Zane protests, but I can barely hear her. My brain is going a hundred miles a minute. Did my father send the men I asked for? If he did, why the fuck would they be opening fire on Maya and the Irish?
Or is it Lebedev who’s come out to play?
Fuck!He wasn’t supposed to know we were coming. We were smart. Careful.
Unless Maya led us into some kind of a massacre…
We break into the open, and I stride for the cars. There aren’t any apart from ours and Fitz’s—so whoever’s waging war was lying in wait. But they weren’t smart enough to block us in.
“Nik,” Zane says urgently. She’s resisting as I steer her toward the passenger side of the car. “We can’t leave her. Iwon’tleave her—”
I take Zane by the shoulder and pin her to the car, tearing my gaze from the sporadic, distant muzzle flashes to her eyes. Her beautiful, fierce eyes—which right now, are filled with a helpless, determined kind of rage.
“You are not dying like this,” I say, my voice rigid and brittle enough to break. She must see the open fear in my face, because for a moment, she stops resisting. “Get in the car.”
“No.”
“I will fucking carry you if I have to.”
“Nik.” She grabs the front of my shirt, giving me a gentle but firm shake, as though to sober me. My flailing mind hones in on her face. For an instant, despite the chaos, I’m grounded. “I am making my own choices.”
Her voice is soft, almost broken. But the sheer will in her eyes glows like an inferno, and for a moment, I see the brilliant, blazing young girl I grew up loving. The girl I told myself I couldn’t miss. The girl I thought I’d never see again, much less get a shot at falling in love with all over again.
“Go!”
The voice comes from shockingly close. Zane and I turn in time to see Maya bolting full-tilt for the car. Zane lunges for her, but there are silhouettes down the aisle of storage units. I register guns raising, sharp voices, a shout of pain, the endless echo of loosed bullets.
I open the car door and shove Zane in, slamming and locking it before she can break out and get herself killed. She beats her palms against the window. I barely hear her muffled screams.
I have the driver’s door open. “Get in,” I say to Maya, but she may not be close enough to me to hear.
Or maybe she is. I don’t know. Because at that exact moment, she flies forward, slamming face-down on the pavement with a cry. She twists, gripping her side, where a bloom of dark blood is spreading rapidly over her shirt.
My back slams against the side of the car. My brain flails for explanation. I pop off a few gunshots, aiming into the dusky dark with eyes narrowed. One of the silhouettes collapses with a bellow. As my eyes peel the landscape, I see Fitz on the ground, body splayed and blood spreading in a viscous pool beneath him.
“Don’t come back for me,” snarls Maya with visceral clarity. She’s far enough I couldn’t reach her, but those words cut straight through the noise. “Let them kill me.”
It’s then that Zane grabs me. She’s scrambled up to the front from the backseat, and her grip is hard enough to bruise. I let her pull me in.
“Maya!” she screams, climbing past me.
But she stops short at the sight of the men rushing toward us. There are ten of them or more, continuing to flood out of the darkened end of the storage lot. Zane goes pale. Half on my lap, she slams the door shut.
“Get in the passenger seat,” she says, her voice white hot with rage or fear.
“Zane—”
“Get in the fucking passenger seat.” This sentence emerges barely a growl, and with some strain, I obey.
Gunfire peppers the lot, exploding through the left-facing windows of the car. Glass sprays over us. We duck in tandem, Zane plunging the key into the ignition, whipping around, and pinning her foot to the floor.
“Hold on.”
I do, but the force of her full-throttle reverse still throws me forward. She skids past Fitz’s cars, past row after row of storage containers, flipping a violent U when we hit the road. I think the car’s going to flip, she turns and accelerates so fast. Her deft confidence, her cool silence, are chilling.
“Who?” she says, the one word full of enough hate to kill a man.
“Lebedev.” There is no other option. “He could have figured it out a thousand ways. We should have been more careful. We shouldn’t have let Maya near the fucking lake house.”
