Page 70 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“… You’ll have to go through me because I won’t be moving, Kirill, I won’t⁠—“

“Suit yourself.” Then I hear Kirill laugh, soft and final.

I open fire.

The first two men drop before the rest have begun to turn, and then Lev’s firing past my shoulder, deafening me. The twins shoot, and the corridor becomes a killing tube, muzzle flash strobing the walls white.

I race forward into the guns that are turning my direction. A round tears my sleeve open along the arm, a line of heat for later. Another sparks off the doorframe beside my head, close enough to powder my cheek with plaster. I keep firing, and the air tastes like fireworks.

They die, all of them, in the space of four seconds.

I come through the ruined door with the smoke of the corridor still stinging my eyes. The fire burns low. Pasha is on the floor, gray as ash and too still. Galina lies over him, alive for now. Thea. Alive and upright and standing behind Klaus.

Where the fuck is⁠—

Kirill turns toward me from the inside corner, his gun already up. He tucked in there to avoid a stray shot from the hallway. His eyes meet mine across the room, and there is no fear in them, no anger. His barrel is not rising toward me. He fires a half-beat before I do.

I see his muzzle flash and put four rounds through him. Kirill goes down, his body flinging backward like a marionette getting jerked off stage. But he got his shot off. I saw it leave him. Somewhere in this room, in the half-beat that I was too slow.

I look to Thea. To the center of her, where his barrel was aimed. My heart stops in my chest, waiting to see the red.

There’s none. She’s not hit. She’s upright and staring at me, both hands rising toward her mouth.

And then I realize that my view of her is clear because Klaus no longer stands in front of her. He’s on the floor in front of her. His face, when he turns his head toward me, is not afraid. Only surprised. Young. Then, vacant.

Thea tries to lift him to his feet. But he’s too heavy. Dead weight.

29

THEA

“Rappaport,” Maxim says, and the name’s an order. “The cottage. Now, run,” and two men are gone out the ruined door before the sentence finishes leaving him.

Klaus blinks back into existence. “Dad, I’m fine.”

He’s not fine.

Klaus is on the floor where he slid, propped against the desk leg. One hand is pressed to the red spreading across his shirt. He’s doing the most Klaus thing I’ve ever seen him do, which is lie about it.

“It went through, it’s fine, check on—” He nods at Pasha, and his voice is thinner than he wants it. “Check on him first. He’s worse.”

Just a blink, one long slow blink, and Max’s face absorbs that the son who sold him out took a bullet meant for me.

No time for sentiment, though. I’m already past both of them, on my knees in the blood at Pasha. Galina has both hands stacked on his stomach, pressing with all her weight, and the blood’s coming up between her fingers anyway.

Her voice trembles. “I cannot stop.”

His face has gone grayish. His eyes are open and moving but slow, like a man underwater looking up at the light.

“It’s not even slowing with pressure,” Galina says, and her voice cracks. The crack in it scares me worse than all the blood on the rug, because I trust her instincts. “I press and I press, and it does not slow. Thea, it does not slow.”

Lev drops down across from me. He shrugs off his suit jacket, balls it, and shoves it under Galina’s hands for more pressure. His movements have a competence that surprises me, fast and certain, checking Pasha’s pulse at the throat with two fingers. Then he tilts his chin to open the airway.

Lev has done this before.

“Entry low, no exit,” Lev says, flat and rapid. “He’s bleeding inside where I cannot press. Rappaport has to stop it. We only have to keep him breathing until he gets here.”

“How can I help?”