AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Go time.
Wordlessly, the two of us draw our weapons. Malice nods and slides forward a bit, still well hidden but with a better view to aim.
He takes a breath, lines up his gun, then fires.
It’s a clean shot, and it should hit the mark. But a fraction of a second before he pulls the trigger, a car backfires on a street nearby. Ilya tenses, glancing over his shoulder—and that movement is enough to bring his head out of the path of the bullet. It grazes his temple, and he grunts, whipping his head back.
With a speed born from years of training, he recovers from his shock in an instant, yanking a gun from the inside of his jacket and firing back in the direction the bullet came from.
“Fuck!” Malice curses, firing blindly around the edge of the building as another of Ilya’s shots hits the dumpster with a metallic ping. “Shit, we gotta go. Go, go!”
He fires again, then shoves me backward. We lunge out of our hiding spot and take off running down the alley behind the hotel, moving as fast as we can to keep our distance.
Behind us, I can hear furious feet pounding on the pavement, and the sound of Ilya swearing in Russian as he chases after us.
We can’t let him see our faces. If he finds out who’s after him, we’re fucked.
We dash down the alley and then turn into another, jumping over a small chain-link gate that blocks off part of the alley for delivery trucks or something. Malice vaults it, and I follow, and we tear down the side street, sprinting back to where we left our car.
A bullet whizzes past my head, and I grit my teeth as I put on an extra bit of speed. We vault another gate, and I hiss a curse as a sharp bit of metal stabs into my thigh when I come down on the other side. The cut burns, but there’s no time to stop and make sure it’s okay.
We burst out onto the street where we left the car, racing toward it and leaping inside. Malice revs the engine and peels out, and I glance back behind us. Just as we turn the corner onto a cross street, I catch a glimpse of Ilya running out onto the road we were just on.
“Fuck!” Malice snarls the word as his hand balls up into a fist, slamming against the steering wheel. “God fucking dammit.”
I grit my teeth, because I feel the same fucking way. We were so close. If that shot had hit its mark, we would be done with this shit. We’d have Ilya down, and the only person who seems to be interested in coming after us for killing Nikolai would be dead.
But instead, we now have another problem.
“Did he see us?” Malice glances into the rearview mirror. “Did he get a good look at the car?”
“I don’t think so.” I play it all back in my mind, trying to be sure. “I don’t think he saw our faces either. So he shouldn’t be able to figure out who we are.”
Malice mutters a curse in Russian, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “Yeah, but now he knows someone’s after him. His guard is up, and we lost the element of surprise.”
I nod, frustration filling me. He’s right. We had a golden moment, a perfect chance, and it fell through our fingers. Now it’s going to be harder to get to Ilya next time. He was already being careful to cover his tracks, and now he’ll be even more wary. People like him don’t usually survive long unless they’re paranoid and powerful, after all.
“He probably has a lot of enemies,” I say, trying to find some silver lining on this pile of shit. “Maybe he won’t put two and two together that this attack was about Nikolai.”
Malice doesn’t seem to share my forced optimism. He scowls at the road ahead of us, shaking his head. “Maybe, but I think he’s just gonna assume it’s related. His brother dies, and then a few weeks later, someone tries to take him out too? That shit’s a little too coincidental.”
He has a point there, and I sigh, slumping down in the passenger seat. My thigh hurts from where the metal bit into it, and there’s a rip in my pants, blood already seeping into the fabric.
“We’ll still get him,” Malice says, and it’s the voice he uses when he means fucking business. “We’ll still find a way to kill him. I don’t care if we have to stake out every goddamned hotel in Detroit, we’ll find a way to end this. We can close this goddamned chapter once and for all.”
I nod, holding back my worries, since there’s no reason to speak them out loud. As nice as it would be to put a cap on this whole thing and close the chapter on our revenge for our mother’s death, it feels like shit is spiraling out of control.
Every move we make ends up getting fucked somehow, and there are too many enemies piling up and crawling out of the woodwork.
Eventually, it might be too much.
44
WILLOW
It feelslike it’s been forever since Malice and Ransom left.
Victor has himself barricaded in his room, and I don’t think he’d be happy if I knocked on his door and asked him to keep me company until his brothers return home, so instead, I end up pacing in the living room, jumping every time I hear a car go by the warehouse. Each time it’s not them, it puts me in a worse mood, and I bite my lip, dragging it between my teeth.
