Chapter 31
Damien
Decoy.
It flashes through my head like lightning. Kirill is groaning, but he’s alive and will remain that way out of sheer stubbornness.
“Down,” he says to me, shoving my head down.
“Get off, you fucking prick. You are dead on your feet.”
“If I’m moving, I’m protecting you,” he growls.
“Lidiya,” I snap, seeing blood running down her face as she turns glazed eyes to the back of the car.
“What was that?” she croaks.
“A decoy. They hit us and drove off. The second wave is coming.”
“What is the second wave?” she asks, eyes terrified.
Sirens blare through the air.
“That,” I say, shoving the car door open and taking the shortcut over the car bonnet to reach her door faster.
I hit the pavement and rip her door open. She’s dazed, blood streaking down her temple, hair tangled, eyes wide.
“Out,” I order, hauling her free by her upper arm before she can argue. Her feet hit the ground and sway. I lean in and grab my phone before I cage her with my body and the ruined door.
Kirill is on his feet, hand against his stomach as he lurches forward. “Move,” he says.
“This way,” I growl, hauling Lidiya away from the car wreck, which is now drawing more attention than I’d have liked. But car crashes in broad daylight on the border of Belgravia and Mayfair are kind of unheard of.
We move out, hitting the pavement as if nothing has happened, even though two of us are bleeding openly.
“What is going on?” Lidiya asks, her breath coming in short pants as she struggles to keep up with my longer strides.
“I’m guessing that’s Grandfather Stan,” Kirill grunts.
“Shut it,” I snarl, pissed off that he is putting himself in more danger. “What the hell happened at the church?”
“Shut it or talk?” he asks. “Which is it?”
“Fucking talk before I rip your tongue out.”
He tuts. “Always with the contradictions. Caught me from behind. They were tailing us. Had to be. Still are.”
“Agreed. We need to get off the street.”
“Five minutes to the house,” Kirill says.
“If you make it that long, Marek is probably waiting already.”
“I’ll make it.”
I nod grimly. I’m not so sure about Lidiya. She is swaying on her feet. Probably concussed. But picking her up and slinging her over my shoulder is not the right move. It will make things look worse than they are.
“Shouldn’t we wait for the ambulance?” she rasps.
“They are not the good Samaritans you think they are,” I explain. “They were paid to wait for the crash. They were there to abduct you.”
Her face goes paler, but she accepts it and nods, picking up her pace.
We turn onto my street. Lidiya’s breathing changes—quick, shallow huffs. The crash is catching up with her. I’ve got her arm in a death grip, practically hauling her along. Her eyes are glassy but determined, fixed straight ahead like she’s afraid to blink.
Kirill is falling a step behind, and I can hear the laboured quality of his breathing. He’s moving on willpower and spite, both of which he has in industrial quantities, but neither of which will heal a knife wound without help.
“Thirty seconds,” I murmur, more for Lidiya than for him.
She nods without looking at me, her eyes fixed forward, locked on the gate at the end of the street like it’s a finish line.
Blood has dried in a dark rivulet from her temple to her jaw, and the sight of it makes something in my chest go incandescent.
They drew her blood.
Someone, somewhere, authorised an operation that resulted in her blood spilling, and I am going to find that person and make them understand what that costs.
Two guards see us coming and swing the gate open, moving into action to deal with Kirill, while I get Lidiya inside.
“The police will come looking for us. We left the scene of a crime,” she murmurs.
“We left the scene of someone trying to abduct you,” I correct her. “But don’t worry about it. It will be handled.”
“How?”
“Payoffs and a man on the inside.”
She nods, eyes wide and collapses onto the sofa, resting her head against the cushions. I fetch the first aid kit and set to work cleaning up the wound before handing her two painkillers and a bottle of water. “Rest, but don’t sleep. Not yet.”
She nods and swallows the pills. I stand up and check the gun at my back. “Stay here. I’ll be back soon.”
“Where are you going?”
“To end this.”
She grabs my arm before I make it three steps. Her grip is weak—concussed, battered, running on fumes—but the desperation in it stops me faster than a bullet would.
“Don’t leave me here alone,” she says. Not a plea. A statement of fact wrapped in fear, she’s too tired to disguise.
I turn back. “You won’t be alone. The house is secured. Guards at every entry point. Marek is here for Kirill, and he’ll check on you, too.”
“That’s not the same, and you know it. You wouldn’t leave me here alone before. What if that is the… what is the term? Third wave? What if they know you’ll go for them and leave me? Kirill said they’re watching.”
She’s right, and the fact that she’s right while bleeding from the head and barely upright makes me want to put my fist through the nearest wall.
I stand there, caught between the door and her grip on my arm, and the calculation runs through my head at speed.
Leave, hunt, end it. That’s what every instinct is screaming.
