Chapter 7 - Yakov #3
I look at her disheveled, beautiful face, the sun catching the warm red tones in her hair.
It would be so easy to lean forward right now, to close the six inches of air between us and press my lips to her cheek, to taste the salt of her sweat and the heat of her skin.
The pull is a physical ache in my gut. But I don’t move.
I don’t want to break this delicate, fragile truce we are currently sitting in.
I need her to trust me before I take what’s mine.
I carefully shift my weight, sliding over to the passenger side, while she takes the driver’s seat.
She slams her door, adjusts the mirrors, and starts the car, the engine rumbling to life. “So, where the hell are we going?”
I rattle off the address to a secure house about an hour away. It’s a clean property I’ve held for three years under a dummy corporation that leaves zero digital trail back to the Mykros name. She punches the coordinates into the satnav without a word of discussion and pulls the car out.
I watch her hands on the wheel. Even with the wind howling through the shattered windshield, her focus is absolute. Her eyes constantly move between the road ahead and the mirrors; she pays attention to everything.
Every few miles, I catch her side-eying my posture, checking to see if I’m fading.
“I’m fine,” I say without turning my head, catching her watching me.
“I know.”
“Stop checking on me.”
“I will check on you all I want.” She exhales a sharp breath through her nose. I look back at the road, a smug smile tugging at my lips despite the throbbing ache in my flesh, and then I immediately look back at her. I cannot seem to stop.
My shoulder is screaming now, every minor dip in the asphalt sending a fresh wave of agony through my chest. But all I can focus on—the only thing keeping me conscious—is the fact that she was at the door.
When I called her from the supermarket and gave her five minutes, she didn’t stall.
She didn’t badger me for explanations or scream for her brothers.
She was there, bag in hand, ready to run into the dark simply because I told her it was time.
She has no idea what that compliance did to my chest. Seeing her trust me in the middle of a nightmare? I’ll take that realization to my grave.
If my old man thinks he can send his low-level goons to take shots at what’s mine, and thinks I’ll bleed out and take his shit, he’s fucking wrong. There’s a bullet hole in my flesh, but the man who put it there is dead. Nobody fires a weapon near my wife and lives to boast about it. Nobody.
When we finally pull into the driveway of the new house, she parks, cuts the ignition, and sits there.
Her hands stay locked onto the steering wheel for a long moment.
Then, she lets out a massive exhale, and I see her fingers begin to shake violently against the leather grip now that the survival adrenaline has finally bottomed out.
I reach across the console with my left hand and cover both of hers on the wheel, my large palm enveloping her trembling fingers.
She doesn’t pull away. And I don’t let go.
We’re barely through the door of the new house when the adrenaline that’s kept me going really starts to tank.
I sit at the kitchen table, the room spinning slightly as the pain in my shoulder continues its unrelenting throb, threatening to put me on the floor.
I don’t have time to bleed, and I damn sure don’t have time to faint.
I need my mind sharp. I need to set some shit on fire.
I direct Raya to the first aid cupboard and get her to bring me the kit I have stashed in there.
With my functional left hand, I rip open the tactical trauma kit she’d placed on the table, pull out a pre-loaded auto-injector of a high-potency non-narcotic anesthetic, and slam it straight through the fabric into my thigh.
I don’t flinch. I breathe through the sting, waiting sixty seconds for the medication to hit my bloodstream and mute the screaming in my bone.
It won’t heal me, but it will dull the edge enough to keep me conscious.
As the haze clears and my focus snaps back in, cold and lethal, I reach for my burner phone. I have calls to make.
***
Later, she changes the dressing. I sit at the kitchen table while she works behind me, and I look straight ahead, counting the tiles on the wall because I need something to do with my concentration that isn’t the fact that her hands feel soft on my skin.
She tapes the last piece and steps back. “Done.”
“Thank you.”
She goes around to the other side of the table and sits down, and for a minute we look at each other across it.
“You should have told me,” she says.
“I needed to get us clear first.”
“You were losing blood.”
“Not too much, though.”
“You could have—” She stops to compose herself. “If you’d passed out at the wheel—”
“I wasn’t going to pass out.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually. It’s not the first time I’ve been shot.”
She looks at me in surprise, and I can see her weighing up whether to ask about it, but she doesn’t. “Right. Well. Make it the last.”
“I’ll do my best, rodnaya.”
She sighs and pushes her chair back. “I’ll make us some tea.” As she walks past, she pats my good shoulder, and I think, my father’s thugs and gunshot wounds aside, today’s been a pretty good day.