Chapter 21 Shattered Glass, Spilled Blood
SHATTERED GLASS, SPILLED BLOOD
DANI
Everything happened at once.
The “I’m pregnant” had barely left my mouth. His “Is it mine?” still hung between us like a bad joke. I hadn’t even finished being furious when the world tore open.
The first shot screamed through the window. Then another. Then a full burst.
The so-called bulletproof glass lasted half a second.
The giant pane to our left shattered inward. A wall of ice and splinters crashed into the kitchen. Cold air knifed across my bare legs. My knees slammed into marble hard enough to send sparks up my spine.
Before I could even breathe, Konstantin hit me.
Not with his fists.
With his whole body.
He drove me flat, covering me from shoulders to shins. The impact punched what little air I had left out of my lungs. Between his weight and the floor, there was nothing but sound and fear.
The scent of his cologne cut through dust and cold. Underneath it: something copper and sharp.
Blood.
“Kon—” I gasped, the rest torn away by the roar.
Gunfire chewed through the room. Deafening. Bullets ripped into furniture, walls, the Christmas tree. Marble chips exploded from the island, raining down like stone hail.
Our perfect glass box was being shredded.
“The baby,” I choked, one hand clawing instinctively to my stomach under his weight. “Oh God, the baby—”
His arm banded tighter across my back, pinning me harder. “You stay down,” he growled in my ear, accent rougher, consonants harder. “Do not move.”
I didn’t argue. I couldn’t. Terror had swallowed my tongue.
Through the chaos I caught flashes—figures in dark tactical gear at the blown-out window, black masks, rifles braced. This wasn’t some drunk with a handgun. This was practiced. Planned.
Too fast after Maksim. This had been ready no matter what happened in that kitchen.
He shifted his weight just enough to free his right arm. A gun appeared in his hand like magic. He twisted, still over me, and fired.
Two clean shots. Two bodies dropped. Blood sprayed the white wall in messy arcs.
There were more. Too many more.
“Move!” he barked.
He rolled, dragging me with him, hauling me to my feet by sheer will when my legs wanted to fold. We half-ran, half-stumbled across a minefield of glass and debris toward what looked like a solid stretch of wall off the hallway.
“Where are you—”
“Now, Dani,” he snapped.
His palm hit a section of panel I’d always assumed was just art-friendly drywall. A square of it slid aside with a whisper, revealing a narrow elevator door set into raw concrete.
Of course there was a way out I’d never seen.
He yanked it open and practically threw me inside.
Another burst of bullets shredded the corridor we’d just crossed. The sound was so close I felt it in my bones.
He dove in after me, slapped a control I couldn’t see, and the doors slid shut with a soft hiss that didn’t match what we’d just escaped.
The floor dropped.
My stomach tried to claw its way up my throat. My hands clenched in his already blood-soaked shirt on reflex.
“You’re bleeding,” I managed. The words came out thin. Useless.
He glanced down. A dark stain spread across his shoulder, soaking the white cotton, running in thin lines along his ribs.
“Is nothing,” he said. “Grazed.” His vowel flattened, the Russian heavier. “I have had worse.”
My chest tightened. “You’re still bleeding.”
The ride couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but it felt like falling forever.
The doors opened on concrete and fluorescent lighting.
Underground garage. Low ceiling. Damp walls. The echo of distant engines. A row of vehicles in neat lines—black SUVs, a couple of sedans, one sad little hatchback that looked like it had given up years ago.
We stepped out.
For a second, it was quiet. Too quiet.
Then a man stepped from behind one of the SUVs. Tall. Broad. Jacket open over a holster.
Vlad. One of Konstantin’s guys. I recognized the dead eyes and broken nose from the tree lot.
His gun was pointed at us.
My heart slammed against my ribs so hard it hurt.
“Surprised?” he asked, mouth curling.
“Not anymore,” Konstantin said. His voice had gone very soft. Very flat. “Maksim sends you?”
“Among others.” Vlad’s gaze flicked to me. Weighing. Calculating. “Nothing personal, boss. The lady’s worth more to the right people than loyalty to you.”
The floor dropped again under my bare feet.
They didn’t just want to kill us.
They wanted me.
Before I could form a scream or a plan, Konstantin moved.
