Chapter 25
PIPER
Nikita stands twenty feet away while Adrian holds a gun against my side, and I watch him choose control over the instinct to cross the room, which is the hardest thing I have ever asked him to do without saying a word.
His own pistol stays lowered at his side because he knows what I know.
Any sudden movement in this room could cost us our lives.
I know that face. I’ve spent two months learning it. It’s the expression he wears when every option is bad and he’s making himself pick the least worst one. His pointed gaze at my abdomen and the way he pales tell me Mila reached him.
He knows. Six days ago, I was rehearsing how I’d tell him myself, choosing the room and the words, and instead he learned it from a doctor. It should hurt more than it does. That he knows matters more than how he found out.
Nikita would hold still for me either way. Knowing about the babies only gives him three more lives to protect and makes an impossible calculation even worse. Adrian put us in this room by corrupting every safeguard I followed six days ago, and knowing that doesn’t move the gun an inch.
What I can do is give Nikita an opening, and to do that, I need Adrian to stop paying attention to him or me for a second.
“You found me sooner than you should have,” Adrian says from behind me, and his voice isn’t the voice from the meetings anymore.
Six days have sanded the polish off him.
He hasn’t shaved. He breathes quickly against my ear and can’t keep his forearm steady across my body, a weakness his polished manner used to conceal.
He bet everything on one clean plan, and now he can feel it coming apart in his hands.
“It doesn’t matter. You still can’t cross this room before I finish it. ”
“You shoot her, and you destroy the only leverage keeping you alive,” Nikita says coldly. “Shilov will cut you loose the second you stop being useful to him.”
Adrian laughs, and it’s an ugly, exhausted sound, nothing like the cold control he used across a conference table.
I’ve spent two months in rooms with this man, watching him move furniture four inches to control who sat where, and the person breathing against my ear now couldn’t square a picture frame.
Six days waiting for a plan to work has hollowed him out from the inside.
“You still think this was about Shilov.” He says the name like it tastes bad.
“You think I did this for him. You think I spent twenty years running the machine that kept your family rich so I could hand it to that animal?” Adrian tightens his hold, and the trembling grows worse.
“I went to Shilov because your return threatened everything I built, and he was the only man powerful enough to keep you from taking it back. I did the rest because I earned it. I kept the estate alive for four years while you played dead. Then you walked back in and dismantled everything I preserved without once asking what it cost me.” His voice cracks on the last word, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“You never once saw me. I kept the lights on, and to you, I was the furniture.”
Adrian is no longer watching the room. He’s watching Nikita, his attention narrowed to one man while the rest of us blur at the edges. I notice this with the part of my brain Dorian trained and Platon sharpened, the part that runs cold while the rest of me screams.
He no longer notices what Lazar or I am doing.
I scan the room without turning my head, running the same survey I’ve used every time they brought me through here.
Lazar stands near the tall windows, where he’s been since Nikita came through the doors.
Platon’s people are visible on the terrace outside, moving to cut the paths Adrian built, and Lazar turns to watch them instead of me.
I’ve stood still and compliant long enough to become cargo again.
Lazar drifts two steps toward the glass to track the men outside, and the space between Adrian and any help he might expect opens into a gap.
This is the gap I’ve rehearsed for six days. Adrian’s weight is wrong now, tipped forward toward Nikita, with his attention nailed to the man he’s still arguing with. His grip is a habit instead of a decision. Lazar is looking at the water.
The room will never be this open again.
I don’t give myself time to hesitate. Hesitation would close the gap before I use it. Platon drilled the sequence into me in an underground soundproofed room, and I have rehearsed it in my head for six days. I run it now.
I stomp down on Adrian’s instep with my full weight. He grunts, surprised, and his forearm loosens across my upper body, and that loosening is all I’m going to get.
I drive my elbow back into him below the ribs, hard, exactly where Platon trained me to put it, and Adrian exhales hard against my neck.
When his arm gives, I twist free toward the opening between his forearm and my body.
Then I create distance. I drop sideways away from the pistol, land on my hip and shoulder, and get one arm across my abdomen as I go down.
I complete the sequence before Adrian can recover. The whole escape takes less than two seconds.
Nikita is already moving. He crosses the twenty feet before Adrian recovers the space I put between us, faster than I’ve ever seen him move.
He grabs the back of my jacket to drag me up and behind him in one motion, putting his whole body between me and the room.
I go where he pulls me. Six days of planning my own escape, and when the moment finally arrives, the last three feet of it are his, because that’s the plan we never spoke aloud during our shared look moments ago.
I get us to the gap, and he gets us through it.
The world gets loud. Platon’s men come through the terrace doors and the hall at once, and the syndicate men who’ve been holding the house break for the exits Adrian prepared.
Platon’s team fires at the men running for the doors. The syndicate men fire back, and rounds strike the walls as Nikita drags me toward the stone hearth.
He keeps his grip on my jacket and holds me directly behind him in short controlled steps, never once turning his back on the room, until we reach cover.
I keep one hand low over my stomach and let him steer.
I have never once let a man put himself between me and an exit, but I let Nikita do it now without hesitation.
Three of the four men who came in through the hallway fan into the room to engage the syndicate guards, and Platon reaches the hearth with the fourth. He takes position beside me.
“I have her,” Platon says.
