14. Sofiya
SOFIYA
The driver throws the car off the cleaner route and onto a narrower road lined with wet fields and black trees, and I brace one hand against the seat in front of me while Anton braces the other one against me like I’m something he can hold in place by force of habit alone.
“Keep your head down,” he grits out.
I do my best to not show how panicked I am. “I’m trying.”
He spares a glance my way. “That wasn’t criticism.”
I frown at him. “Everything out of your mouth sounds like criticism.”
He glances at me, and even now, even with the car flying down a road I don’t know and men behind us who very likely want me dragged home breathing or not, there’s a flash of amusement in his face that makes me want to hit him and kiss him both.
The front passenger twists around in his seat. “They’re gaining.”
“Which car?” Anton asks.
“The darker one. I know that driver.”
The driver takes a bend too fast, gravel sprays the undercarriage, and the back of the sedan fishtails before the tires catch again. My stomach drops. Anton’s arm comes harder around me, steady and infuriatingly effective. “You know everyone,” I mutter.
He looks out the rear window. “That’s why I’m still alive.”
A clear shot explodes with a crack, then another, then the sound of glass giving way somewhere behind us. The front passenger ducks and swears in Russian. The driver jerks the car left and then right again.
“Tire?” Anton asks.
“Rear panel,” the driver shouts back in a voice stretched with panic. “They’re testing.”
“How flattering,” I mouth.
Anton actually smirks. “There’s a farm road ahead. We can lose the road there and cut for the fallback.”
“And if they anticipated that?” I ask.
Anton’s mouth curves. “Then they get to find out I anticipated their anticipating it.”
A laugh nearly escapes me, which feels deranged under the circumstances.
Then another shot lands, this one closer, and the rear window caves in with a violent burst. Glass flies across the back seat.
Anton throws himself over me, one arm shielding my head while I fold into him on instinct I’d rather deny.
“Jesus,” I gasp.
“I’ve got you,” he says, and he doesn’t raise his voice. He’s calm, and that means he’s exactly where he knows how to be.
The driver veers onto the farm road, pushing the car through a rut deep enough to make my teeth click together. Mud and water kick up on both sides. The headlights carve over fencing, dead grass, and the glint of something metallic ahead. “Blocker!” he breathes.
Anton is already moving. “Out.”
The car hasn’t fully stopped before his door is open. He catches my wrist, drags me after him, and shoves me down behind the rear wheel. The front passenger is out on the other side with his gun already up. The driver gets out lower and slower, then hisses through his teeth and grabs his arm.
I look at Anton. He doesn’t waste one second looking surprised. He checks the road, the ditch, the tree line, then the car ahead. Two men. One behind the engine block. One trying to angle around.
“Stay down,” he says.
I stare at him. “That’s obvious.”
He almost smiles. “Good. You’re still useful.”
He rises just enough to fire. One shot. Pause. Another. He isn’t wild, and he isn’t angry in the way bad men get angry. He places each round like he’s settling accounts. A man near the block car drops with a sound cut short halfway through it. The second ducks back.
The front passenger fires from the driver’s side and shouts, “Left!”
Anton grabs the back of my coat and hauls me up just as a round snaps through the space I was crouched in. He half carries me through the ditch, my boots sinking into mud and icy water. I slip. He catches me by the waist. I hate how natural that grip feels now.
“Move, Sofiya.”
“I am moving.”
“You’re doing it badly.”
I shove his shoulder as we run. “Then let me panic with dignity.”
He laughs once, and the sound follows me through the trees while branches slap my coat and wet leaves stick to my hair. Behind us, the gunfire turns ragged and then fades. Somebody shouts in Hungarian. Somebody else answers. The sound gets swallowed by distance and trees.
We cut uphill through a patch of brush and over a low stone wall. Anton drops behind it first, then pulls me down beside him. The front passenger appears seconds later with the driver leaning on him, blood dark through his sleeve now.
“Can you walk?” Anton asks the driver.
The man spits into the mud. “Can drive.”
“Not tonight.”
The front passenger crouches beside us and glances at me once, checking whether I’m hit. “You all right?”
I spare a scowl at him. “Define all right.”
