Chapter 39 Luca #2
Every Kozlov soldier spins in a different direction. Half go for cover. The other half go for their weapons too slowly and die for it.
In the confusion, one of the men behind me reaches for his gun, and Dario drops him before I can even open my mouth.
Then he’s at my side.
“Jesus Christ, you look like shit.”
“Missed you too, asshole,” I grind out.
He slashes through the ropes at my wrists. The relief is instant and brutal, blood rushing back into my hands in a hot, stabbing flood that makes me hiss between my teeth.
He shoves a pistol into my grip. “Can you shoot?”
My hands are stiff. My shoulder is a mess. My left eye is swollen shut.
“Fuck, yes.”
Across the warehouse, Nikolai doesn’t run for cover. Doesn’t engage the Andrettis. He goes straight for Natalia, grabbing her by the arm as he yanks her toward him.
Dario cuts the rope at my ankles. “Luca—”
I’m already moving.
The chair clatters behind me as I shove to my feet. My ribs scream. My knees almost buckle. Doesn’t matter. None of it matters.
“Stupid fucking traitor,” Nikolai snarls in her face, raising his hand.
She twists, trying to tear free, but he backhands her so hard her head snaps to the side. Matteo barrels toward them, but another Russian bastard intercepts him, and the two of them crash into a stack of crates in a spray of splintered wood.
“Natalia!” I roar.
Nikolai’s head whips toward me.
I’m on him before he can react.
He shoves Natalia away and swings. I duck under it and drive my fist into his throat hard enough to send him stumbling backward.
The impact jars all the way up my arm. He’s tough.
I’ll give him that. Mean bastards usually are.
He recovers fast and slams into me with all his weight, and suddenly we’re both going down in a hard sprawl across the concrete.
Pain explodes through my ribs. My vision whites out for half a second. I blink it back.
He drives an elbow into my jaw. I answer with one to his temple. We roll, swearing and grappling and trying to finish this while gunfire cracks through the warehouse around us and men shout over the noise.
I lose track of everything except his hands and mine. The scrape of concrete. The taste of blood. The sound of Natalia shouting something that never quite reaches me through the pounding in my ears.
Nikolai tears free and gets to his feet first, pulling a knife. He’s sloppy with rage, and that makes him dangerous. The first swipe catches my forearm before I can fully twist away. Heat flashes across my skin, sharp and wet, and then the blood comes.
I barely register it.
This isn’t a fight anymore.
This is for everything she ever flinched from. Every bruise she hid. Every time his voice made her shrink.
He comes at me again, and I block his swing, twist his wrist until the knife clatters to the ground, and drive my fist into his throat again. He staggers, choking, and I hit him again. Chin. Temple. He drops to his knees.
I snatch up the knife. My fingers are half-numb and slick with blood. I grip it anyway.
Nikolai looks up at me from the floor, blood pouring from his nose and his lip split open, and for the first time since I met him, he doesn’t look cruel or smug or untouchable.
He looks scared.
“Any last words?”
Nikolai opens his mouth, blood slick on his teeth, and gets as far as “You’ll nev—”
I drive the knife into him.
Deep.
He jerks beneath me, mouth opening on a raw, wet sound. I pull the blade free and do it again, lower this time, because I’m done playing with this bastard. I’m done with his hands on her. Done with his voice in her ear. Done with the years he spent teaching her fear and calling it family.
He goes still.
I turn toward Natalia, and the relief on her face lasts exactly one second before it transforms into horror.
“Luca!”
I spin just as a gunshot tears past my ear. Anton has Natalia by the throat, one arm locked around her, his pistol now aimed at her head.
“Everyone stop!”
The command cuts clean through the remaining gunfire. Men on both sides hesitate. The few Bratva soldiers still standing look around wildly, caught between their dying loyalty and survival. Matteo pivots, gun raised. Dario comes up on my left. I barely see any of them.
All I see is Anton with his arm locked tight around Natalia’s neck, dragging her back against his chest like she’s exactly what she’s always been to him. Leverage. Property. A shield with a pulse.
His grip is crushing. She claws at his arm, feet scraping the ground. She’s breathing fast, eyes huge, but she’s not breaking.
Anton keeps backing toward the side door. “Drop your weapons.”
No one does.
His grip tightens. “I said drop them or she dies.”
My whole body goes cold.
But there’s a line. Barely. The angle shifts every time he moves, appears and disappears with each step he forces her to take.
Natalia’s eyes find mine across the warehouse. Fifteen feet of smoke and blood between us. She’s shaking. Her father’s arm is locked around her throat, thinking the gun at her head makes him untouchable. And she looks right at me with something that isn’t fear.
Trust.
She goes still. Completely, deliberately still.
I exhale. Pain flares white-hot through my shoulder as I steady my aim. My left eye is useless and my hands won’t stop shaking.
But I can make this shot. Because I have to.
Anton’s eyes flick to her. To me. His grip shifts.
I fire.
The bullet catches him in the forehead, just above his right eye. His grip releases. Natalia stumbles forward as he crumples backward, hitting the concrete with a sound that barely registers above the ringing in my ears.
Anton Kozlov, Pakhan of the Vegas Bratva, the man who murdered his wife, sold his daughter, and controlled every room he ever walked into, dies on the floor of his own warehouse.
Natalia runs to me. Full sprint. She crashes into my chest and I catch her with my good arm, pulling her in so tight that my cracked ribs scream and I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.
“You absolute idiot,” she chokes against my neck. “You could have missed.”
“Wasn’t going to miss. Not with you.”
She pulls back. Tears and blood on her face, I don’t know whose. Her hands are shaking so badly she can barely hold onto me.
There are a hundred things I should probably say first. Are you hurt?
Can you walk? We need to get out of here.
But they all get trampled under the weight of the one thing that has been clawing its way up my throat for days now, maybe from the moment she found me bleeding on that beach and decided not to let me die.
I press my forehead to hers.
“I love you.” I cup her face with my bruised hand.
“I think I have from the start. I loved you when I didn’t know my own name, when all I knew was that I wanted to be near you.
And I loved you after I remembered. When I knew exactly who I was and exactly why I shouldn’t, I still loved you.
I’m always going to. You’re it for me, Nat. ”
She kisses me. Hard and desperate and tasting like blood and salt, and I kiss her back with everything I’ve got left, which isn’t much, but it’s hers. All of it. Whatever I am, whatever’s left after tonight, it belongs to her.
She pulls back just far enough to look me in the eye. “I love you too.” Her voice cracks on it. “So much, Luca.”
For one second, I can’t say a damn thing.
Because no one has ever chosen me like that before. Not cleanly. Not with their whole heart.
“Then I’m yours,” I say, my throat tight as hell. “For the rest of it.”
Around us, the gunfire fades. Bratva soldiers drop weapons. Dario is barking orders. Matteo is moving through the room, clearing threats, efficient as always.
Natalia’s gaze drops past me to the warehouse floor, to where Anton lies sprawled near the side door and Nikolai is a ruin by the broken crates. I feel the shiver that goes through her.
Then she looks back at me.
“For the first time in my life,” she says softly, “I think I’m free.”
I brush my thumb under her eye, catching the last tear there. “You are.”
And this time, with Anton dead at our feet and Nikolai never getting back up and the whole rotten Kozlov machine finally broken open around us, I know it’s true.