Chapter 43 #2
“He’s… dangerous, right?”
“If he’s anything like his brother, and everything seems to suggest that he is, then yes,” Victor replies matter-of-factly.
She glances between the three of us, worry clear on her face.
It feels good knowing she cares what happens to us, that she’s worried about me and Malice going into a dangerous situation. Something in me warms at that, and I pull her into my arms, nuzzling against her neck.
“Hey, don’t worry,” I tell her. “We’re going to be fine. I know this is new to you, but this isn’t our first rodeo.”
“I know, I just…” Willow trails off, shaking her head. She doesn’t seem to have the words to say how she feels, and I don’t push her to find them.
Instead, I pull her into a kiss, lingering a bit and then dipping in to steal another one.
When I pull away, I catch Malice watching us.
Things have mellowed between him and Willow, and the attraction between them is clearly off the fucking charts, but he doesn’t have the same ease with her that I do. Hell, he doesn’t have that ease with anyone other than me and Victor, and that’s just because he’s known us for our whole lives.
He shoves the last of his sandwich into his mouth and snaps into business mode, taking point the way he does.
“Vic, send us the details,” he says. “Ransom, let’s go. We need to move now, while we have the chance.”
I nod, letting go of Willow and straightening up.
“Be careful,” she says, looking at me and then to Malice. He holds her gaze for a second, then he dips his head in a little nod of acknowledgement and sweeps out of the room to go get armed up.
“That’s his way of saying we will,” I tell her, then follow him out.
We take Malice’s car, the coordinates Vic sent us punched into the GPS. It looks like it’s nothing more than a hotel on the outskirts of the city, random and low profile.
“The kind of place someone stays when they’ve got something to hide,” I point out as we drive over.
Malice nods in agreement. “Yeah. Too bad he’s not as good at hiding as Vic is at finding shit.”
He slows the car as we get close, and we park a few blocks away and then walk over, not wanting to draw attention to ourselves as we check the place out from across the street.
The hotel is small, just two floors, and only a half dozen rooms or so on each floor.
The outside is run-down and shitty, with chipped paint and cracked brick.
Every so often, someone comes out of the front door, either to smoke a cigarette or head to their car and drive off.
For the most part, it’s quiet, far enough away from most things that there’s not a lot of traffic on the road, and judging from the number of cars in the spots, it’s not a very full house this afternoon.
“We’re in luck,” I murmur to Malice.
My brother grunts, narrowing his eyes as he stares at the building. “If he’s here.”
It’s impossible to pick out which car or room might be Ilya’s, and Vic’s digging didn’t turn up a room number. All he could give us was what he’d picked up on the nearby cameras, that Ilya usually comes and goes around the same time, leaving in the morning and coming back in the evening.
We’re a little ahead of the window in which he might be returning, and the two of us are prepared to wait as long as it takes.
“We need to find a good position,” I say, eyeing the area around the hotel. “Our best bet is to ambush him when he gets back.”
Malice grunts in agreement, and we cross the street, keeping our eyes peeled.
Eventually, we find a little brick alcove around the side of the building where the dumpster is tucked away.
It smells like ass, but it has a perfect view of both the front and back of the hotel, and if we duck down behind the half wall that blocks off the dumpster, we can’t be seen from either area.
“You think this is close enough?” I murmur to Malice.
He leans out, checking the distance. We’re a little farther away than I’d like from some of the rooms at the far end, but it’s more important to not be seen.
“I can make it,” he says, nodding. “And he’s a big fucker. It’s not like we’re gonna miss him.”
I snort at that. “Let’s hope you’re right. I don’t want to fuck this up.”
He nods, his brow furrowed and his jaw tight.
We spend the next couple hours trying not to breathe too deeply as we wait for Ilya to return. I do my best not to let my thoughts wander to Willow, knowing I’ll get too fucking distracted if I do, but it’s hard. All my mind wants to do is replay last night on an endless fucking loop.
Finally, an elbow digging into my side snaps me out of my thoughts, and I glance at Malice to see him nodding across the way.
