Chapter 25 #2
Grant blinks, spasms once more, and his gaze becomes empty. His eyelids stay open, but there’s nothing left of the sadistic man who made my life miserable and killed my sister. He’s dead.
A man I presume must be Kirill stands in the doorway behind me with a handgun still raised.
He lowers it and looks at Grant’s body the way someone looks at a piece of equipment that stopped working, with disappointment and minor disgust. “He was about to damage my advantage.” Kirill’s voice is the same filtered calm from the speaker, except now it’s in the room with me, spoken by a man in an expensive coat who kills people the way other people cancel appointments. “You are worth more intact.”
I take a step back. Fear of a different kind fills me. I want to face him defiantly, like I did Grant, but self-preservation kicks in. “You didn’t save me.”
“No. I preserved my investment.” He steps over the threshold and walks toward Grant’s body without looking at me.
“Grant was a tool who broke things instead of fixing them. His value became zero because tools that break other tools get replaced.” His gaze turns appraising.
“Let’s hope your value holds longer, Margot. ”
In spite of my fear, I take a step forward as anger surges. “Mara wasn’t a tool.”
“Mara was a paralegal who documented patterns she should have ignored.” He nudges Grant’s hand with his shoe, checking for life the way you’d check a circuit breaker.
“I sent Grant to kill her because she interfered with the arrangement, not because she was keeping him from you. I’m sure there was an element of that, but she was always the target because of her nosiness, not because of you.
I sealed the evidence because dead women who leave paper trails create expensive problems.” He straightens.
“You created a more expensive problem by surviving.”
I look at Grant on the floor. He killed my sister, broke my bones, locked doors and called it love.
I thought he’d killed Mara because she wouldn’t tell him where I was and helped me file for divorce.
All along, he had a different objective, and it was just a bonus that she was my sister.
Kirill selected him as her assassin because the familial link gave Grant access and gave the murder a personal motive.
Now he’s lying on concrete in a witness archive beneath a shuttered fugitive-recovery office.
There’s no relief.
I wanted a courtroom and a jury, and the evidence I’d gathered read into the record while Mara’s pendant was on my throat.
Instead, he died on a concrete floor, shot by a man who considered him a malfunctioning tool.
He didn’t get to suffer in prison for years like he deserved.
I feel cheated. I’m glad he’s dead, but I wanted to accept Valentin’s offer only after Grant had spent months in prison and the record showed that he killed Mara.
I look at Grant one more time and think about Mara.
Then I turn away because the child inside me can’t afford the seconds it would cost to feel this fully.
Kirill steps over Grant’s body without looking down.
He leaves through a side door, unhurried, clearly already thinking about the next item on his schedule.
There’s no one else in here with me, so I run. I know I can’t be alone. Kirill has someone waiting for me, but I still sprint toward the door, instinctively moving toward the stairs when I get into the hallway.
Gunfire erupts above me. The stairwell is twenty feet ahead, and muzzle flashes show through the smoke drifting down from the upper level. Valentin’s people are in the building. The rescue is happening above me while I’m running through a sublevel toward it.
I take the stairwell steps two at a time because my body still works and my legs still move. Right now, the baby is still alive and the flash drive is still pressed against my skin. Everything I’ve survived in the last ten weeks has been preparation for the next thirty seconds.
Valentin is on the stairs, descending toward me through the smoke, with blood on his shirt and his weapon in his right hand and an expression of raw, desperate focus. He’s rushing toward me.
I pick up the pace, and I’m four steps from reaching him when Kolya catches me from behind.
I grunt and immediately struggle, but he wraps his left arm around my shoulders.
His right hand presses a gun against my temple.
The metal is warm from his grip, which doesn’t look secure but is probably secure enough to fire once at this range and not miss.
His forearm is still bleeding, his plan is collapsing, and I’m the only advantage he has left.
“Stop.” Kolya’s voice carries across the stairwell, over the gunfire, and Valentin freezes mid-step. “The baby makes her the only asset left worth bargaining with.” He adjusts his grip. “Walk away, and she lives. Come closer, and I solve the problem your father would have solved ten weeks ago.”
Valentin stares at me through the smoke with blood on his ribs and the gun lowered at his side. He’s clearly enraged that Kolya has a weapon pressed against my forehead. If he didn’t know before, he knows now that I’m pregnant, since Kolya just told him.
I don’t look away, beg, or bargain. I keep looking at the man I love and wait for him to make the choice I’ve been watching for since the night he told me the next move was mine. What will he choose?