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Delaney’s eyes redden above the tape.
Igor laughs, a wet, satisfied sound, and lowers his pistol a few degrees. “Bring the documents,” he says. “And a pen.”
A man peels off toward a table, and up on the second-floor gantry a shadow slithers toward the stairs. The captors around the room relax by a fraction, their shoulders dropping, their muzzles dipping toward the floor.
That fraction is all I will get, and I hope to God it is enough.
Delaney’s eyes find mine, and something reverent passes between us without a word. She shifts incrementally, by the smallest degree, toward the right edge of her chair, testing how far the ropes give.
Yelena doesn’t notice. Victory is already spreading back across her face, and her guard has fallen with it.
I step forward, into the open center of the room, and every gun in the place swings toward me at once, and my sudden advance sets their nerves jangling. I pull all of their attention onto myself and hold it there.
Delaney kicks off the floor with both bound feet, crashing her whole chair sideways into Yelena’s legs. Yelena screams and loses her balance.
The two of them go down together in a tangle, and Yelena’s pistol skids away across the concrete, out of reach.
Igor’s arm comes up, his gun tracking toward Delaney where she lies on the floor, and I have already charged.
28
DELANEY
A gunshot tears the air open, and I watch the bullet come for me, frozen on the floor, still tied to the toppled chair, less some kind of princess than a prisoner, with nowhere to go.
Lev lunges in front of me before it lands, crushing me into the heat of his body and turning his back to the room.
The bullet grazes his shoulder and slams into the concrete pillar behind us, spitting gray dust, and my stomach drops. My heart nearly bursts through my ribs.
“Are you hurt?” he asks, his voice low and ragged against my ear. Even now, even shot at, his concern lands on me first, as though I’m the only thing worth guarding in this building.
The whole factory erupts into chaos around us. Gunfire cracks from every direction, men shout in garbled bursts, and the far door is kicked open as bodies drop to the concrete. The gunpowder chokes the back of my throat, and bile climbs up to meet it.
Lev covers me completely with his body, and his hands work fast. He rips the tape from my mouth in one quick, painless tug and cuts through the bindings at my wrists and ankles, and I can finally drag in a full, stuttering breath.
“Don’t be scared,” he says quietly, almost a whisper, and he strokes my head once, slow, the way you gentle a spooked animal. His calm reaches down into my panic and quiets it, and it is all I can don’t to cling to him.
He grabs my chin with a thumb and forefinger. There is a focused stillness in his eyes, as though the room vanishes and the war going off around us doesn’t exist and I’m the only thing in the whole world worth looking at. My fear loosens its grip a little.
Igor’s men are all down now, the worst of the worst lying still, but Igor’s wheelchair sits toppled and empty on its side. The sight of it twists my stomach hard, and his threats still ring in my ears.
“The old man,” I gasp out.
“Yuri will find him,” Lev says coldly. The threat is not fully gone, then.
I try to stand, fumbling for balance, and my numb legs fold under me at once. Lev catches me around the waist. Over his shoulder I glimpse Yelena hauling herself up off the floor, a gash seeping blood across her temple.
She turns toward the gun lying on the greasy concrete, and the sight of it freezes the blood in my veins. I scream a warning at him.
Lev spins as Yelena brandishes the gun, the barrel swinging toward me, her pupils blown out with hate. Her lips move, contorting around some final, hateful thing.
“You ruined everything,” Yelena says, and her voice has a cool edge to it. “You little bitch.”
The whole world drags torturously down into slow motion. I see her finger squeeze the trigger, and I see Maksim lunge from the side, shouting, too far away to reach the muzzle in time.
Lev throws himself in front of me, and the bullet punches into his body. His whole frame goes rigid for one endless heartbeat, like something in him has turned off.
Maksim fires like the reaper himself, and Yelena jerks and staggers backward. She stares down at the red spreading across her front as though she cannot understand what it is, and then she folds and collapses in a boneless sprawl that makes her look like a sack of meat.
