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I can hear the men moving further down the hallway towards the sound of the women screaming. There are gunshots and cries of both pain and terror. But it all fades away as I stretch onto my toes and kiss him.
“We’re going to get out of here,” I whisper against his mouth, tears pooling in my eyes.
I blink them back and hold my gun with two hands.
He nods and echoes my words. “We are going to get out of here.”
Luka makes like he is going to grab my gun, but then he thinks better of it and asks another of the Bratva members for his. He hands it over immediately.
“We have to get out of here,” Luka says.
I follow him for a second before I stop and pull away. “I need to go see if the women are okay.”
“Eve,” Luka groans. “Let the men handle it.”
I shake my head. “They are terrified. But if they see me, they may come with us. They will trust us more. I have to go check on them.”
“We need to make sure every member of the Cartel left in this building is dead,” Luka says.
“Then go. I will meet you when it is over.”
He stares at me, his green eyes wide and searching.
I pray I’m not going to have to fight him on this. That I’m not going to have to tell him once again that I can handle this. By now, I hope I have shown him that I can.
Luka steps forward, wraps a hand around my neck, and pulls me to his lips. The kiss is quick but fierce. He presses his forehead to mine once and then pulls away. “I’ll meet you when it is over.”
On his way out the door, he tells Grigory and a few other men to stick close to me, and I don’t mind. I want the backup.
Luka turns left and heads back towards the entryway while I go right, towards the sound of the dying gunfire.
By the time we get to the main holding room where all of the slaves were held the first day we were brought to the inn, the men in the Bratva are making small circles and checking corners for anyone they could have missed.
The women are nowhere to be seen.
With Grigory just behind me, I go through the back door and out onto the gravel behind the inn.
It is not meant for guests—just a loading and unloading zone with white vans scattered around, several of which have bullet holes in the sides.
I bend down, looking under the nearest van and then the one after that.
Have the guards already delivered all of the women? Are they gone? Am I too late?
Then, I hear a shift of the gravel. It could have come from me or Grigory walking around, but my instincts tell me otherwise. I walk around the corner of the building and see one final car parallel parked along a shallow curb. Peeking over the hood I see a flash of curly red hair.
“Maddie?”
The girl jerks upright, her blue eyes peering at me from behind the car. And then, in an instant, Maddie is running towards me like I’m the last life vest on a sinking ship.
She slams into me hard enough that every single one of my bruises complains, but I ignore it and hug her back with my free arm. “How many of you are left?”
“Some of the women were already gone when the men arrived,” she says through a cascade of tears. “We didn’t know who they were, but they were killing the guards, so we just ran.”
“They are good guys,” I say.
Technically, they are criminals, but in this situation, they are heroes. Absolute heroes.
Three other women crawl out from behind the car, crouching low. They are numbers ten through thirteen.
