Chapter 44
The snow was cold enough to burn.
She lay where Akilov had thrown her, face down, the cold burrowing under her skin. Her cheek throbbed where it met the ground. Her left eye had swollen to a slit, the world narrowed to silver and black. Her hands were raw, the torn nail radiating violent pulses up her finger with every heartbeat.
She couldn’t feel her arms properly. Shock? Damage? She had no idea. Snow seeped through her shirt and into her bones. Her body was starting to believe stillness was the answer.
Just stop.
Her breath came in shallow clouds against the snow. A small, hypnotic cycle.
She could close her eyes. The ground was holding her, the cold was becoming something almost gentle, wrapping around the places that hurt the most and numbing them into silence.
Someone else would stay down.
Let someone else decide how this ended.
She almost did.
For one long, trembling breath she stopped fighting gravity.
Click.
A small mechanical sound, almost swallowed by the wind. But she knew what it meant because Wyatt had taught her, and the sound of a slide locking back on empty was burned into her, part of the vocabulary of this new life she hadn’t asked for.
Empty.
She turned her head.
Wyatt was fifteen feet away, standing in the snow, weapon extended. He wasn’t retreating. He wasn’t running. He was reaching behind for a spare magazine.
Drop the empty. New magazine. Rack the slide. Two seconds. Maybe three.
Wyatt was fast. The reload still needed time he didn’t have.
Akilov’s muzzle was coming up.
She knew when margins ran out.
In the space between one heartbeat and the next, she saw what she stood to lose.
Not the rush or survival.
Him.
This was the man she wanted years with. Not just moments.
She planted her hands in the snow and drove herself up.
Everything screamed. Her ribs, her face, her torn fingers, the cold-stiffened muscles in her legs. She got her knees under her, didn’t go for the gun.
She aimed for his legs.
Bodies fall when you take out their knees.
She hit him low and hard, wrapping her arms around his shins the way you’d tackle a tree trunk—graceless, total, every ounce of her weight driving forward into the backs of his legs.
Akilov staggered. His center pitched forward and his weapon arm swung wide as he fought for balance.
He yanked left—away from her right hand.
Away from the side he expected.
She wasn’t like everyone else. Her left hand shot up—clamped around the barrel. She forced it down with everything she had.
The gun went off. The blast was enormous, deafening, a concussive punch that hurt her teeth. A geyser of frozen earth and snow sprayed upward. The shot buried itself in the ground inches from her feet.
Akilov roared. He wrenched his gun free and grabbed her arm, twisting her sideways. For a fraction of a second there was only his face—the warped flesh, the gauze peeling away, the fury in his one good eye—and then his hand cracked across her face.
His backhand was vicious. Bony knuckles connected with her cheekbone, and her head whipped sideways, the world fracturing into bright, spinning fragments.
Jen hit the snow.
Sound came from somewhere far away. Everything whirled. She tasted coppery blood and smiled anyway.
Beneath the pain. Beneath the ringing and the cold.
Footsteps crunched in the snow. Fast. Closing.
The snow held her. The sky was wide and black and full of stars.
Gunshot split the dark.