He doesn’t get back up.
“Leonid!”
I snap my head around to see Mikhail signaling upstairs. He must have received intel on where Tatiana’s being held hostage.
I drop the empty magazine, slapping a fresh one in, and the slide snaps forward. I stand in the middle of the carnage, chest heaving and covered in blood, and my eyes lock on the heavy iron staircase leading upward.
The warm-up is over. It’s time to send that bastard to hell.
I advance up the iron stairs. My boots crunch on the shards of broken glass littering the steps.
Every muscle in my body is coiled tight, a time bomb wrapped in tailored wool.
I move past a long, suffocatingly quiet hallway where the peeling wallpaper hangs like dead skin from the walls. More gunshots ring from the lobby downstairs, but the world has shrunk down to a single, hyper-focused point.
On instinct, I kick open the door at the very end of the hall.
And there she is. In the corner of a damp, barren back room, Tatiana is tied tightly to a rusted metal chair. She’s battered, with dark bruises blooming across her cheek and blood drying beneath her nose.
At the sound of my feet on the floor, her eyes snap open, and a quick sigh of relief escapes me.
She’s alive.
The sight of her broken skin hits me like a match to gasoline. My anger doesn’t just grow; it doubles, and a blinding, white-hot fury replaces the cold ice in my veins.
But before I can take a single step toward her, a low, grating chuckle echoes from the farthest corner of the room.
Vasili steps into the light, smirking, entirely unbothered by the slaughter I just left downstairs.
His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, his slacks are dusty, and a heavy black revolver hangs loosely in his grip. He looks like a man who thinks he’s already won.
I’m going to knock that smirk off his face.
“She’s beautiful, I’ll admit,” he says, then throws a quick glance at her. “Smooth skin, perfect lips, sexy body. Fuck, she’s every man’s wet dream. Maybe, if you’d given us a few more minutes, I’d know what she tastes like…down there.”
My teeth grind as I lift my gun. “Where do you prefer? Your mouth or your eyes?” I growl.
He cocks his head to the side, his eyes lit with mirth. Then he raises his weapon, ready to finish me.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe my fingers,” he sneers. “I groped her.”
“Son of a fucking bitch!”
I don’t fire my gun; I lunge across the space between us, knocking his gun to the floor as a deafening shot blasts into the ceiling.
But the bastard doesn’t collapse like I expected him to.
Driven by pure, frantic survival, he fights back—dirty, desperate, and wild.
He rams his elbow violently into my ribs, trying to create distance between us, and grabs a jagged piece of broken timber from the floor, swinging it wildly at my head.
He scratches and claws, spit flying from his lips.
I know what he’s doing—fighting for his life, throwing every cheap, uncalculated trick he has at me, but every blow he lands only feeds the fire burning under my skin.
He dared to touch my blood, and now I’m going to paint this room with his.
In a swift, blinding motion, he slides a jagged hunting knife out from underneath his shirt.
