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“You’d better hope not, comrade, because you have clearly fallen for her wiles.”
Now I wish I’d shot something more than his hand. Vasily is a dick with a capital D.
Vasily adjusts the cuffs of his dress shirt and looks over at Daniel. “Are you done fucking at the moment?”
“Yeah, having you show up has effectively killed any sort of hard-on I might have had,” Daniel says in a dry voice. “And Regan can be trusted. I won’t have you saying shit about her, okay? She’s a fighter, and she’s with me. She’s not leaving my side.”
God, I love hearing him say those things. For that, he’s totally getting a blow job as soon as I get him alone.
“So you want to take her to Hudson’s compound?” Vasily snorts. “It is, as the Americans say, your funeral.”
“You know where Hudson is?” Daniel looks a little surprised. “How’d you manage that?”
“While you were fucking, I pull strings and grease palms.” Vasily’s expression is utterly cold, and he shoots another look of blame at me. “It is not hard to find people to notice a snow-pale man with a fetish for blond women from North America who arms himself with dozens of mercenaries.”
I frown at his words. “Did . . . did you say snow pale?”
Vasily’s gaze moves to me, his eyes slits. “Da.”
My heart begins to thump erratically in my chest, and I feel my skin prickle with an all-too-familiar fear. I lick my lips and then gesture, asking, “Short, white-blond hair? Pale eyes and pale skin? About this tall?” I gesture a few inches above my head. “Wears light-colored suits and sunglasses indoors?”
“You know this man?”
“That’s Mr. Freeze,” I whisper through numb lips. “The one who wants me back once I’ve been ‘broken in.’ He’s the one watching the embassy, waiting for someone to drop me off.”
Daniel’s arm tightens around my waist, noticing my fright. “He’s not going to get you. I promise that.”
“So,” Vasily says, “we leave her here, and you and I pay Hudson a visit. We retrieve this hacker and we find out more information about your sister. Everyone is happy.”
“Wait, no,” I cry out and cling to Daniel. This time, I’m smashing his face against my breasts, but I don’t care. “You can’t leave me here. You have to take me with you.”
Daniel’s voice is muffled against my breasts. “Fighter baby, you know I wouldn’t ask you to stay behind if it wasn’t safe, but—”
“No! You’re not abandoning me.”
“Regan—”
“I’m going with you.” Vasily being here has made me all edgy again, and I have a feeling I’m going to be clinging to Daniel harder than normal. Even the thought of Daniel leaving the room for five minutes and being here alone with Vasily is enough to make my skin prickle with gooseflesh. “You can’t leave me behind. You can’t. You promised.”
Daniel sighs. “I know. I know. We’ll think of something. It’s . . . fuck. It’s not safe, okay?”
“When has any of this been safe?” I ask him.
Vasily snorts.
“I’m going,” I say stubbornly.
“You are not invited,” Vasily says to me.
“If you leave me here, I’ll follow you,” I say, fighting the panic that’s rising. He can’t leave me behind. Not after all this. He can’t. If he does, I know I’m going to turn a corner and see Mr. Freeze lurking there, waiting for me.
“You heard the lady,” Daniel says. “She goes.”
Vasily spits out another phrase in Russian, and Daniel flips him the bird. They look ready to come to blows, staring down each other. After a tense moment though, Vasily throws his hands up, conceding.
• • •
Daniel peers down the scope of his rifle, scanning the compound far below. “That’s thirty-one,” he says. “Which means there will be more inside.”
The three of us are perched inside one of the hovels in Monkey Hill. We stopped by Luiz’s place, picked up our papers, and then headed back to the slums. Or at least, we did after both men tried to talk me out of going again.
I refused. I’m not leaving Daniel’s side. I won’t feel safe until he delivers me back to my doorstep in Minneapolis, so why does it matter that we’re heading to someplace dangerous? Everywhere is dangerous.
Once in the slums, Daniel paid someone to let us make use of his place for a few hours. Vasily guards the door, an enormous handgun held high as he scans the hallway. I’m crouching next to Daniel by the window, a piece of scratch paper in hand as I mark an X onto my sketch of Hudson’s compound. I have an X every place that Daniel has found a soldier.
My paper is littered with Xs.
“Thirty-two,” Daniel murmurs. “One hiding in the stairwell. Fuck, the man has an army with him. Paranoid son of a bitch.”
I make a mark on my paper and look over at Daniel. He’s still squinting down the scope of his rifle, monitoring things. “So what does this mean?”
