“Ilana,” he said quietly. His voice was low, steady, lethal calm, running under every syllable. “Breathe.”
I shook, continuing to sob while I clung to him like a drowning person. “They’re going to take me—”
“No,” he said, pulling me behind him. “They will not. Nobody can take you anywhere while I am here. Do you understand?”
The rain came down harder as the men stepped forward. I nodded, my heart already believing him.
Scar smiled again. “Chernykh. Didn’t expect you here.”
“You should’ve,” Avgust said, voice dropping into something colder than ice.
My pulse thundered as I tried to grip his arm, but he pushed me backwards gently without turning to look at me. “Stay behind me.”
“Avgust—”
“Behind. Me.”
His hand slid to his holster as the scarred man’s eyes widened. “Wait—”
Avgust didn’t.
The gunshot cracked through the air like a lightning strike, slicing through the rain and splitting my breath in half, and for several heartbeats, the world became nothing but sound and shock. I flinched so hard my knees nearly buckled, the echo bouncing off the empty road.
The scarred man jerked violently as the bullet hit him, his body twisting with the force. He stumbled back before collapsing into the wet gravel with a heavy, sickening thud that sent rainwater splashing up around him.
The second man shouted something I couldn’t understand, but it didn’t matter because Avgust was already moving again. His stance widened, and his shoulders lowered, the gun steady in his hand as if it were simply an extension of his arm rather than a weapon capable of ending lives in an instant.
“Don’t,” the second man barked, lifting his hands as though surrendering would erase what had already happened here.
Avgust fired again.
This time, I saw the flash. Sharp. Bright. Almost beautiful in a horrifying way. I saw the man jerk back, arms flailing as the shot punched into his chest. He dropped to his knees first, a strangled sound escaping him, before collapsing face-first into the rain-soaked asphalt.
Silence followed, but it wasn’t real silence. It was heavy, charged, vibrating with the aftershocks of violence, with the rain now pounding harder, soaking my hair, my clothes, and tracing lines down my face that I couldn’t tell apart from tears.
He turned around slowly, lowering his gun but not holstering it yet. His eyes swept over me, taking in my shaking hands, my uneven breaths, the panic written across me so clearly I didn’t bother pretending otherwise.
“Ilana, he said, voice deep, steady, and unhurried. “Look at me.”
I tried. God. I tried.
But my gaze kept dragging back to the two bodies sprawled on the road, rain collecting in the folds of their jackets, mixing with blood until everything looked blurred and unreal.
“They were going to take me,” I whispered, my voice raw, cracking on the words. “They were going to—”
“I know,” he murmured, stepping closer and cupping the side of my face with a hand that was somehow steady despite pulling gunshots just a moment earlier. “You did the right thing running. But you ran in the wrong direction.”
I choked out a short, broken laugh, half hysteria, half disbelief. “There was no right direction.”
“There was,” he insisted, thumb brushing damp hair from my cheek. “Back to me.”
A shiver tore through me, not from the cold this time. “You can’t say things like that.”
“I just did.”
“Boss?” A man emerged from the shadows and I realized Avgust’s car was parked just behind us. I had seen the man around the house, but I did not know who he was.
“Yes, Mikhail?”
