The Darkness is Calling (Cold Empire #1)

Ekaterina

“Look at me!”

His voice, deep and commanding, is like a saving hand reaching for me, trying to drag me out of the filthy, bottomless water I’m drowning in.

The tears flooding my vision only sharpen the terror clawing through me, making me feel as if I’m trapped in a frozen lake. I don’t know how to swim, and right now, I’m drowning in that same horrifying certainty of death.

Except this might be worse, because fate seems determined to show me just how cruel it can be, playing with the gun I’m being forced to hold, aimed at the man I love.

My hands are shaking violently around the weapon, which suddenly feels heavier than my entire body.

I can barely breathe. I can barely form a coherent thought, because my mind is racing in a thousand desperate directions, searching for a way out of this.

But there isn’t one.

Time is no longer on my side, dragging me closer to an agonizing end. This is why terror paralyzes me almost completely, reminding me that I am standing one breath away from death.

Mine.

But more than anything, his.

“Ekaterina, look at me!”

I lift my tear-blurred gaze, streams of tears slipping down my cheeks, and I force myself to look at him.

He is so beautiful.

From the very first moment I saw him, I was fascinated by that perfect face of his, by the sharp, square line of his jaw, the hard cut of his cheekbones, and those mismatched eyes. He made me forget how to breathe properly, filling my mind with forbidden thoughts.

And even now, with blood running toward his chin from his split, slightly swollen lower lip – a lip I would kiss endlessly – and with the bruise beginning to bloom beneath his injured eye, he is still beautiful.

“It’s going to be okay,” he tells me with conviction, his eyes locked on mine, trying to give me even a fraction of the control he seems to possess. “Raise the gun, dusha moya1.”

Almost hypnotized by his words, I lift the revolver for the third time, panic gripping me even tighter than before, ever since this game began.

A hard palm slams against the metal table separating me from the man I can’t stop looking at, the man whose image I cling to like a lifeline.

A lifeline I’m about to kill.

“I don’t have all day, suka2!” the man beside me roars, dragging the thick fingers of his other hand through his brown hair. “If you don’t move faster, I’ll shoot him myself, with my own gun. And I can assure you, this one is fully loaded. It doesn’t have just one bullet.”

He hisses the last sentence into my ear, but the one who makes me react is still the man standing in front of me.

“Do it, Katya. It’s going to be okay.”

He sounds so certain. But I know better than to believe him.

Nothing is going to be okay.

The chances of both of us making it out of here alive shrink with every shot. We’re on the third round now, and even if we’ve managed to survive so far, I know it won’t be long before one of us dies.

Out of eight chances, six are already gone.

And I pray this isn’t the moment when everything ends, when he dies by my hand.

I want him to live.

He must live.

And he must avenge my death.

I lift the gun and try to control my hand, but it won’t stop shaking. I aim it at him again and a pained sob slips from my chest when I see him smile.

How can he smile at a moment like this, when this could be the last second we ever share?

He never smiles. But he does now, as if this is a goodbye written in the blood that is about to spill between us.

“I love you,” I whisper through my dry lips, my voice breaking after the first few syllables. “I love you so much…”

He arches one eyebrow, as if I’ve just confessed to stealing candy from a kindergartener’s jar.

“Now you choose to confess that to me?”

Two guns are instantly aimed at our heads, both held by the bastard beside me, cutting off any attempt to stretch this moment any further.

Even if these may be our final seconds together.

No.

I refuse to be the one who kills him.

I begin repeating the prayers I’ve been whispering since this nightmare started, begging God to spare him. To let me be the one who dies when it’s his turn to fire at me.

Not the other way around.

God, save him again!

“Faster!” the bastard beside me roars, growing more impatient.

“It’ll be over soon, dusha moya. Come on. Pull the trigger,” the man in front of me urges, his voice still impossibly calm. “It’s going to be fine.”

I want to believe him.

I almost do.

And that is why I slowly squeeze the trigger.

Only this time, there is no empty, hollow click to quiet my heartbeat for a fraction of a second. This time, the deafening blast freezes me completely. And the blood splattering across my face, touching the lips he once tasted, shatters the last remaining piece of my sanity.

1моя душа (ru.) – my soul 2сука (ru.) - bitch