One second he was at my side. The next, he was on Vlad.
He slammed into him, knocking the gun wide. It fired, the shot cracking off concrete. The muzzle flash lit their faces in a harsh strobe.
Something silver flashed in Konstantin’s hand.
Then disappeared into the side of Vlad’s neck.
Vlad’s eyes went huge. He staggered back, hands flying to the spurting wound. The sound he made was wet and wrong. He dropped to his knees, then sideways, gun clattering across the floor.
He was dead before he finished hitting the concrete.
Konstantin yanked the knife free, wiped it once on Vlad’s coat without looking down, and shoved it back into a sheath at the small of his back.
“Get in the car,” he said.
He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t need to.
My feet moved.
He headed for a black SUV tucked into the far corner—a little more armored, a little more unassuming than the others. I stumbled after him, climbing into the passenger seat on legs that barely felt attached.
The interior smelled like leather and steel and faint oil. My hands, wrapped in his blood and Vlad’s, shook against my thighs.
Konstantin slid behind the wheel, jammed a key into the ignition, and twisted. The engine came to life with a low growl.
We shot up the ramp like something being chased.
Snow-slick streets blurred past—the city just going about its business, no idea its favorite monster was barreling through red lights with his pregnant fake wife in tow.
“What was that?” I forced out over the roar of engine and blood in my ears. My voice sounded small, scraped raw.
“A message,” he said, eyes on the road. His accent was heavier now, words short and hard. “They want me to know nowhere is safe.”
“‘They’ being…?” My fingers dug into the seat. “Your cousin and…whoever else?”
He took a corner harder than any driver’s ed teacher would approve. The SUV held, grudgingly. “Whoever pays more for you,” he said. “Whoever thinks they can hurt me fastest.”
My skin crawled.
His shirt was soaked through now, the blood spreading across his chest like spilled ink. His left hand gripped the wheel; his right stayed close to the console, near another hidden compartment.
“You’re losing a lot of blood,” I said. “You should—”
“I will not die from this,” he cut in. “Stop looking at me like I am about to disappear.”
“You just stabbed your own man in front of me,” I whispered. “You don’t get to pretend this is…normal.”
“He stopped being my man when he pointed gun at you,” Konstantin said. “Loyalty has…short shelf life around me.”
He said it like a fact, not an excuse.
We finally slid to a stop in front of a building that was the opposite of the penthouse.
Rust stains on cracked concrete. Flickering fluorescent above the entry. A smell of cigarettes, fried food, and years of bad luck seeped out of the stairwell.
“This is it?” I asked. My voice shook. I didn’t try to hide it.
“Safe house,” he said. “Move.”
We climbed three flights of narrow stairs that felt like they might give way under his weight and my adrenaline. My hand kept drifting to my belly, like it was a magnet and my palm was metal.
He unlocked 3B with a key from somewhere—how many keys did one man carry?—and pushed the door open.
The apartment inside was…not the worst place I’d ever seen. Small. Clean. Bare walls. A battered couch. Two chairs. Tiny kitchenette. Bathroom with tiles that had seen better decades and worse grout.
Not home.
But not on fire either.
Konstantin went straight to the bathroom, already stripping off his ruined shirt as he walked. White cotton peeled away from his skin, sticky with blood.
I followed because the alternative was standing in the living room and listening to my heartbeat try to escape my chest.
Under the shirt, the graze along his shoulder looked less like “nothing” and more like a high-velocity insult. The bullet had carved a groove across muscle, tearing skin open. Ugly. Bleeding. Not immediately fatal, but not something you shrugged off either.
“You need a doctor,” I said, grabbing a towel off the rack and wetting it in the sink.
“I need distance,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bathtub and reaching for a black first-aid kit under the sink. Of course it was military-grade. Mesh pockets. Labeled compartments. Enough supplies to start a small clinic or patch an army. “And time to see who is left on my side.”
“You’re bleeding,” I repeated, pressing the towel around the wound. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “You can’t do either if you pass out.”
He gave me a look that would have made a me on any other day sit down and shut up.
I didn’t.
“You pulled me out of that kitchen,” I said. “You covered me when the glass blew. Let me do this.”
He exhaled through his nose. A concession.
