That answered her unspoken question of where Grigoris was.
A second later, Gus went limp behind her, his knife dragging against her throat as he fell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Nikolett stirred beside him and Eric caught her hand as she reached for the bandage on her throat and chest. “Don’t touch it, Nikki baby,” he murmured.
She frowned, shifting uneasily. She glanced around, her eyes not quite focusing.
“Plane?” she murmured.
“Yes.” He kept his voice soothing. “We’ll be landing in half an hour.”
Given the size of the team Grigoris and Raphael had assembled to catch the Spaniard, they’d had enough people power to divide out tasks and get a lot of things done in the short number of hours since the moment the Spaniard crumpled to the floor, a tranq dart stuck in his back.
It wasn’t yet midnight, and their private plane was currently over Manchester on the way to the Isle of Man. The direct flight from Paris to his home was less than three hours. The plane was also now a mobile command center as the Masters’ Admiralty tried to unravel what the hell had just happened.
Raphael had warned Eric that it had taken ungodly amounts of money to bribe various air traffic controllers and airport executives to allow this last-minute, late-night flight. He didn’tcare. Eric would empty the society’s coffers to get the hell out of Paris and back to a place where he was in total control.
Bribes had also been needed in order for people to overlook that one of the passengers had been hauled on board unconscious and in chains.
“Where is everyone?” she murmured.
“They’re here. Doing what they need to do.”
Nikolett tried to turn to look behind them.
“Nikki, don’t.” He grabbed her but not in time.
She hissed in pain and sat back.
“No twisting,” he reminded her.
As Gus fell, his knife sliced a line diagonally down Nikolett’s neck. That cut wasn’t bad, more of a shallow scratch. But when the knife hit her clavicle, it had slid along the bone, peeling a large flap of skin away from her collarbone.
It had bled. Badly.
Eric’s life had flashed before his eyes several times as he leapt across the room toward her. He’d seen Grigoris drop silently onto the balcony and had been ready to move. At the time, he hadn’t known what kind of gun Grigoris held, and his greatest fear had been that Grigoris didn’t realize Nikolett was pressed against the target, and the bullet would go through both of them.
That fear had been easy to dismiss because Grigoris was simply too good for that. He wouldn’t shoot without knowing the shot was clean. That left the secondary fear that when the bullet entered the back of Gus’ skull, it would bounce around in there and exit at an angle, striking Nikolett.
Eric had a split second when he saw the red feathers on the back of the tranq dart as it shot through the air to process that Grigoris wouldn’t be shooting to kill, which brought its own kind of danger.
A voice at the back of Eric’s mind kept insisting that if Gus had wanted to, he could have slit Nikolett’s throat before the tranquilizer took effect.
It was very clear to everyone that the injury she did sustain hadn’t been deliberate. The fact that Gus had chosen not to hurt or kill her when he had the chance was something no one had mentioned aloud.
But he’d felt bone-deep fear the moment he saw her clutch her throat as red instantly stained her soft gray sweater.
The volume of blood had him convinced that Gus had managed to cut her throat as he fell. The only thing that stopped Eric from throwing himself dramatically off the balcony so he didn’t have to live without her was the fact that Nikolett—alive Nikolett rather than a zombie version—reached out to him as he skidded to his knees beside her.
With alarmingly calm movements, she’d grabbed his hand, pressed it over her upper chest and collarbone, said, “Ouch,” and then passed out.
She’d been stitched up by a French doctor who made dire predictions about needing a hospital but stopped talking when Eric snarled at her.
The pain meds they gave Nikolett had left her drowsy, so technically they’d boarded this plane with two unconscious passengers, but unlike Gus, Nikolett had been in his arms, not chained and dragged on.
She’d been drifting in and out of awareness most of the flight.
