be staring straight at me, she doesn’t blink, move, or gasp in a shocked breath. She does nothing but peer at me blankly.
I can’t say I’m experiencing the same thing. The memories I lost crash back into me in an instant. K’s gallop down the stairs on the heels of a woman with oddly similar features. Her inability to light a match to send Vladimir to hell. Me burning her wounds when I slid into the jacuzzi with her on my lap. They all come flooding back in, and they maim me as much as the expression on K’s face a second before she lowers her mirrored brush to smash it against a set of drawers she’s seated in front of.
“Oh fuck,” Eight mutters at the same time I say the exact words in my head.
K is clutching a shard of glass in her hand. It’s only tiny, but it isn’t the size of her weapon I’m worried about. It is what she intends to do with it.
“Give me an orange.” I yank down the backpack on Eight’s back before digging my hand inside for an orange. I ribbed him when he packed oranges, disgusted he’d even consider eating a snack during the middle of a raid.
Now I get where he was going.
Now I understand.
“Come on, K,” I quietly beg when I roll the orange across the filthy floor, praying like fuck she spots it before any of the sorrow radiating out of her cell can transpire. “Look at the orange.”
I realize my error when my prayers fall on deaf ears.
K doesn’t trust anyone.
Not even me.
Ignoring the tightness of my jaw, I dig a second orange out of Eight’s backpack, rip out a big chunk of it with my teeth, swallow down the citrusy clump, then roll it toward K’s cell again. My heart launches into my throat when she peers down at the bitten orange within a second of it tapping her shoe. She gathers it up, almost trance-like before she swivels in her seat to face the direction the orange rolled from.
Although she stares straight at me, she doesn’t see me. She’s completely fucking gone. Her eyes are lifeless and blank, swallowed by her miserably bleak existence.
“Go!” Eight roars when we get word from Nikolai it’s time for us to move. We don’t use listening devices to communicate. The healthy discharge of machine guns and the potent scent of death guides us through every raid.
“Duchess,” I push out through a groan as I sprint for her cell, praying I’ll reach her before she can do any of the morbid things I see in her eyes.
She wants to die, to be free.
She most likely thinks she’s already dead.
I’ll prove her wrong. I’ll show her how your heart doesn’t have to beat in your chest to prove you’re alive.
Sometimes it thuds in your ears.
After taking down three men charging at me from the other end of the dungeon, I punch in the five-digit code Hunter assured me would open the digital lock on K’s cell, then throw open the heavily-weighted door keeping her hostage. Having no time to remove the glass from her hand she’s intending to drag down a vein in her neck, my palm takes on the brunt of the glass’s jab. She pierces it into my hand deeply before yanking it down with a groan, proving she wasn’t playing.
She truly wants to die.
As the undeniable scent of blood seeps into the air, K collapses. I catch her just before she hits the grubby ground with a thud, my nostrils naturally flaring to suck in her intoxicating scent.
With K held in close to my chest with one hand, and the other gripped on my gun, I gingerly make my way out of her room. I’d rather place her down and make sure the route is safe first, but there are too many objects she could hurt herself with if she were to come around while I was gone.
I also refuse to leave her alone.
I made that mistake three and a half months ago, and look what happened. The last of the light in her eyes has been stolen. I don’t know if she’ll ever get it back.
Partway down the almost black corridor, Eight raises his hand in the air. He fires into the dark two times, silencing the faintest conversation of two men talking in a foreign language before he gestures for me to keep moving.
The itch for a bloodbath treks through my veins when we race across a body-studded field. Nikolai’s crew went in quiet and heavy as planned. There are more bodies littering the grounds than there were when I was freed from captivity three years ago. I wouldn’t hold back my desires if K wasn’t my main priority. This isn’t a turf war. It’s an extraction.
Nikolai’s crew is once again saving one of their own.
