Chapter 19 Dividing Lines #2
One of the gunmen glanced back to watch Ivan’s men finally peeling away, their cargo gathered.
His expression contorted and he released his grip of the weapon hanging from his chest. The men next to him swung their attention to him as he raised his arms up, palms out and fingers splayed in a universal gesture of surrender, and took one large step forward.
Evelina arched a brow. “Have something to say?”
The man dropped hard to his knees and dipped his chin to his chest. “I don’t …
I don’t support this,” he said, voice choked.
“I didn’t even know what was in that cooler until we got here, but—fuck—I didn’t join the bratva to get stabbed in the back by the men standing next to me!
” He swallowed hard. “Viktor … he drilled it into us that we do our jobs like soldiers, or we die like pigs. But this … this isn’t—”
“Shut the fuck up, coward!” one of his cohorts snapped, swinging his gun forward.
In the next instant, the front yard became a warzone.
Bullets erupted all around her, exploding from every side until Evelina couldn’t hear herself think much less hear a damn thing someone might have said.
She saw flashes of light from muzzles in front of her as if in slow-motion, saw bursts of red as bodies dropped.
Then she was on the ground, her vision narrowed to the darkness of a single color and her body pressed almost too tightly against another.
Otto’s scent filled her lungs, becoming an anchor in the insanity.
Her brain finally caught up. The angrier gunman from Viktor’s crew had shot at his kneeling colleague.
In her mind’s eye, she remembered watching the man who’d surrendered drop before the blood had finished spraying from his head.
Bile rose in her throat. But instead of guilt, it was anger that followed.
That shooting had triggered a chain reaction. Artem had opened fire. Viktor’s gunmen shot back. The other men on her side joined in. And amid all of that, she’d simply stood there, watching men fall and their freshly spilled blood stain the earth red.
It hadn’t needed to end up that way.
But she was a fool for thinking it would ever have ended up any other.
Even if Pyotr hadn’t ordered them to kill her, he had to have assumed she’d say something that might provoke someone.
That heads would clash. These were Viktor’s men.
They were probably predisposed to hate her.
The whole incident may as well be labeled yet another sloppy attempt on her life.
Then, as quickly as it had started, the shooting stopped, and a deafening silence hung overhead.
Evelina sucked in a breath and pressed her hands into Otto’s chest. “Let me up. You had better not be shot, or so help me—”
Otto sealed his lips over hers in a firm, demanding, short-lived kiss. “At this rate, it’s the heart attacks that’re gonna get me.” He hauled them both upright without waiting for her to formulate a response, helping himself to the task of brushing gravel dust from her clothes.
Evelina tried not to get too flustered, allowed herself a moment to look him over anyway, then finally swept her gaze outward.
Only to find both Kirill and Artem watching them with variations of the same knowing, silently laughing grin on their vastly different faces.
Kirill’s looked a little smug, too. In her attempt to look away from their awkward but thankfully non-judgmental expressions, Evelina almost missed that both men were also bleeding.
Kirill held one hand over his opposite arm, where rivulets of blood soaked into the fabric of his shirt and dripped off his fingers.
Artem had blood spreading across the lower portion of his shirt.
Evelina frowned. “You need treatment. Both of you.” She looked past them, toward the men who remained standing. “Let’s all get back inside.” Viktor’s men were all down, but not all of Artem’s had made it through the brief burst of violence. And that was on her.
No one objected, and Evelina led the way through the halls until they reached the in-house infirmary.
The room itself was little more than a semi-sterilized office space, but it served its purpose all the same.
With the men lined up in order of need, she paused to make clear to Artem that she expected him to heed doctor’s orders before stepping into the hall.
She’d only be in the way if she lingered.
Otto followed her around a corner. “None of that was your fault.”
She scoffed. “If I’d kept my mouth shut, our guys wouldn’t be scraping their brothers off the ground right now.”
“Trigger-happy assholes are always looking for an excuse, Lina. We both know they were sent to provoke you.”
Ivan’s lifeless face flashed through her mind’s eye and her throat constricted. “I need—”
“Ms. Nikolaev?” an unfamiliar man asked, stepping partially in front of them from a room they’d nearly passed.
He looked to be closer to her own age, in his mid-twenties, with short-cut brown hair and a day’s growth on his jaw.
He bent his head briefly before meeting her gaze, and a swirl of pain sprinkled with something like gratitude shone out at her.
The raw emotion in his eyes choked her. It felt like looking into a mirror.
His jaw ticked for a second as he struggled with his words before he said, “I heard … I heard what you did for Uncle Ivan, at the end.”
Uncle? That explained some of the pain in the young man’s eyes, she supposed. Perhaps theirs had been a good relationship.
“He always wanted to keep the clan strong,” Ivan’s nephew continued.
“He had his … reservations about you, but I think that was just him being a bit too old-fashioned.” He gave a shake of his head, his face briefly contorting.
“When we heard your accusation of Pyotr on Friday, that he might have hired those Morozov bastards, Uncle Ivan pulled a bunch of us aside and announced that he was going to launch his own investigation.”
Evelina’s eyes widened. It hadn’t even occurred to her that someone else in the clan might feel so motivated. She’d felt so isolated against Pyotr from the start, like everyone else was blindsided by him, that she had come to view everyone not openly with her as more than likely in league with him.
