“Pakhan!”
“Down!”
A second shot cracks through the alley, then a third, then the answering roar of my men returning fire. Boots pound over wet pavement. Someone shouts in Russian. Someone else is screaming. But all of it sounds strangely far away.
My head swims. Rain hits my face in cool, relentless drops. It trickles into my eyes, over my mouth, down the side of my neck. I taste blood, though I can’t tell if it’s mine.
I blink hard and try to push myself up.
The world sways.
Then I see her.
At first I think she’s a trick of the rain, some fever-bright hallucination dragged loose by pain and memory. A woman stands above me, just beyond the blur of water and alley light, looking down at me with the faintest smile curving her mouth.
Soft. Golden. Impossible.
My breath catches.
Her face is haloed by the rain, features blurred at the edges, but I know that face. I know the shape of it. The dark eyes. The lush mouth. The kind of beauty that doesn’t strike all at once like lightning, but ruins a man slowly, then all at once, once he has been foolish enough to look twice.
Seven months vanish in an instant.
Airplane cabin lights. Storm clouds beyond the windows.
Her body opening under my hands. Her sweet little cries swallowed against my throat while the world shook around us.
Her.
My angel.
I lost her before dawn. Woke to a cold seat and an empty row and the taste of her still on my tongue.
And now she’s here, in the rain, looking down at me like she has stepped out of some half-remembered dream I’ve fed myself too many times in the dark.
I try to speak, and her face wavers. The alley lurches again.
“Sir!”
The vision breaks apart as hands reach for me. Yuri is suddenly there, dropping to one knee in the water beside me, one hand already pressing my shoulder, the other reaching for the gun at his back as more shouting explodes toward the street.
“Where?” he barks.
I drag in a breath that burns. “Side.”
He curses viciously.
Another shot rings out, farther now. Footsteps thunder away, one set chasing, another circling back.
“She’s gone,” I hear myself say.
Yuri looks at me like I’ve started speaking in tongues. “Who?”
But I cannot answer, because the rain has washed the place where she stood clean. There is no one there now. No soft smile. No impossible face. Nothing but wet pavement gleaming beneath the alley light.
Was she there at all?
My jaw tightens. I know what I saw.
