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“What are we waiting for?” Dmitri asked, voice strained after the tight hold Gregor had had on his throat.
“Updates,” Gregor replied.
“You can’t have taken the whole house.”
“Oh, we booby trapped the house this morning,” Gregor said. “Those men who were loyal to you. They’re all dead.”
Dmitri got to his feet, but hands pushed him back down. Two of the defectors were positioned behind him, his back-tied hands rendering him helpless. With the magic running through their restraints, there was no shifting either. She struggled with hers, but whenever she tried to get free, all she got for it was a stinging sensation of the wires digging further into her skin.
There was the sound of steps approaching. For a moment she thought it was Martha, but a different woman entered the room. Younger, black locks styled into a perfectly wavy hairdo; her eyes so green they looked neon. She wasn’t human. She wasn’t a dragon either. Perhaps she was one of the fae. They rarely left their sanctuaries, but she’d heard stories of stray ones who dared to venture out into the world of humans. Yes, she looked fae to Alina.
The woman spoke something in Gregor’s ear, and he smiled, nodded. Gregor turned his gaze on Dmitri, but where Alina had expected a smug expression, there was quiet fury there.
“Where are they?” he asked.
Dmitri couldn’t hide the triumph that crossed his face at the understanding that Misha had succeeded, and the family was safe.
“You think I’ll tell you?” Dmitri laughed in Gregor’s face.
Gregor stared at him for a handful of seconds before he rose to his feet, walked around the table, raised the gun without barely taking aim but directing it at Dmitri, and fired it without pause.
Alina screamed out her protest, getting to her feet to get to Dmitri, but strong hands grabbed her from behind and pulled her back against the intimidatingly hard chest of one of the henchmen. She thought she was going to break free of the wires so that she could breathe her fire on Gregor’s hateful form, she felt the fury like it was a living, breathing thing inside of her, but no such strength manifested and she was stuck bearing witness.
Dmitri was far from dead, but there was a crimson stain beginning to soak through the gray fabric of his pants where Gregor had shot him in the thigh. Dmitri clenched his jaws together at the pain, his face going red with the self-restraint as he kept himself from vocalizing his pain.
“Tell me or die horribly,” Gregor said, matter of fact.
“You’regoing to die horribly,” Dmitri gritted out.
Gregor shook his head at him.
“These aren’t normal bullets. Your body won’t just reject them out of you and heal itself. You get that right? Or are you really as thick as they say?”
If Dmitri’s stare could kill, Gregor would have been a pile of ash on the ground. Alina watched the future ruling head of the Kuznetsov family as he slowly got to his feet in front of this lowlife scumbag intruder, no matter the injury. Drawing himself into his full height he stood a head taller than Gregor.
“Well, fuck,” Gregor smirked. “You’re higher up than me. Congratulations. Like the view?”
Dmitri pulled his head back and smashed it into Gregor’s, who went down on his knees with a wail, dropping the gun on the floor. Dmitri was tugged back by three of the men, one of them speaking to him in a familiar way that made Dmitri turn his fury at him.
“Fucking traitor!” Dmitri screamed, tackling the man to the floor.
Alina stayed back, watching the short brawl as Dmitri was pulled onto his feet and the man stood back, clutching his left side where Dmitri had hit him shoulder-first. Then she saw the blood down Dmitri’s pant leg.
“For God’s sake, he’s bleeding,” she said to Gregor, who was still kneeling on the ground, clutching his head.
He huffed, rose to his feet with a grunt.
“Find a room to lock them away in,” he told one of the men. “And give her a first aid kit. Not much you can do except stop the bleeding and have the wound fester under the bandages. Because whether you stop the bleeding or not—that wound will rot.”
She clenched her jaws together, wishing she could headbutt him too, but she feared he’d shoot her as well and then where would they be?
The bedroom they were brought to went in soft blues and gold. It wasn’t as big as hers had been but had an en suite, into which she immediately went, once her hands were untied. She poured Dmitri a glass of water from the faucet, hearing the man who’d been dragging Dmitri’s by one tied-up arm say something she couldn’t discern before he left.
The bedroom door closed.
She didn’t hear the lock click and assumed there would be men posted outside of it for the remainder of their stay. Delightful.
Dmitri was sitting on the bed when she entered from the bathroom, legs up, hands thankfully untied. He was tearing his pantleg in half, using the bullet hole as a starting point. He was still bleeding profusely.
