Did she fight them both off? What did they do to her?
A plaintive whimper reaches my ears, cutting off the anger welling in me. The desperate sound sends a pang of something through my chest… which surprises me. I’m not my cousin Alex with his white-knight kink.
A woman in trouble has never mattered more to me than a man. People are people, and I rarely care about any of them. My upbringing taught me that only family is worth bleeding for.
But my family—if not already dead—is rapidly bleeding out in this alley.
Good.
“Get back.” Her shaky voice snaps my attention back to her, and I realize I may have been too hasty in writing her off because her hands drop and her feet shift into what can only be described as a trained fighting stance.
Now that her hands are no longer covering most of her face, the sensation of familiarity hits me again. The smear of blood she’s left behind can’t hide the nasty scrape on her cheek or the swelling on the side of her head.
She’s clearly terrified, but she’s not giving up, and I fight the urge to smile.
I respect that.
I lift my hands, palms out. “Take it easy. I’m not going to hurt you.”
A pink tongue sneaks out to lick her lips as her jaw juts out. She doesn’t believe me. I don’t blame her.
But… why hasn’t she screamed? Not that the bouncers at the front of the club would hear her with the club music pulsing through the front door, but someone walking by might.
Her uninjured hand reaches up, and she shoves the heavy fall of dark hair off her face, giving me my first unobstructed view.
She’s beautiful—wounded, covered in blood and still not surrendering. There’s a warrior in this girl.
I scan her hazel eyes and bow-shaped mouth trying to decide what I can say to keep this from escalating. If I have to subdue her, I don’t want to hurt her further.
Her head tilts like she can’t figure out what I’m doing, and that’s when I see them… the web of scars tracing from her jaw up to her ear and down the delicate line of her throat.
Sera Worthington.
My gaze drops briefly to my father’s corpse. Suddenly the scene makes brutal sense. I knew she worked for her brother’s firm—Elite Security—but I’d assumed it was behind a desk.
I can hear Alex’s wife, Madison, lambasting me for the sexist assumption.
There’s a shift in the air, and I sense more than see her make the move to run. Her eyes go past my shoulder to the opening of the alley behind me. Her gaze flicks to the side, giving her thoughts away. When her jaw hardens and she shifts her weight on her back leg, I realize she knows the door behind her is locked, as well as I do. Her eyes glitter as adrenaline once again floods her system, and I have the stray thought she is going to have a hell of a headache tomorrow from the whiplash her adrenal system has taken tonight.
She’s preparing to fight her way out. And fuck if it’s not hot.
For one insane second, I think I might be in love.
Blyat. I’m not that fucked up.
I hope.
I shove the ridiculous thoughts away.
I’m not Alex, falling in love at first sight, especially in a dingy alley with dead bodies and with a bloody, traumatized woman.
And I don’t have time for anything but containing the massive fucking catastrophe in front of me.
My father—the most powerfulvorin the Kovalyov Bratva—is lying face down in his own blood behind one of our clubs.
My father is dead.
And so is she.
