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“That’s for the track scholarship, and the life I would’ve had without you,” I told him darkly, before moving to the next knee.
With the next shot, his cry was less.
“That’s for fucking my brother up beyond recognition, and his mother too,” I said remorselessly. I moved my gun up, aiming for his shoulder this time.
“This is Fiona, who deserved the world.”
Viktor didn’t even react the next time, he simply stared at me. A bag of shattered bone and blood, dead without knowing it.
I moved the gun over his heart. “This one you should have known better. You never should have touched her. The first time you said her name, I knew it would end like this. For Molly,” I whispered, and pulled the trigger.
The shot was deafening in the high-ceilinged room. It seemed to echo endlessly around the walls and around my head at the same time. I sagged back to my knees, and after a minute, Molly plowed into my side. I cradled her against me. Pressing my face into her hair, I kissed her head. My angel had saved me in the end. The smell of blood, piss, and death filled the air, and I pressed my face further against Molly’s hair to comfort myself with her scent.
“Kirill, you’re all right,” she muttered quietly against my arm.
I found my head shaking, and it quickly spread to my arms. “I’m not all right. I’m not all right at all after that.”
“Killing your father?”
“Seeing you here, in danger—” I blew out a breath and tried to get the snarling wolves of fear and madness under control inside me. “I’m not all right.”
A dark chuckle floated to me, and I stiffened.
“Well, here we are. Last men standing,” Nikolai called to me, and the metallic clink of a gun being picked up sent me shooting to my feet. I gained my stance and leveled the gun at him, just as he did the same.
I pushed Molly behind me. “Stay behind me,” I warned her in a tone not made for arguing with.
“Well,bratan? We come down to it.”
“We had a truce,” I reminded him, though it was pointless. We’d both known it was going to come to this, hadn’t we? I needed to buy time, though, and getting Nikolai talking would work.
“We did, and we worked so well together, didn’t we?” Nikolai laughed again. “I’m sorry I had to get your little princess involved, but there really was no other way. Sometimes, a job just takes three.”
“He gave me a choice, Kirill. He told me his plan, and I agreed,” Molly piped up.
Of course, she agreed. The woman was braver than the fiercest made man I’d ever met. “We’ll talk about that later. A hundred things could have gone wrong.”
“Yeah, so you could have died a hundred different ways.” Molly’s voice was resolute. “You asked me to wait for you, and I did. I am. But I’m not waiting around for you to get killed without trying to help.”
“You are absolutely infuriating,” I ground out, my eyes never leaving Nikolai. He was watching us with a guarded expression. “Stay out of the way now. I mean it, Molly. Only one of us is leaving here aspakhan, and it’s going to be me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Nikolai smirked, but his heart wasn’t in it. He looked subdued; his normal maniacal psychopath energy was missing.
“Kirill, you don’t have to do this. Neither of you do. Work together. Why not?”
“We’d kill each other in a week,” I snapped.
“Well, that’s better than killing each other now, isn’t it?”
“I could never trust him. He brought you here tonight. He doesn’t know what it is to risk the most important thing to you.”
“Hey—I’m starting to feel left out of this conversation,” Nikolai cut in. “I say we both shoot, and settle who’s the best shot once and for all.”
“No! Please don’t. You’re brothers,” Molly cried.
“Don’t get involved, Princess.” I tried to sound reassuring.
I didn’t plan on dying at Nikolai’s hand, but I realized in that second that I wasn’t sure I could kill him. Somehow, in ending Viktor, I’d found the bottom to my darkness.