He snorts, then looks back at Anton. “I signaled the fallback.”
Anton nods. “Good.”
He turns to me and wipes a streak of dirt off my cheek with his thumb before I can stop him. “Any pain?”
I stare. “What?”
“Any pain. You fell twice.”
“I’m fine.”
“Answer like you want me to believe you.”
His thumb is still against my face, warm, big, and familiar enough to pull Prague straight up from my spine. I hate that I lean into it for the smallest second before I catch myself and jerk away. “I said I’m fine.”
That almost makes him smile again. Lights flash once through the trees below us. Then once more. Anton answers with his phone light, covering most of it in his palm. The front passenger helps the driver up. Anton catches my hand and gets me moving before I can object to that too.
The van that picks us up looks like it carries vegetables and old plumbing parts for hire. The man behind the wheel is in his sixties, flat cap, rough coat, no expression. He opens the side door, takes in the blood, the mud, the guns, and me, then jerks his head.
“Inside.”
No questions. I like him already.
The ride is ugly. Hard turns, rough roads, and no decent suspension.
Anton sits beside me on a narrow bench and braces one hand behind me every time the van jolts.
It should feel insulting. It feels necessary.
My body shakes once the adrenaline starts dropping, and I tuck my hands under my arms so he won’t see.
He sees.
“Cold?”
“No.”
“Lying.”
“I don’t owe you accuracy.”
His hand lands on my knee, warm and broad through wet fabric. “You owe me plenty.”
The words make me furious but they also make my stomach dip in a way that has nothing to do with the road.
The inn appears at the end of a lane so narrow I’d never have found it alone. White walls. Dark roof. One lantern at the side door. From the front it could be an ordinary family place. From the way the back entrance opens before we even knock, it clearly isn’t.
The owner ushers us in through a kitchen that smells like roasting meat, butter, and onions, and I nearly groan from hunger right there.
We go upstairs. One room. Heavy curtains.
Narrow bathroom. Bed too close to everything.
Table under the window. Hooks by the door. A room meant for hiding, not living.
Anton checks both windows before he says a word. He tests the lock, looks under the bed, checks the wardrobe, then finally turns back to me. “Sit.”
I toss my bag onto the chair. “You have a very limited vocabulary when you’re armed.”
“And you have a very poor survival instinct for a woman who keeps managing to survive.”
I shove my wet hair back from my face. “Are you going to answer a question tonight, or just keep moving me around like freight?”
His eyes go over me once, taking in the mud on my coat, the scarf at my throat, the tremor I still haven’t fully beaten, and then he takes out his phone and makes a call before replying. “Talk.”
He listens. Says two short things in Russian. Hangs up. Makes another call. Gets a longer answer. Hangs up again.
“I hate that you do that.”
He looks at me thoughtfully. “What?”
“Act like everyone in the room exists to wait for your summary.”
His mouth shifts. “You’re in the room, aren’t you?”
Before I can answer, there’s a knock and a tray comes in.
I smell it before I see it properly and my whole body wakes up at once.
A roast chicken with browned skin and garlic under it.
A cast-iron pan of potatoes crisped in duck fat with rosemary and black pepper.
Buttered noodles with sweet cabbage and bacon.
Thick slices of bread still hot from the oven.
A bowl of cucumber salad with vinegar and dill.
Two bowls of goulash, dark red and glossy with paprika and onions.
A plate of soft cheese and smoked sausage.
Apple strudel cut thick, steam still coming from the middle.
The woman setting it down looks at me and says, “Eat before it cools.”
I could kiss her.
When she leaves, Anton pulls out the chair for me. I glare at him and sit anyway. He tears bread open with both hands, steam rushing up, and sets half on my plate. Then he spoons potatoes beside the goulash, cuts a piece of chicken, and pushes that over too.
“I can serve myself.”
He smirks again. “I know.”
I stare at him. “Then why are you doing it?”
His eyes lift to mine. “You’re shaking.”
That shuts me up.
The first bite of chicken is so good it nearly makes me angry.
Crisp skin, hot juice, garlic, salt. The potatoes are obscene.
The goulash is rich and deep and full of beef that gives way at the touch of the fork, and the cabbage noodles hit sweet, salty, buttery notes that make my eyes close for one stupid second.
