Chapter 36 #2
Her wrists are bound behind her back. A cloth gag stretches across her mouth, cutting into the corners of her lips. She is upright, moving under her own power, and she’s fighting, twisting against the grips clamped around her upper arms.
Our gazes collide across sixty feet of stained concrete.
Her eyes flood. She blinks — hard, deliberate, the refusal to let them fall — but doesn’t sever the connection. Her chin elevates.
There she is.
The relief that cascades through me is a physiological event, loosening the knot in my chest so suddenly that it requires conscious effort to prevent it from registering on my face.
She’s not broken. Four days in the enemy’s hands, and she remains intact. Still resisting.
“I’m sorry for the bindings. Like I said, you have a fierce girl here.”
I return my attention to Dushku.
“What do you want?”
“Simple.” He clasps his hands behind his back.
“You killed a member of my family. The debt requires your empire, your operations, your territory, your network. All of it, transferred to me.” He pauses with the timing of a man who has rehearsed this.
“After which, I’ll release the girl, and you’ll be free to die quietly. ”
“Interesting proposal.” I allow the silence to occupy the air for precisely three seconds. “Here’s mine: I take Elizabeth, we walk out, and you and Landon don’t survive long enough to discover what I do with this warehouse afterward.”
Dushku laughs. The sound echoes off the corrugated walls, multiplied and distorted.
Landon produces a laugh half a beat later. The delayed reaction means he was monitoring Dushku’s face for permission before committing to the response.
“Bring her closer,” Dushku instructs.
The two men adjust their grip on Elizabeth’s arms and begin advancing her toward the center of the space.
She resists, digging her heels against the concrete and wrenching her shoulders.
The sound of her boots scraping across the floor is the last thing I hear before my thumb locates the face of my watch.
I press the button.
The detonation erupts from the south perimeter, a concussive blast calibrated to shatter attention without compromising the structural integrity of the building containing Elizabeth.
The warehouse walls shudder. Dust cascades from the overhead beams in pale curtains.
Every weapon in the room pivots toward the source of the explosion, and for two and a half seconds, no one is aiming at me.
Two and a half seconds is more than sufficient.
“Down!” I command.
Elizabeth drops. Without hesitation, she collapses her legs and hits the concrete floor.
I draw.
The first two rounds find the operatives nearest to me, both down before Dushku’s expression has completed its transition from confidence to comprehension.
The south entry detonates inward as Alexei’s team breaches — the door frame splintering, boots hammering concrete, the sharp staccato of suppressed weapons filling the space with a new and different percussion.
The east entry follows four seconds later, a second wave crashing against Dushku’s remaining forces from the opposite flank.
The warehouse transforms.
Muzzle flashes strobe against the walls. Ricochets whine off steel beams and embed in material with dull, splintering impacts. Shouted commands in Russian and Albanian overlap and cancel each other, reducing language to raw noise. The air thickens with cordite and pulverized concrete dust.
Through it all, I move forward. Elizabeth is on the ground fifty feet ahead of me, and every second she remains exposed is a second I am failing her.
Landon runs.
I track his trajectory through the haze, acquire the shot, and squeeze the trigger. He pivots at the last second. The round catches his shoulder — the same place where I stabbed him the last time — spinning him sideways, but his momentum carries him through a side door and into the darkness beyond.
Later.
Dushku lunges for a weapon discarded on the floor. My round strikes his thigh before his fingers close around the grip, and he collapses with a guttural sound that reverberates off the concrete, dragging himself backward toward the nearest pillar.
His two remaining guards shift to provide cover, positioning themselves between their employer and the room. I put both of them on the ground in the time it takes to exhale. Clean shots.
Three operatives converge from my left flank. The magazine is spent. I release it. There’s no time for the reload. I move into them rather than away.
The first goes down from my shoulder meeting his sternum. The second absorbs an elbow to the throat. The third manages to land a strike against my ribs — a heavy, reverberating impact that will demand acknowledgment tomorrow — before I take his legs and finish him on the concrete .
I don’t let it slow me down.
My focus has narrowed to a single coordinate: Elizabeth. She’s still on the ground, bound. She raises her head, scanning the chaos with those extraordinary eyes, tracking my position through muzzle flashes and falling debris.
I detect the sniper adjusting his scope a half-second before his crosshairs settle over her.
I sprint, reaching her, using my body to cover her.
The round intended for her grazes my shoulder instead, a searing stripe of pain that I register, categorize, and discard in the span of a single heartbeat.
I haul her behind the nearest pillar, pressing her against the concrete with my body as a barrier between her and the chaos.