Find Gorbachev. Dismantle whatever operation put blood on her face and a knife in Kirill’s gut.
I am built for this. I am good at this. The hunt is where I live, where I’m sharpest, where the violence in me serves a purpose instead of just simmering.
But she’s right.
They’re watching. They’ve been watching since the auction. They followed her here. They tailed us to Alisha’s. They tailed us to the Ashlar. They had a van tailing us and chose the opportunity to ram us.
“I should be the one to end this,” she says quietly. “It’s me he wants.”
“What are you proposing, solnyshko? That you stand out on the pavement until they pick you up and take you God knows where to do God knows what?”
“Maybe.”
“Over my dead body. And I don’t die easily.”
“This is the only way it ends.”
“No, it ends with a bullet between his eyes.”
“You can’t kill him.”
I blink slowly. “Are you being merciful or stupid?”
She cups my face with a sad smile. “Both, probably. I need to know what’s going on, Damien.”
I take that in and let it sit with my conscience for a few seconds before my brain kicks into strategic gear.
“Then we do it together. Madam Orlov is the key. We go back to the Ashlar, and we demand a confrontation. But this time, I’m killing anyone who even steps five metres away from you. Even her.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t do that last time,” she says with a soft smile.
“I was trying to be diplomatic. Besides. I need that yacht back before Baron cuts my nuts off.”
She giggles, and I smile.
“I give you permission to be non-diplomatic.”
I grab her hand and crush her fingers with mine, kissing her fingertips before I speak. “I don’t need your permission, but it’s noted.”
“So we go in hot?”
I stare at her and then snort. “Go in hot? What is this? A movie?”
She blushes furiously, and I cup her cheek with a smirk. “Well, I don’t know what Bratva terms to use.”
“You don’t need Bratva terms,” I say, brushing my thumb across the blush on her cheek. “You just need to stay behind me and do exactly what I say. Can you manage that?”
“Probably not.”
“Honest answer. I respect it. But to answer your question, we go in the front door and start the violence immediately.”
“Isn’t that the same thing as going in hot?”
I smile indulgently. “Yes, solnyshko. It’s the same as going in hot.”
She breathes out. “How do you shoot a gun?”
“You don’t. You stay behind me, remember?”
“I am not going in unarmed. We don’t really know what is going to happen. What if you get hurt? I need… something.” She is agitated, and I capitulate.
“I will give you a stiletto. Use it at close range.”
She frowns. “A shoe?”
I snort at her delightful ignorance of my world.
“It’s a thin blade, designed for stabbing.
Easy to conceal, easy to use. You hold it like this—” I move over to the console table and open a drawer, pulling out the blade.
I demonstrate, grip reversed, blade flat against my forearm.
“Close range only. You don’t throw it. You don’t wave it around like you’re conducting an orchestra.
If someone gets within arm’s reach who isn’t me, you stab. Preferably somewhere where it hurts.”
“Isn’t that everywhere?”
“You know what I mean.”
She nods like a woman who has decided that learning to stab someone is preferable to being taken, and the steel in her expression makes my chest tighten with something I refuse to examine right now.
I flip the blade and offer it to her handle-first. She takes it. Her fingers wrap around the grip with surprising certainty.
“It goes in the top of your boot. Right one.”
She slides it in. Then she looks up at me. “I’ve never hurt anyone in my life.”
“You slapped my face twice.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“It counted to my face.”
The ghost of a smile crosses her lips, and I file it away with every other contradiction she’s given me today.
A woman who’s never hurt anyone but took a blade without hesitation.
A woman who screamed at me for buying her building but rode my cock like she was claiming territory.
A woman who said no to my name but kissed me like she wanted to swallow it.
She’s going to get me killed.
Not because she’s a liability, but because I’ll step in front of whatever’s coming without thinking, and that kind of reflex is the most dangerous thing a man in my position can develop.
I check my watch. It’s been forty minutes since the crash. The window is narrowing. If Gorbachev’s people are as methodical as I think they are, they’ll have already repositioned. The failed grab means they’ll pull back, reassess, and try a different angle. That gives us time—not much, but enough.
“We need to move,” I say.
“What about Kirill?”
“Marek’s got him. He’s had worse.” That’s not strictly true, but Kirill would gut me himself if I delayed on his account, so I honour him the only way he’d accept—by not stopping. “We go in alone. Just the two of us.”
She licks her lips but then nods. “I trust you.”
I stop dead, the world pausing for just a few moments before it speeds up again.
Those three words rip through me like shrapnel, tearing open something primal that would gladly watch London burn to cinders, that would stack bodies like kindling, that would paint the Thames red with anyone who tries to take her from me.
The violence I’ve spent a lifetime containing suddenly has purpose—her.