Anton sees that and leans back in his chair like he’s watching a show he paid for.
“Better?”
I hate that he’s right. “Don’t get smug.”
“I’m never not smug.”
“You’re impossible.”
“And yet here you are, eating my rescue dinner.”
I tear more bread. “You keep calling it rescue and I keep hearing abduction.”
He picks up his spoon. “The difference is simple. Men outside wanted you back for leverage. I want you alive.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It isn’t supposed to be.”
I eat another bite. He watches me until I swallow.
“The ambush confirms what I already suspected,” he says. “Maks’s side is hunting hard, and now somebody besides him knows I have you.”
“Who?”
“Could be a broker line, someone from the road, or one of the men who recognized my car before they fired.” He tears bread and looks at me over it. “Either way, I’m off the cleaner route now.”
“Where are you taking me?”
He doesn’t answer fast enough.
I put the spoon down. “No. Absolutely not. You don’t get to move me like luggage from one hidden room to another and skip the part where I know where I’m being taken.”
His gaze drops to my mouth when I get heated, and it makes me want to flip the table. “You’re not in shape to run your own route tonight.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
He eats another bite, swallows, wipes his mouth with his thumb, then says, “Somewhere safer than Budapest.”
“That could mean anything.”
“It does.”
I lean forward. “You arrogant bastard.”
“And you are very beautiful when you’re furious and fed.”
I actually laugh at that, short and disbelieving. “Did you hear a word I said?”
“I heard all of them. I’m choosing not to reward your tone.”
“Reward my tone?”
His eyes hold mine. “Be careful, Sofiya. You’re tired, you’re angry, and you’re looking at me like you want me to drag you over this table.”
Heat floods through me so fast I nearly choke on the next breath. “I want to stab you.”
He nods. “That too.”
I stand. The chair legs scrape. “Stop doing this.”
He stays seated for another second, looking up at me from under his brows in a way that makes my whole body remember Prague. “Doing what?”
“Talking like this. Looking at me like this. Acting like being trapped in another room with you is somehow funny.”
His gaze runs over my face, then my throat, then lower and back up again, and I hate that my body still answers every time. “It isn’t funny,” he says. “It’s unfortunate timing.”
“Timing is all you ever talk about when it suits you.”
He comes around the table. “I dragged you out of a burned city,” he says. “One of my men is bleeding downstairs, there are two dead men on a road because your cousin got impatient, and you still can’t stop thinking about what my mouth feels like.”
That lands dead center and my face burns. “You’re out of your mind.”
He stops right in front of me. “Am I wrong?”
“Yes.”
He takes my plate from my hand and sets it down on the table behind me. “Look at me and lie better.”
His face is a little dirtier than it was in the apartment, one curl of hair out of place, his coat off now, sweater stretched across his shoulders, blood on one cuff that isn’t his. He looks like trouble in a form my body understands too well. “You’re unbearable,” I mutter.
His hand comes up and catches a strand of hair stuck to my cheek. “You’ve been aching for me since Budapest.”
I catch the heel of his palm with my teeth before I can think better of it. He freezes for a second, then laughs, and the sound of it goes through me. “There she is.”
He takes my jaw in his hand. Not rough enough to hurt. More than enough to hold. “Tell me to stop.”
Yes, I should tell him to get out, to sleep on the floor, to keep his hands to himself, to remember I’m carrying his child and everything is more dangerous now than it was in Prague. Instead I say, “You first.”
That grin of his is pure male sin. “Not happening.” Then he kisses me.
Mouth on mine, hand at the back of my neck, body pressing mine into the edge of the table so the plates rattle behind me.
I make a sound against his mouth that I’m never going to forgive myself for, and he takes advantage of it instantly, deepening the kiss until I’m holding onto his sweater with both hands and leaning into him like I’ve been starving for exactly this.
He breaks it only to breathe and drag his mouth along my jaw. “You’ve been a problem since Prague,” he says against my skin.
“You say that like you’re not one.”
He pulls back enough to look at me, eyes hot. “I’m a much bigger one.”
The bed is three steps away, the food is still hot on the table, and every decent decision I could make leaves the room before I do.