She produces a sound against the cloth sealing her mouth — muffled, urgent, vibrating with my name — and I tear the gag free.
She gasps. One ragged inhalation of warehouse air, then another, her chest heaving against mine.
“Rolan—”
“I’ve got you.” My hands find the rope binding her wrists. The knots are tight, deliberately cruel, and my fingers work them with a precision fueled beyond training. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
The final knot surrenders. The rope falls away, and before I have fully released it, her arms are around my neck.
I close my arms around her, press my face into her hair, and breathe. She smells wrong, like hotel laundry and industrial detergent. Like places that are not home. But beneath it, faintly, stubbornly, she smells like herself, and that’s enough for now.
“ Moya koroleva, ” I murmur against her hair, where no one in this warehouse or any other can hear it. “I’m here.”
A soldier materializes at my elbow. “Sir. We need to move her to the perimeter.”
I withdraw enough to see her face, grime streaked across one cheek, raw redness circling her wrists where the rope carved its signature, eyes glazed with tears she hasn’t permitted to fall. “Go with him. Get outside.”
“No.”
“Elizabeth—”
“I’m not leaving without you.” Her hands remain on my arms, almost desperate. “If you stay, I stay. That’s how this works.”
“It’s not safe?—”
“I’m not going anywhere without you!” she interrupts. “Don’t you understand? I don’t care about the walls you build or what words you use to push me away. I’m staying!”
Before I know what I’m doing, I kiss her. Deeply and passionately.
It’s heaven.
And when she kisses me back, I understand what she is to me.
Everything .
By the time our lips part, the warehouse has grown quieter. Alexei’s teams have neutralized the majority of Dushku’s forces, and the residual sounds of engagement have migrated toward the far perimeter.
My shoulder bleeds with a steady, insistent warmth, and the pain has escalated past the threshold where I can comfortably compartmentalize it.
None of that matters.
I rise to my feet. Elizabeth comes with me.
Dushku is precisely where I left him, collapsed against the base of the pillar, one leg rendered useless beneath him, his suit darkened with blood and concrete dust.
The diminishment is total: a man who commanded this room twenty minutes ago, who orchestrated, postured, and delivered terms from the center of his private stage, now reduced to a crawling, bleeding mess .
He lifts his gaze as I approach. The composure barely persists. I can see the labor required to maintain it, the visible strain of a mask that no longer fits.
I seize the front of his shirt and haul him upright. His weight sags against my grip, and I hold him there, forcing him to meet my eyes at a distance that permits no evasion.
The first blow connects with his jaw. The second splits his lip. The third produces a noise from his throat that makes me quite pleased.
“Alexei, knife.”
Alexei appears at my shoulder. I extend my open palm without diverting my gaze from Dushku’s face. The object arrives handle-first.
“Besnik.” I lower myself to his level. The proximity is deliberate, intimate, inescapable. “What did I tell you would happen if you touched her?”
“I’m —”
“I told you, I would rip off your hands.” I take his right hand and isolate three fingers. “As you know, I’m a man of my word.”
When I’m finished, I stand and hold the blade out to Alexei without removing my attention from Dushku’s contorted face.
“I’ll be taking my woman home now, you son of a bitch.”
Alexei takes the knife. “Make it last,” I say to him. “Every hour. Until there’s nothing left to take.”
He nods.
I turn.
And there she is. Elizabeth. Like a fucking angel in this hellhole.
She’s watching me, and no one else exists.
That’s my fucking girl .
“ Moya koroleva .” I raise my hands, palms outward, displaying the evidence of what they’ve done. “Don’t stain yourself touching me, I’m?—”
“I don’t care. ”
She crosses the distance between us and throws herself into my arms.
I go rigid for one fraction of a second. I expected rejection and received the opposite. Then my arms close around her, carefully.
She withdraws enough for her hands to find my face, my jaw, the side of my neck, moving with rapid, methodical urgency, taking stock of damage.
“Are you hurt? Where—” Her fingers discover my shoulder. Her gaze drops to the saturated fabric. “Rolan, you’re?—”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding?—”
“Elizabeth—”
“Rolan!”
The room collapses.
Not gradually. Not with the courtesy of a warning.
One moment, I’m studying her face, the grime on her cheek, the fierce concern in her eyes, and the next, the adrenaline that’s been sustaining me for the past two hours withdraws all at once.
The warehouse tilts and the edges of my vision darken. I have precisely enough awareness remaining to form a single, coherent thought before the darkness claims what is left.
Don’t fall on her .