27. Sloane #2
I stop so abruptly that my heel slides against the gravel. “Camille?”
She’s running toward me too quickly, stumbling once on the edge of the path before catching herself, and there’s something so wrong in the way she moves that the relief disappears almost as soon as it arrives.
Her hair, usually pinned into the same immaculate style she wears on every flight, has come loose around her face in damp, disordered strands, and her expression is so wild that for a second I barely recognize the composed woman who taught me how Vadim took his water and quietly rescued me from Warren Hale on my first day.
“Camille?”
She doesn’t answer immediately. Her eyes flick over my shoulder toward the house, then toward the dark line of hedges behind her, as though she expects someone to come through them at any moment, and when she finally looks back at me I notice the tremor in her mouth.
Then my gaze drops to her hand.
The knife is small so I almost don’t register it as a weapon at first, but the blade catches the garden light when her arm moves, and the dark shine along the metal is unmistakable.
Blood has collected around her fingers and run across the heel of her palm, streaking the inside of her wrist before disappearing beneath the cuff of her sleeve, and there’s enough of it that my first irrational thought is that she must have cut herself.
Then I see there is no blood on the edge of her palm where she would have grabbed the blade. The blood is somebody else’s.
My stomach turns cold.
“Camille,” I say again, slower this time. “What happened?”
She reaches me and catches my forearm with her free hand hard enough to hurt.
“I’m sorry.”
Her voice is breathless and broken, nothing like the calm, measured tone I know, and when I look more closely I realize she’s not simply frightened.
She looks frantic, almost feverish with it, as though she has been running for a long time and has finally reached the place where panic becomes something physical.
“I’m sorry, Sloane. I didn’t want it to be this way.”
I stare at her. “What way?”
She looks behind herself again. I follow her gaze automatically, but there’s nothing there except the path disappearing between the hedges and the soft pools of light cast by the lamps along the garden.
When I look back at her, the knife is still in her hand.
“Whose blood is that?”
Her fingers tighten around the handle. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“What did you do?”
She shakes her head, breathing harder now. “No, listen to me. You need to listen to me.”
A hard knot forms beneath my ribs. “Then tell me what happened.”
She steps closer, so close that I can smell something metallic beneath her perfume, and suddenly I’m aware of every wrong detail at once: the blood on her wrist, the way her eyes keep searching the dark, the fact that she’s holding a knife as though she has forgotten it’s there.
“Sloane, I never meant for you to—”
The gunshot cracks across the garden so violently that for a fraction of a second I don’t understand what I’ve heard.
Camille’s body jerks against me. Her expression empties, and the sentence dies on her lips.
Then something hot strikes my face. I flinch backward, bringing one hand up instinctively, and for one disorienting second all I can see is Camille staring at me with the same shocked expression I know must be on my own face.
Then blood begins spreading across the front of her dress.
Too much of it.
It blooms rapidly through the fabric near her chest, darkening everything beneath it, and her knees give way before I can understand what’s happening. Her hand slips from my arm, the knife falls somewhere into the grass, and suddenly her full weight is collapsing into me.
My arms close around her shoulders, but she’s already sliding, dragging me down with her, and when I look at the hand pressed against her chest it comes away red.
“Camille?”
Her eyes move once. I don’t know if she hears me.
“Camille.”
My voice breaks this time.
She collapses fully onto the path, and I scream.
The sound tears out of me so hard it hurts my throat, but even that feels distant compared to the sight of blood across my hands, across my dress, across the skin near my mouth where it sprayed when the bullet hit her.
Then I look up.
Vadim is standing only a few feet away.
For a moment, everything around him seems to disappear. The house behind him. The music still drifting faintly through the terrace doors. The movement of security somewhere near the steps.
All I see is him. A gun in his hand. His arm still raised.
His expression is completely cold. Cold in the terrifying, absolute way I have only seen when violence has already happened and he has decided there is nothing left to discuss.
My gaze drops to the weapon.
Then to Camille.
Then back to him.
His eyes meet mine, and something inside me stops.
“Vadim…”
Another gunshot erupts from somewhere beyond the hedge. His head turns toward the sound.
The next burst comes almost immediately, several shots close together and the violent crack of rounds hitting stone and metal. A security light near the wall shatters, spraying sparks as someone yells from the direction of the house.
Vadim moves toward me. “Sloane, down.”
I hear him, but my body doesn’t respond. I’m still staring at Camille.
At the blood.
At the gun in his hand.
At the impossible certainty that he fired it.
Someone grabs me by the upper arm and yanks me sideways just as another shot cracks through the dark, and the sudden force knocks me off-balance.
My foot catches against the edge of the path, my shoulder slams into somebody’s chest, and then I hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs.
Pain flashes through my side, and for several seconds I can’t breathe properly.
Shoes pound past me. Men are shouting in Russian and English, voices overlapping so quickly that I can’t separate commands from panic, and somewhere close enough to make me flinch, a weapon fires again. I curl instinctively toward the ground.
Someone falls nearby. I hear the impact before I see anything.
My hands are slick with Camille’s blood.
That’s what finally makes me move.
I push myself up onto one knee, then my feet, barely aware of the pain in my shoulder because my mind has narrowed to one simple, overwhelming need.
Get away.
I don’t know who’s attacking the estate.
I don’t know why Camille had a bloody knife.
I don’t know whether Vadim shot her because she was dangerous, because she betrayed him, or because of something even worse that I have not yet begun to understand.
All I know is that I can’t stay where I am.
“Sloane!” Vadim’s voice cuts through everything.
I look toward him. He’s moving in my direction, gun still in his hand, but two men cross between us at the same time and one of them fires toward the eastern wall, forcing Vadim to turn.
That’s enough.
I run toward the gate.
The decision isn’t rational. I don’t have a plan for what happens if I get beyond the compound, no idea where I will go barefoot in the middle of the night or how far the nearest road is, but the gate is the only thing in front of me that looks like an exit, and right now that’s enough.
I sprint across the grass. My shoes are wrong for it, the thin heels sinking into the damp earth and twisting beneath me every few steps, and after nearly falling for the second time I stop long enough to kick them off.
The gravel bites immediately into the soles of my feet, but I barely feel it.
Behind me, someone shouts my name again. I don’t turn around.
The garden blurs as I run past the line of hedges, past a low stone wall, past the lamps throwing long shadows across the ground. My lungs burn, my heart pounding so hard that every beat seems to strike against my throat.
The gate comes into view, the darker road beyond. For the first time since I started running, hope cuts through the panic. I’m close enough that I start thinking I might actually make it.
Then someone catches me from behind.
An arm locks around my waist with brutal force. I scream, but a hand clamp over my mouth before the sound can fully escape, pressing hard enough against my lips that the rest of it turns into a muffled cry.
I fight immediately. My elbow drives backward. My heel catches somebody’s shin.
The grip around me tightens, and a man’s mouth comes close to my ear.
“Stop.”
I twist harder.
He drags me away from the path and toward the darkness behind the hedge, using my own momentum against me. I try to bite the hand covering my mouth, but his fingers press harder across my face.
“Quiet,” he whispers, breath hot against my ear. “Unless you want him to hear you.”