She doesn't ask who I am. She doesn't ask how I know her name. She's moving toward me before I finish the sentence, like she's been waiting her whole life for someone to say exactly those words.
I take her hand. It's small and cold and it grips mine like a drowning woman grips a rope.
“Stay behind me. Stay close. Don't stop moving unless I stop moving.”
She nods. She doesn't waste breath on questions.
We make it three steps into the hallway before the villa wakes up completely. Alarms sound, a constant wailing as all the lights switch on.
Another shout goes up somewhere above us, then another, and I know instantly that a lot of men are going to die tonight. And I don’t want to be one of them.
“Behind me,” I say again, and push her back against the wall with one arm while I put two rounds into the first man who comes around the corner.
It gets loud after that. Loud the way I planned for and hoped to avoid, loud the way every extraction threatens to go the second the clock runs out. I clear the stairwell in a sequence of motion I don't have to think about, body first, mind following, each shot economical because ammunition is finite and the men keep coming.
I feel the bullet before I hear the shot that sends it. A punch of heat and pressure low in my side, spinning me half a step off my line, and I absorb it the way I've absorbed worse in the past, breathing through it, keeping my feet, keeping the gun level. Pain is data. Pain tells you where you're hurt, how badly and how much time you have before it starts to matter. This one tells me I have time. At least enough to get the target out.
Iris makes a sound behind me, sharp and wordless, and her hand finds my arm, gripping hard enough to bruise.
“You've been shot.”
“I'm fine. Move.”
We come out into the courtyard and Salvatore Ramunno is standing there in a robe like a man who thinks his own house will protect him, flanked by two men with rifles raised and murder in their faces. He's the one. I know him from the photographs, the surveillance, the intercepted calls, the man who decided the Orlov sister was worth more as a bargaining chip than as a living person with a family who loves her.
He looks at Iris the way a man looks at property he's about to lose, and I know now is the moment I have to act. Anything else will be too late.
I put both his men down before either of them thinks to pull the trigger.
Ramunno doesn't run. He's smart enough to know he won't make it, and stupid enough to think that standing his ground buys him something. It doesn't. Not with me.
I cross the courtyard and take his hand before he can lift it, and I don't ask him a single question, because I already have everything I need. I press him back against the stone wall with a forearm across his throat, and I take the knife from my belt. He struggles against me when I find the ring on his smallest finger, the heavy gold signet that marks him as a man who believed himself untouchable.
He screams once, high and short, before I clamp a hand over his mouth and finish it.
I pocket the finger with the ring still on it. A message, the kind men in this world understand better than words. This is what happens when you touch an Orlov. This is what's left of the man who tried.
I let him drop to the ground cradling his bloody hand. Then use my pistol to shoot him in the head.
Iris hasn't looked away. There are no more men standing between us and the gap in the wall, and the adrenaline that's been carrying me starts to ebb, taking my strength with it.
“We need to move,” I say, and my voice comes out thinner than it should.
“You're bleeding everywhere,” she says. “You can barely stand.”
“We have to get to the boat. Directly north of here.” I hand her my compass and she hold it to the moonlight and turns it until the needle lies directly over north.
I make it through the vineyard rows on will alone, one hand pressed to my side, the other still holding hers, because somewhere in the last four minutes I stopped being able to imagine letting go of it. The world is starting to tilt at the edges, colors bleeding into each other the way they do when blood loss starts being a problem, and I focus on the only fixed point I have left, which is the small, fierce hand wrapped around mine, pulling me forward instead of waiting for me to lead.
Iris
The vineyard rows blur past in strips of dark green. All I can hear is my own heartbeat slamming against my ribs and the wet, uneven sound of Yakob's breathing beside me.
He's slowing down.
I feel it in his hand before I understand it with my head, the grip that was iron a minute ago going soft, his fingers loosening around mine like he's forgetting why he's holding on. His steps are dragging now, one boot catching on a vine root, and I catch him before he goes down, my shoulder jamming up under his arm, my knees buckling with the sudden weight of a man twice my size.
"Hey." My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to. "Hey, no. You don't get to do that."