I follow the path of his gaze and catch a glimpse of Nikolai’s brother walking across the parking lot.
Go time.
Wordlessly, the two of us draw our weapons. Malice nods and slides forward a bit, still well hidden but with a better view to aim.
He takes a breath, lines up his gun, then fires.
It’s a clean shot, and it should hit the mark.
But a fraction of a second before he pulls the trigger, a car backfires on a street nearby.
Ilya tenses, glancing over his shoulder—and that movement is enough to bring his head out of the path of the bullet.
It grazes his temple, and he grunts, whipping his head back.
With a speed born from years of training, he recovers from his shock in an instant, yanking a gun from the inside of his jacket and firing back in the direction the bullet came from.
“Fuck!” Malice curses, firing blindly around the edge of the building as another of Ilya’s shots hits the dumpster with a metallic ping. “Shit, we gotta go. Go, go!”
He fires again, then shoves me backward. We lunge out of our hiding spot and take off running down the alley behind the hotel, moving as fast as we can to keep our distance.
Behind us, I can hear furious feet pounding on the pavement, and the sound of Ilya swearing in Russian as he chases after us.
We can’t let him see our faces. If he finds out who’s after him, we’re fucked.
We dash down the alley and then turn into another, jumping over a small chain-link gate that blocks off part of the alley for delivery trucks or something. Malice vaults it, and I follow, and we tear down the side street, sprinting back to where we left our car.
A bullet whizzes past my head, and I grit my teeth as I put on an extra bit of speed. We vault another gate, and I hiss a curse as a sharp bit of metal stabs into my thigh when I come down on the other side. The cut burns, but there’s no time to stop and make sure it’s okay.
We burst out onto the street where we left the car, racing toward it and leaping inside. Malice revs the engine and peels out, and I glance back behind us. Just as we turn the corner onto a cross street, I catch a glimpse of Ilya running out onto the road we were just on.
“Fuck!” Malice snarls the word as his hand balls up into a fist, slamming against the steering wheel. “God fucking dammit.”
I grit my teeth, because I feel the same fucking way. We were so close. If that shot had hit its mark, we would be done with this shit. We’d have Ilya down, and the only person who seems to be interested in coming after us for killing Nikolai would be dead.
But instead, we now have another problem.
“Did he see us?” Malice glances into the rearview mirror. “Did he get a good look at the car?”
“I don’t think so.” I play it all back in my mind, trying to be sure. “I don’t think he saw our faces either. So he shouldn’t be able to figure out who we are.”
Malice mutters a curse in Russian, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “Yeah, but now he knows someone’s after him. His guard is up, and we lost the element of surprise.”
I nod, frustration filling me. He’s right.
We had a golden moment, a perfect chance, and it fell through our fingers.
Now it’s going to be harder to get to Ilya next time.
He was already being careful to cover his tracks, and now he’ll be even more wary.
People like him don’t usually survive long unless they’re paranoid and powerful, after all.
“He probably has a lot of enemies,” I say, trying to find some silver lining on this pile of shit. “Maybe he won’t put two and two together that this attack was about Nikolai.”
Malice doesn’t seem to share my forced optimism. He scowls at the road ahead of us, shaking his head. “Maybe, but I think he’s just gonna assume it’s related. His brother dies, and then a few weeks later, someone tries to take him out too? That shit’s a little too coincidental.”
He has a point there, and I sigh, slumping down in the passenger seat. My thigh hurts from where the metal bit into it, and there’s a rip in my pants, blood already seeping into the fabric.
“We’ll still get him,” Malice says, and it’s the voice he uses when he means fucking business. “We’ll still find a way to kill him. I don’t care if we have to stake out every goddamned hotel in Detroit, we’ll find a way to end this. We can close this goddamned chapter once and for all.”
I nod, holding back my worries, since there’s no reason to speak them out loud. As nice as it would be to put a cap on this whole thing and close the chapter on our revenge for our mother’s death, it feels like shit is spiraling out of control.
Every move we make ends up getting fucked somehow, and there are too many enemies piling up and crawling out of the woodwork.
Eventually, it might be too much.