Chapter 18 #2
"Are you hurt?" My voice is rough, barely controlled. It doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard from myself before.
She shakes her head, but she's trembling. Her whole body is shaking.
"Did he touch you? Did he—"
"No." The word is barely a whisper. "He was trying to take me. Through the window. There's a rope—"
I look. She's right. There's a rope anchored to something outside, hanging down from her window. They were planning to extract her. To take her. The rage that floods through me is so intense it's almost blinding.
They tried to take her from me.
"Stay here," I tell her, my hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look at me. "Don't move. Don't go near the window. Do you understand?"
She nods, but her eyes are unfocused. She's in shock. I want to stay with her. I want to hold her until the shaking stops, until the fear leaves her eyes. But I can't. Not yet.
"I'll be back," I promise. "I'm getting you out of here."
Then I'm moving again, back into the hallway, back into the chaos.
—
The next twenty minutes are a blur of violence.
I move through the estate like a force of nature, taking down anyone wearing Volkov marks.
My men rally around me, feeding off my fury, pushing back against the assault with renewed aggression.
We retake the gardens, secure the south entrance, and drive the remaining attackers back toward the breached east gate.
A man comes at me with a shotgun and I take him down with three rounds to the chest. Another tries to flank me and I catch him with a burst that nearly cuts him in half.
Blood soaks into the grass. Bodies litter the grounds.
The fountain runs red. My men are fighting like demons, but we're losing people.
I see one of mine go down with a bullet to the leg.
Another takes one to the shoulder but keeps fighting.
Another guard catches a round to the head and drops instantly.
But we're winning. Slowly and brutally, but we're winning. The Volkovs are falling back, their coordinated assault breaking apart under our defense. They retreat toward the breached gate, dragging their wounded and leaving their dead.
"Push them out!" I shout into the radio. "Don't let them regroup!"
My men surge forward, driving the last of the Volkovs through the gate and into the street beyond. Gunfire follows them, cutting down stragglers, making sure they understand the cost of attacking us.
And then, suddenly, it's over. The gunfire stops.
The estate falls silent except for the moans of the wounded and the crackle of flames from the burning vehicle at the main gate.
By the time Viktor calls the all-clear, there are bodies everywhere.
Most of them are Volkov's men, but we've lost five of our own.
Good men. Men who died because one man refused to pay a fucking ransom.
Because I demanded it of him. As if I had any fucking choice, myself. My own men would rather die than see me show the kind of weakness they'd perceive if I'd just cut Liesl loose.
And if I had, I wouldn't have…
I don't have anything. I need to remember that.
And the only thing I need to focus on right now is that I need to get Liesl out of here.
I stand there in the wreckage of my estate, surrounded by bodies and blood and the evidence of how close I came to losing everything. Not the estate. Not my position. Not my power.
Her.
I almost lost her.
I need to see her. Need to make sure she's really okay, that the terror in her eyes has faded, that she's—
I stop myself.
She's not mine. She made that clear two days ago. And after what just happened—after she watched me kill a man in her room, after she saw exactly what my world looks like when it comes crashing down—she's probably even more certain of that now.
But I'm taking her to the safe house anyway. I'm not giving her a choice.
Not about this.
—
I find her in her room, sitting on the bed, staring at the wall.
The body has been removed and the blood has been cleaned up. But the broken window remains, a gaping wound letting in cold air and the smell of smoke.
She doesn't look at me when I enter. "We're leaving," I tell her. "Pack what you need. We have twenty minutes."
"Where are we going?" Her voice is so flat that it doesn't even sound like her.
"A safe house, outside the city. It's secure."
"For how long?"
"As long as it takes."
She finally looks at me then, and the expression in her eyes makes my chest tighten. There's no warmth there. No softness. Just cold resignation. She's distanced herself from me in every possible way that she can.
"Do I have a choice?"
"No," I say honestly. "You don't."
She nods slowly, like she expected that answer. "Then I'll pack."
She stands and moves to the closet, and starts pulling out clothes. Every movement is careful and restrained, like she's doing this through sheer force of will.
I want to go to her, pull her into my arms and tell her I'm sorry, that I'll keep her safe, that everything will be okay.
But I can't promise that. I can't promise anything except more violence, more danger, more reasons for her to look at me with that cold, distant expression.
So I just stand there and watch her pack, the silence between us heavy with everything we're not saying.
The transport is ready when we come downstairs—an SUV with bulletproof glass and dark tinted windows, the engine already running. Viktor is waiting beside it with two other armed men.
"Route is clear," Viktor reports. "We'll have an escort for the first twenty miles, then you're on your own."
I nod. "Keep the estate secure. Reinforce the defenses. And find out how the fuck they knew to attack today."
"Already working on it."
I turn to Liesl. She's standing a few feet away, her bag clutched in her hands and her face pale in the morning light. She looks small and vulnerable. Fragile and breakable.
"Get in," I tell her, opening the rear door of the SUV.
She doesn't argue or protest. She just climbs in and settles into the far corner of the seat, as far from me as possible.
I get in beside her, and Viktor closes the door.
The driver pulls away immediately, and I watch through the tinted windows as the estate disappears behind us.
The damage is visible even from here—the broken gate, the scorched earth near the east entrance, the bodies being loaded into vehicles for disposal.
This is what my world looks like. This is what I've built.
And I've dragged her into the middle of it.
I glance at Liesl. She's staring out the window, her expression unreadable. Her hands are folded in her lap, perfectly still, but I can see the tension in her shoulders, the rigid set of her spine. She's holding herself together, but barely.
"Liesl—"
"Don't." The word is quiet but firm. "Please. Just... don't."
I close my mouth and swallow the apology that was forming, the explanations and justifications.
She doesn't want to hear it. She doesn't want anything from me except silence.
So I give her that.
We drive in silence through the city, then out onto the highway. The escort vehicles peel off after twenty miles, just as Viktor promised, and then it's just us and the driver. The safe house is two hours away. Two hours of this suffocating quiet.
I should be thinking about strategy, about the Volkovs and what their attack means for the larger war, about Alexander Baumann and how to finally end this. But all I can think about is the woman sitting beside me, so close I could reach out and touch her, and yet further away than she's ever been.
Two days ago, she told me she wasn't mine unless she decided to be. Today, I'm taking her to a safe house against her will, locking her away from the world and keeping her prisoner in a different cage. Proving her right.
I'm not the man she saw that night. The tender one. The vulnerable one. I'm the man who kills without hesitation, who drags her from one prison to another, who can't let her go even when I know I should.
I'm the monster she saw in that outbuilding, covered in someone else's blood.
And I don't know how to be anything else.