Chapter 36 - Gavril #2
My eyes skated past the filthy, mostly broken furniture and spotted familiar hands clasped together behind a wooden chair.
Zip ties dug into her wrists, leaving red welts against her pale skin.
Her long hair fell down her back in tangles.
I moved to get a better view and saw her profile, chin tipped downward, almost resting on her chest as if she might be unconscious.
I didn’t blink until I caught the rise and fall of her chest. Blood stained the shoulder of her t-shirt, and I gripped the windowsill until the rotting wood crumbled in my fingers.
I ducked down when footsteps sounded toward the kitchen. A moment later, I heard familiar voices.
“How much longer?” Reuben whined. “You promised all I had to do was deliver her.”
The little piece of shit sounded scared, but it was nothing compared to how he’d sound when I was sawing his fingers off one by one.
“We need everyone for the ambush,” Luigi answered. “It won’t be long now. They landed at a private airfield not too far from here. Any minute now.”
Another voice joined in, one of Luigi’s right-hand men. “This is a lot of work for just one more,” he said, as whiny as Reuben. “I get that Masha’s a prize and will probably hold a lot more sway than that other one, but—”
Luigi cut him off with a grunt. “Do you honestly believe they’ll just send one person? No matter what the girl told them, we’re going to be able to pick off quite a few with this setup.”
So this wasn’t just to get Lilia back in his control. Luigi had actually thought a few steps ahead this time. He planned to take out whoever arrived to rescue her.
“They’ll kill you all,” Lilia screamed from the other room after hearing their laughter. Someone cut her off with a hard slap.
The sound of her whimper after the crack of the hand against her cheek filled me with such fury that I was about to go in alone. All I had to do was aim my gun over the windowsill and take three neat headshots in quick succession.
As I raised my gun, the sound of several cars pulling up outside made them hurry out of the kitchen toward the front of the house, shoving Reuben ahead of them. “Get outside and keep up the act like you’re helping her,” Luigi hissed, as the other men with him ducked down and readied their weapons.
Running around the side of the house, I saw that Luigi’s assumption was correct.
It was a veritable army of Petrovs. Out of the first car spilled Aleks, the leader of the American branch of the powerful family, Lilia’s older sister Masha, who looked like she was ready to tear off some faces with her teeth, and her husband, Anatoli Ovinko, someone who definitely wouldn’t mind seeing me dead.
Two other cousins I thought I recognized as Rurik and his brothers, Matvey and Daniil, jumped out of another car, followed quickly by at least a half-dozen other angry, heavily armed men.
I stayed frozen at the corner of the house, my hand on my gun, waiting to see what would happen next, only thinking about Lilia, unable to protect herself or get out of the way if something went wrong. Reuben stepped out onto the sagging porch, his hands up, a nervous smile on his face.
“Where’s Lilia?” Masha demanded, lunging forward. Aleks grabbed her by the arm and held her back. No one made another move closer to the house after that.
“She’s inside, she’s not feeling well, she…” the nervous little shit trailed off, motioning for them to follow him in.
The moment they stepped through those doors, the shooting would start, and Lilia would have to watch her sister and cousins be executed in front of her. Without a single thought, I raised my arm and shot Reuben cleanly through the side of his lying head.
Immediately after the shot rang out, almost before the body hit the porch, the sheet metal in front of the barn door exploded outward, and a swarm of Luigi’s men ran out. They must have hidden the extra cars in the barn; there were so many of them. The Petrovs were far outnumbered.
All hell broke loose, and I raced around the back to find another way in to rescue Lilia. Footsteps thundered behind me as someone chased me. I didn’t waste time looking behind me to find out who it was. I was on my own here, with only one objective.
Kicking in the back door, I stormed inside to a cacophony of shouts and gunfire.
As I skidded through the kitchen, someone knocked Lilia’s chair over, and she screamed as she hit the floor.
Everything seemed to drag into slow motion as I watched another person barely avoid stepping on her head.
She was going to get killed. A bullet winged past me, ricocheting off the door frame, but I barely noticed it.
Time stood still, my mind went blank. The only thing that mattered was getting her out of there, to safety. She was mine; no one would ever hurt her.
I shot two of Luigi’s men and had to forgo dropping another because Daniil Petrov moved into the way. My finger twitched at the trigger, but I only swore and dove toward Lilia, struggling to break free of her bonds.
Whipping the hunting knife out of its case, I slashed through the zip ties at her wrists and moved to get her ankles free.
There was no time to feel anything about the scrapes on her leg or the deep scratch on her shoulder, let alone the burgeoning bruise on her cheek where that asshole had slapped her.
She stopped screaming as soon as she realized it was me, and I got her on her feet, shielding her with my body as more men streamed in through the door, trying to block in the Petrovs.
“I’m getting you out of here,” I said over the racket, tucking her under my arm and moving toward the back door, gun raised in front of me.
“No,” she shouted, shoving me out of the way with all her might. The push barely budged me, but it was enough to keep the next bullet aimed my way from tearing through the center of my back. Instead, it only grazed my shoulder.
“Lilia,” someone yelled.
I whipped around to find that her cousin Rurik had been the one to shoot at me. He aimed again, but one of Luigi’s men jumped forward and knocked the gun out of his hand. “Hey, boss,” he said to me, full of bloodlust as he raised his own gun to Rurik’s head. “When did you show up?”
I shot him through the wrist, the gun falling to the floor with a clatter.
The next was a kill shot, and then I roundhouse kicked Lilia’s stunned cousin before he could reach for another gun.
It looked like the Petrovs were going to come out ahead, with only a couple of Luigi’s men still hanging in there.
Luigi himself was nowhere to be seen, not that I had any free time to look very far.
I picked Lilia up, tossed her over my shoulder, and hauled ass for the back door.
I didn’t stop running until I reached my car, glad I had parked further down the road.
I hardly noticed she was pounding on my back and screaming at me; the sound of my own heartbeat was so loud in my ears.
Blood trickled down my arm where the bullet grazed me, and her hair was streaked with it when I tossed her in the backseat.
“What are you doing?” she yelled.
“Saving you,” I said, jumping into the driver’s seat and slamming the car into gear.
She whacked me on the shoulder, then flew back against the seat as the car leapt forward. With a grunt, she rolled into the space between the seats.
“Damn it, Lilia, are you all right?” I reached behind me to help her up into the front, but she swatted away my hand.
“No, I’m not all right. If you’re trying to save me, why not leave me with my family?”
Did she really just ask me that? I glared at her in the rearview mirror, jerking my eyes back to the winding road.
“If you cared about me, you would just …” she trailed off, curling up in the corner of the backseat and woefully stretching the seatbelt across herself. She winced when it brushed against her injured shoulder, but continued staring at me, waiting for answers.
“I’m not letting you go, Lilia,” I said. My voice came out broken, tired. Defeated, even though I had won. She was still mine, and her family had done me the favor of getting rid of a good number of people I wanted gone. Maybe even Luigi. And not a single one of the Petrovs had died in the process.
In fact, one of them owed me for that. Hadn’t Lilia seen me save Rurik’s life?
I slowly replayed the instance back in my mind.
The bullet he aimed at me went wild and then—wait a minute.
It didn’t go wild at all. Lilia shoved me out of the way.
She saved me when her cousin had the perfect shot to wipe me off the face of the earth.
She could have had her way out right there.
And yet, she risked putting herself in the path of the bullet by trying to push me out of the way.
So why was she still so hell-bent on leaving me?