Page 37 of Beautiful Ruin

Tires bite into the cold asphalt and screech, causing the SUV to fishtail half a foot before traction grabs and the entire force of gravity bears down. The car rocks hard as it comes to a stop, my pulse already gone flat and deadly in my ears when I twist in the seat.

I keep my foot jammed to the brake pedal, letting the barrel track before my eyes finish catching up. A flash of blonde hair and wide blue eyes are what freeze me from pulling back on the trigger.

Curled against the rear door like a stowaway caught mid-escape, hands half-raised in the air and mouth open in a small, startled O, is Sofia.

“For the love of God,” she squeaks, “don’t shoot me!”

For three seconds, I cannot speak. That may not sound like much to an ordinary man, but to me, it is an eternity. Long enough to kill. Certainly long enough to die. The absurdity of what I’m seeing moves through my brain like molasses.

Sofia Kuznetsov is in my back seat.

Sofia, who was supposed to be in the library under guard, who apparently crawled into my vehicle without my knowledge because she clearly has some kind of death wish.

I lower the gun by inches, not because I am calm but because shooting Ivan’s niece would be heavily frowned upon. And perhaps earn me a bullet to the back of the skull.

“What,” I say softly, “the fuck are you doing in my car?”

10

ROWAN

She swallows. “I can attempt to explain.”

My grip tightens around the gun, though my finger does move away from the trigger. I lean back just enough to find the shifter and throw the car into park, easing my foot off the brake pedal.

The rational part of my mind knows she isn’t a threat. Not in an immediate sense. She’s curled in the back seat of my SUV with her hands lifted, eyes wide and breath coming too fast, looking less like an assassin and more like someone who just realized the consequences of startling an armed man trained to shoot first and process emotions never.

The rest of me does not care. It is still stuck back in the half-second between movement in the mirror and my muscles locking around the only reflex that has kept me alive through ambushes, alley fights, and men stupid enough to test whether Ivan Kuznetsov’s enforcers hesitate before pulling the trigger.

“You have five seconds. Make it good,” I snap.

Her eyes flick to the weapon before moving back to me. “Could you maybe point that somewhere else first?”

“Perhaps you should have thought about that before hiding in the back seat of an armed man’s vehicle.”

Her mouth opens and then closes. A small grunt leaves her, sounding every bit as exasperated as I feel. “Okay. That’s fair.”

“Sofia.”

Thousands of questions collide inside my head, most of them screaming the same two things. How the hell did she get out of the house? And how the hell did she get past her guards?

The estate is not some boarding school dormitory with broken locks and distracted staff. It is a fortified property with overlapping security rotations, cameras, armed men, controlled access points, and corridors designed specifically so no one moves through the important parts unnoticed. Sofia is not supposed to be able to vanish from a guarded library, cross the estate, enter the garage, and hide in my SUV without someone seeing her.

Yet here she is.

Alive only because my finger left the trigger in time.

She flinches, though not enough to satisfy the part of me currently trying to crawl out of my skin. “I’ve been doing research.”

There is a moment where I genuinely consider whether my brain misheard her out of self-preservation.

“What kind of research,” I growl out, “requires you to sneak out of a fortified estate, evade half a dozen men trained to notice a blade of grass out of place, hide in the backseat of my car, and almost get yourself shot? Explain. Now.”

Sofia blinks at me from the back seat, those wide blue eyes startled, sure, but not even remotely close to seeming repentant. Her hands are still half-raised, fingers trembling just enough to betray the adrenaline spiking through her veins.

But regret?

None at all.