Still, the grieving man continued his quiet speech, as if he felt an explanation were necessary.
“He was uncertain, maybe uncomfortable, about accepting a woman as pakhan. But he adamantly refused to accept any pakhan who would turn to our enemies, let alone for something as underhanded as assassinating a relative. He viewed that as both betrayal and cowardice, unbecoming of the bloodline let alone the name. So, he made it clear that the results of his investigation would determine which of you he gave his support to.”
And sometime in the following forty-eight hours, that man had died. Not only died, but been viciously slain. Evelina had to fight not to gape.
Nothing quite screamed “I’m guilty!” like slaughtering a man who would happily announce one’s innocence.
Ivan’s nephew raised his head a bit higher, nostrils flaring with a hard-drawn breath, and slammed his fist to his chest. “I don’t see any way to see this situation other than that Uncle Ivan found proof you spoke the truth, and for that, as well as for the way you defended his legacy today, I would like to pledge my fealty to you! ”
Bozhe moy. This wasn’t how she’d wanted to win anything. But she couldn’t afford to turn it away.
A tear rolled down his cheek, but he ignored it. “I don’t speak for everyone,” he said, as if admitting a sin. “I’m not qualified to”—his voice cracked—“replace my uncle. But I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.”
For a moment, her own tears threatened to resurface as she watched this man she didn’t really know struggle with his emotions. She recognized his grief. She sympathized with it. But she was done breaking, so she pushed the feeling aside and found a smile. “What’s your name?”
He blinked once and his stance softened marginally. “Pasha, ma’am.”
Evelina reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m so sorry for what happened to your uncle, Pasha.
Please take some time to process and heal from your loss.
” Her hand fell away. “If you, or any of your uncle’s men, wish to support me, I’m happy to have you.
And please know that I fully respect your uncle’s desire to uncover the truth—I would have respected it, regardless. ”
Pasha smiled for a moment and bobbed his head. “I appreciate that, ma’am.”
She really was trying to come around on that word, but hearing it from someone basically her age still kind of made her want to snap.
Probably that’s something I’ll need to work on now.
Evelina kept the thought to herself. “Why don’t you go home for the day?
Spend it with family or friends, without worrying about catching a stray bullet, hm?
And the men from Ivan’s crew who had the misfortune of seeing him outside … tell them to take the day, too.”
Pasha thanked her again before disappearing back into the room he’d rushed out of previously.
Evelina held her breath for a beat before forcing her feet forward. But Pasha’s words lingered in her mind.
Viktor had done exactly as she’d expected and immediately sworn loyalty to the closest available male heir.
Artem had shocked the crap out of her by being wonderfully open-minded and genuinely likable, offering and delivering his support to her.
Ivan had taken a tactical approach, apparently, and decided to learn more about both of them via independent investigation, in order to determine which potential heir he viewed as better for the clan.
And Grigoriy—she still had no damn clue.
Evelina stopped walking again and turned enough to catch Otto’s gaze. “I need to get in touch with Grigoriy.”
Another scream ripped through the halls as soon as the words were past her lips.
Evelina groaned before she could catch herself.
She didn’t have to work too hard to locate the source, or cause, of the newest scream.
And once again, she determined she would have preferred it to be a mouse.
For a strange moment, as she stared at the angry orange flame licking across the ceiling, she thought another severed head might even have been better.
Around her, staff shouted at each other in a semi-coordinated effort to douse the flame that had burst to life in the front sitting space.
But it wouldn’t be easy. It’d caught the throw rug as well as the drapery and leapt from those fabrics onto the wooden beams some designer had thought were too beautiful to remove.
Someone rushed in from the foyer, but it took Evelina another moment to hear her name.
She turned, catching the eye of a man in a vest that indicated he worked perimeter duty. “What is it?”
He approached and held out a tablet. “We scoured the footage from between when Viktor’s crew arrived earlier and when the Molotov went through the window.”
Evelina pulled the device closer and realized he already had some footage queued up.
She tapped the button and watched in anger as two men approached the gate and one proceeded to reference some kind of note before inputting what had to be their security code—because the gate swung right open.
No muss, no fuss. The two rushed through, disappearing from the camera’s line of sight.
Wait, two? Both men had carried bags over their backs of similar size.
But only one Molotov had come through the window.
Her eyes widened and she practically shoved the device back at the guard.
“Forward that footage to Artem’s private email,” she said.
She had her own, but she wasn’t giving it out so easily. “Do we know where the other guy went?”
The guard’s jaw tightened and he shook his head. “We’ve been too low on resources to scour the feeds like that.”
Evelina threw her hands up, her voice rising accordingly as her temper flared.
“So, somewhere in this massive fucking house there’s probably another fire we haven’t even found yet because everyone’s focused on the obvious one, and you’re not even trying to locate it? Is that what you’re telling me?”
Several people nearby stopped what they were doing and looked over.
The guard paled. “I— We— It’s just that—”
She raised a hand and silenced him. “We have too many wounded to properly evacuate if this shit gets worse right now.” She raised her voice. “I need spare hands to spread out and find that second fire!”