“Fine,” he said. “You be doctor.”
His skin was hot under my fingers as I cleaned away the worst of the blood. He flinched once, jaw tightening, but stayed still.
The cut was deep, but neat. Bullet had sliced, not dug.
“Hold this,” I said, shoving the towel back into his hand while I dug out antiseptic and gauze.
He obeyed, pressing cloth to his own shoulder while I opened packets with fingers that were finally starting to steady. Focus helped. Doing something helped.
“You would be dead if I left you there,” he said, voice low. “In that apartment. In that church. In that lot.”
“Maybe,” I said, dabbing disinfectant along the wound. He hissed as it bit. “Or maybe I’d be in my crappy studio eating ramen and watching Netflix instead of learning how to bandage bullet wounds. We’ll never know.”
I taped gauze in place. My hands knew what they were doing even if the rest of me was still shaking.
“I never wanted this for you,” he said.
I sat back on my heels, staring at the white square on his skin, the edges already pinking with blood.
“But you chose it anyway,” I said quietly. “You chose me. You chose to drag me into your war instead of letting me walk out of that lot and forget your face. Now I’m pregnant and people are shooting at your windows and trying to buy me out from under you.”
His jaw flexed.
We let the silence fill the tiny bathroom. Pipes hummed. Water dripped somewhere in another unit. Distant traffic filtered through thin walls and a bad window.
I could hear my own breathing. His. The ghost of gunfire still echoing in my bones.
“Look at me,” I said finally.
He did.
His eyes were tired. Hard. Something softer flickered behind them for a second before he forced it back down.
“It’s not just me anymore,” I said, fingers curling unconsciously over my stomach. “You know that, right?”
His gaze dropped to my hand. Stayed there.
When he looked back up, there was real fear in his eyes.
Not for himself.
For that tiny, unasked-for life tangled up in all of this.
“I will not let anything happen to you,” he said quietly. “To either of you.”
Something in my chest ached at the way he said it. Like it was a vow he’d carve into the world if he had to.
“Your own man just tried to sell us in a parking garage,” I reminded him, but softer now. “You’re bleeding in a bathroom that looks like a before picture. I’m scared, Konstantin. For me. For you. For this baby.”
He huffed a rough sound that might have been a laugh if the night had been different. “Not plan, kotyonok,” he said. “Oath.”
I swallowed. “Then make sure you keep it.”
He stood, testing his shoulder with a small rotation. The bandage held. His jaw clenched once, then he moved past the pain.
Then he went into motion.
He checked the windows. The locks. Pulled cushions off the couch to expose the steel plate bolted into the wall behind it. Opened a door that looked like a closet and revealed a narrow safe with a keypad. Cash. Passports. Weapons. Burner phones.
He did it all fast, efficient, like he’d rehearsed it a hundred times.
“Where are we going?” I asked from the doorway, suddenly exhausted. “Or am I still on a strict ‘need-to-know’ diet?”
“Out of city,” he said, stuffing cash and guns into a plain duffel. “Somewhere they do not own doors and cameras. Somewhere I can see who is hunting us.”
“Them being your cousin and whoever sent his puppy in the garage,” I said.
“And anyone who smiles too quickly when they hear my name,” he said. “I find out who signed on with Maksim, then I decide who breathes next year.”
Violent. Cold. Terrifying.
And in a twisted way, the only thing that made me feel like we might make it out of this.
“And if I don’t want to keep running?” I asked, hand splaying over my belly without permission. “If I want to…stop? Breathe? Not raise a kid in a moving target?”
He paused in the middle of zipping the bag.
Looked at me.
“I will build you house where no one finds you,” he said. “Later.”
“Later,” I echoed. “When there’s no one left to shoot at you.”
“Da,” he said. “When I am finished.”
He slung the duffel over his good shoulder and jerked his chin at the door. “Come.”
We headed down the narrow, echoing stairwell toward whatever borrowed car waited below. My hand stayed on my stomach the whole way, whispering a prayer to whatever deity handled terrible timing and worse men.
The war had finally stepped through our front door.
Now we had to find a way to survive it long enough to decide if this baby was going to grow up knowing who their father really was—
Or if we’d be stories told in someone else’s cautionary tale.