My hands shook so hard I couldn't even grip the steering wheel. I pressed them against my thighs until the tremors passed, then pulled out of the lot and drove.
Not home. Not to her apartment.
Instead I went south on I-35 with the windows down and the February air cutting through the car like a blade, because the cold was the only thing keeping me from pulling over and losing what was left of my mind.
I drove for two hours. No destination. No plan. Just the highway and the wind and the open wound in my chest.
Forty-eight hours.
I ran through my options, looking at it from every angle, every exit. Looking for any possible way out.
There weren't any.
Run. Fight. Hand her over. Those were my options.
None of these would work.
Or I could do what Viktor asked and forget I'd ever lost my heart to a blind woman who saw right through all of the bullshit to the man I was underneath. I could go back to my life.
I pulled off the highway and sat in the parking lot of a strip mall. There was a nail salon. A tax prep office. A pizza place with a HELP WANTED sign in the window. Normal people doing normal things while I sat in my car with forty-eight hours to either kill the woman I loved or figure out how to make the entire Russian Bratva believe I had.
My phone sat on the passenger seat. I stared at it.
Then I picked it up and made three calls.
I'm not going to say who I called. I'm not going to say what I asked for. Not yet.
What I will say is this: when I hung up after the third call, I sat in the car with the engine idling and my forehead on the steering wheel and my hands gripping it until my knuckles went white, and I understood with perfect clarity that whatever happened next, the man who'd walked into Viktor's office this morning was already dead.
What came out the other side would be something else entirely.
CHAPTER 19
MILO
Iwent to her that night.
I stood outside her building at eleven o'clock and stared up at her dark windows, and knew with absolute fucking certainty that I was going to climb those stairs and hold her one last time.
The stairwell smelled like Pine-Sol and boiled cabbage, and when I got to her door, I could hear music playing from inside her apartment. It was a piece I didn't recognize. Simple. Haunting. The kind of melody that sounded like a person saying goodbye.
I knocked.
The music stopped and I heard footsteps, then the deadbolt turning.
She opened the door and I watched the recognition move through her body. The slight lift of her chin as she caught my scent. The parting of her lips. The tension leaving her shoulders and then rushing back as her jaw set, because she was angry andrelieved in the same breath and didn't know which one to lead with.
"I thought you were dead," she said.
"I'm sorry. I texted you."
"That's your explanation?"
"No." I paused, searching for something that could possibly explain. "I don't have one."
Her hand found the doorframe. Gripped it. "Then why are you here?"
Because I might not get another chance.
