Taste of the Light (Izotov Bratva #2)

Chapter 1 - Eliana

ELIANA

fire /?fī(?)r/: verb

The world has been gutting me piece by piece.

Now, it’s come for Yasmin, too.

I stand frozen in my best friend’s bedroom doorway, watching Brandon’s hands wrapped around her throat. Everything that has led to this moment goes tumbling through my mind in jagged, gruesome fragments.

The rain on my face and Sage’s frantic call.

Bastian in that alley with blood on his hands and a corpse at his feet.

Running and screaming and screaming and running until my vision narrowed to nearly nothing.

And before that, another shower of broken glass memories: weeks and months of falling in love with a man who turned out to be exactly what everyone warned me about. The black sedan on every corner. Wires dangling like dark, treacherous seaweed in the empty caverns of Project Olympus.

Every moment of tenderness and violence blurs together, each melting into the other like paints in the rain, until the world is nothing but a blackened wash of things that no longer have shape or form or rhyme or reason.

I’ve endured it all. I endured and endured and endured again, when what I should’ve done from the start is stand up and say, No more. No fucking more.

I’m done enduring.

It’s time for me to act.

My hand closes around the first thing I can reach: a ceramic lamp on Yasmin’s dresser. Heavy. Solid. Perfect.

Brandon is too focused on choking Yasmin to hear me coming. His back is to the door, shoulders hunched, all his weight bearing down on her throat. She’s clawing at his wrists, her face going purple, her eyes bulging.

I swing the lamp as hard as I can.

It connects with the back of Brandon’s skull with a sound like a ripe melon splitting open. The ceramic shatters and Brandon’s grip on Yasmin’s throat goes slack as he crumples sideways onto the bed.

Yas gasps and coughs, sucking in air. Her hands fly to her throat as she rolls away from Brandon’s body.

I drop what’s left of the lamp, just the base and a jagged shard still attached, and grab Yasmin’s arm. “We have to go. Now.”

She’s still coughing too hard to speak, but she nods. I haul her to her feet and we go stumbling toward the door together.

Behind us, Brandon groans. “You b…bitch,” he slurs. “You f-fucking c-cu—”

I don’t wait to hear the rest. I drag Yasmin through the bedroom door, down the hallway, past Zeke’s still form in the living room.

“Wait! We can’t leave him,” Yasmin rasps, her voice destroyed.

“We have to.”

“Eliana—”

“We can’t!” I scream. I’m still pulling Yasmin toward the door, my bloody feet leaving prints across her carpet. “Yas, I just saw Bastian. He—he did something. Something awful. We have to go.”

“What? What does that mean? What are you talking about?” She’s still trying to twist back toward Zeke, but I yank her harder.

“He killed someone!” The confession bursts out of me like bile. “I watched him fucking cut off a dead man’s finger, Yasmin. We can’t wait, we can’t—Brandon might wake up, or Bastian might find us, and Zeke—” I pause for air. “Zeke’s his best friend. He’ll tell Bastian where we are.”

“But Eliana—”

“Now, Yasmin! Right fucking now!”

Down the hall behind us, Brandon groans again. The sound galvanizes Yasmin. Her eyes go wide and she stops resisting, lets me pull her through the doorway and into the hall.

We sprint toward the elevator together, both of us barefoot, both of us bleeding, both of us running from men we thought we no longer had to fear.

The elevator doors slide open and we collapse inside. I slam the lobby button with my palm, leaving a crimson smear across the burnished metal.

As the elevator descends, we pant like animals.

Our ragged breaths echo in the small metal cage.

I try not to panic at how little I can see.

The world has never been more dangerous and I’ve never seen less of it.

Wisps of color and motion are all that remain.

I’m drowning— wallowing— floating away— I need something to— to— to—

My hand shoots out blindly and finds Yasmin’s. I grab it hard enough that she gasps, but she doesn’t pull away. Instead, she squeezes back just as tight.

I force myself to focus on that. The sensation of her palm against mine. The warmth of her skin. The tremor in her fingers that matches the earthquake in my own.

I have to focus on that, because if I don’t, I’ll start to think, and if I start to think, I’ll die. So I don’t think. Not about anything.

Not the darkness closing in.

Not Bastian’s face in that alley.

Not Brandon’s hands around Yasmin’s throat.

Not Zeke lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood.

Just this: Yasmin’s hand in mine.

The elevator dings. Lobby. As soon as the doors open enough to allow us to wriggle through, I pull her forward into whatever comes next. When we pass the horrified doorman, I yell at him, “Call an ambulance! People are hurt upstairs.”

I don’t stop to see if he listens.