Adrian doesn’t surrender. Surrender would mean admitting that none of this was ever his and facing consequences.
He gets his feet under him, and instead of using the gun, he bolts through the double doors and into the hallway, heading for the service exit that opens onto the path to the dock, the escape he built for this.
Nikita shoves his pistol into its holster and goes after him, trusting Platon to keep me behind cover.
Nikita catches him halfway down the hall, beside the propped service door.
Adrian is desperate, and Nikita is six days past the edge of anything reasonable.
They collide against the doorframe together hard enough to crack it.
Adrian twists the pistol toward Nikita. Nikita traps his wrist with both hands and forces the muzzle toward Adrian’s own torso as Adrian pulls the trigger, unable to stop in time.
Their bodies muffle the shot, but the sound still cuts through the hallway. The round strikes Adrian below the ribs. Nikita takes the pistol from his hand and steps back, but he doesn’t fire again. He doesn’t need to.
Adrian looks down at the blood spreading across his shirt with open surprise, as though a plan this carefully built shouldn’t have been allowed to end with him on the floor.
He slides against the doorframe and presses one hand to the wound.
Nikita stands several feet away with the pistol lowered, not aiming it.
“You didn’t have to…” Adrian says.
“You pulled the trigger.” Nikita stares down at him. “You held a gun against my wife. I stopped you.”
Platon sends a medic into the hallway. The medic works over Adrian briefly, then looks up at Platon and shakes his head.
Adrian’s eyes stay open but never see anything again.
Lazar surrenders when the last door closes.
He studies the sealed exits, Adrian bleeding in the hallway, and Platon’s men aiming their weapons at him from three directions.
Dying for Adrian accomplishes nothing for Shilov, and Lazar has probably never done a single thing that accomplished nothing.
He lowers his gun and sets it on the floor, unhurried, almost bored, and laces his hands behind his head.
There’s nothing cowardly in it, and nothing brave.
The remaining men follow his lead. The gunfire stops, and Platon’s people begin securing the prisoners.
Then Nikita is across the floor and on his knees in front of me, and everything else stops mattering to either of us.
He checks me quickly, examining my face, my arms, and the yellow bruises around my wrists. It’s the frantic inventory of a person he’s spent six days imagining broken, and only after he has checked every visible injury does he place one hand low over my stomach and leave it there.
Everything in him quiets around that one point of contact. I’ve never seen him hold this still, not once in two months. He’s known about the babies for six days and carried that knowledge under the terror while he tore his empire apart to find me.
How he found out—secondhand and terrified—is the one thing I can still put right.
I put my hand over his, holding it against me, and give him the news as it was always supposed to reach him, from the person carrying it.
“I’m pregnant. There are three of them.”
Nikita exhales sharply. Hearing it from me makes it ours. Nikita closes his eyes and presses his forehead to mine, and his control finally slips. He trembles once beneath my hand before he steadies himself.
“Three,” he says, and his voice cracks.
“Three.” I keep my hand over his, because I was supposed to give him this news myself, in a room I chose, and holding his hand here is the closest I can come to reclaiming that. “All five of us are getting off this rock.”
One of Platon’s men kneels beside us with a medical kit before anyone talks about moving me.
He checks my blood pressure, my pulse, and my abdomen, and asks in a low, steady voice whether I’ve bled or cramped in six days, and I shake my head.
He asks what they fed me, and I tell him they brought water and enough plain food to keep me upright and nothing more, and that I made myself eat all of it because starving three passengers wasn’t a form of protest I could afford. He notes it and moves on.
Nikita puts Mila on speaker before the medic finishes the first reading, and she questions the medic about every number before she gives him a single instruction.
She wants my blood pressure logged every thirty minutes in the air, wants me on fluids the moment we reach the mainland, and wants to know if I feel any cramping, pressure, bleeding, or pain low in my abdomen.
The medic clears me for the flight only after she’s said all of it, and even then, Nikita makes him repeat the numbers twice.
Then he takes me off the island himself, in the helicopter, while Platon stays behind with the prisoners, the evidence, and the arriving authorities.
Platon’s men cover Adrian’s body before we lift off.
I watch them carry him across the same cleared ground Nikita’s men landed on an hour ago, and I wait to feel something about it, triumph or the cold satisfaction I’ve watched other people take in a settled score.
I feel tired, protective of the lives inside me, and finished with Adrian.
I’m glad he’s dead but would be just as apathetic if he’d been handcuffed instead.
The medic starts an IV the moment we set down on the mainland and rides with us to the safe house, taking my blood pressure every thirty minutes exactly as Mila ordered.
Nikita doesn’t let go of me through the flight or the drive.
He keeps a hand on me when the island shrinks to a green dot behind us, when the mainland rises gray, ordinary, and safe ahead of us.
When we transfer to a car with blacked-out windows for the long drive inland, he rests his palm on my knee, as though six days of searching still hasn’t convinced him that I’m beside him.
I let him keep one hand on me because it steadies him, and it steadies me too.
The safe house is quiet when we reach it. Nikita walks me through the door with his hand at my back. The locks engage behind us, and he checks them twice before he turns to me without taking his hand from my shoulder.
“Mila will be here later this morning,” he says. “Until then, you stay where I can see you.”
For once, I don’t argue.