Prologue #8
As quietly as possible, I continue dragging myself through the dirt and snow toward the farthest end of the cottage, wondering how the fuck something that is technically only three and half rooms is this goddamn long, before I’m facing south.
If I can get out and into the woods, go further into the mountains, I should be able to lose them long enough to double back past here and head to Albany.
It’ll be brutal as fuck on foot but it’s too risky trying to come back for my truck.
If I’m lucky, I’ll hit another occupied cabin along the way and be able to call for help from there.
Waiting for a few agonizing minutes, I watch to make sure there isn’t anyone patrolling this side of the house then try to center myself so I’m hopefully out of everyone’s line of sight. And as soon as I see that it’s clear, I move.
I pull myself out of the crawl space as fast as I can then start booking it even faster, tearing off into the forest like my ass is on fire while I ignore the way I can now feel how sore I am today.
Every inch of my fucking body hurts, every muscle burns.
I have to be grateful for the adrenaline rush, though, and I should probably thank the god my mother prays to that this didn’t happen twenty-four hours ago.
If it had, I’d be dead as a goddamn doornail and my alpha most likely would, too.
Attacking while I was in heat would have been smart on their part if they’d have known it was happening.
I’ll take the fact that they didn’t as a small miracle.
Very small since I’m only about forty feet away from them when I hear the first bullet explode into a nearby tree.
It’s not much of a headstart but I’ll fucking take it. It’s better than none and being dead, that’s for fucking sure.
I push myself harder as I keep running, jumping over fallen trees and large bushes, ducking when I can behind something that might be able to hide me.
I pull my gun from the waist and cock it, ready to fire as more shots whizz past me, getting closer and closer the further away from my cottage I get.
At minimum, I have six bastards following me and that’s only if they didn’t bother leaving anyone at my house, and they didn’t have more waiting in the trees.
I’ve outrun more than this before. Hell, I’ve been shot and running from at least double that during a rainstorm. While I know I can handle this based on history alone, there are two factors working against me right now.
I’m post-heat, which means I am not up to snuff physically.
I can push through the pain, can force myself to keep going through that, but hardly eating anything other than fruit for the last week is definitely working against me.
I can feel myself getting shaky and a little lightheaded, and that doesn’t really bode well for me.
The other thing? It’s starting to snow harder.
Visibility is dwindling and the terrain is more uneven, more unstable than it was when I started, and considering I haven’t exactly been out here very long, I might be fucked.
Then I remember something.
A thicket.
One a little more east that’s relatively secluded, and could hopefully provide cover for a little while even without all the foliage.
My alpha found it the first time he came out here. We’ve been back a couple of times but it isn’t necessarily significant in any other way. Unless, of course, it manages to save my ass during a shootout, then it’ll be as sacred as a fucking church to the Catholics.
Taking a hard left, I race toward the thicket, hopeful that it’s somehow going to be a life-changing location for me, and as soon as I see it, I breathe a sigh of relief.
Thank fuck.
Unfortunately, that relief only lasts a few seconds before I hear snow crunching under heavy boots behind me.
I raise my gun as I spin, ready to blow away whoever it is that’s trying to come up behind me but instead, I pause and squint through the blanket of snow falling from the sunny sky.
“Dimitri?” My shoulders sag as I drop my posture, so fucking glad to see my alpha standing across from me. “Thank god, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it—”
“Don’t move,” he says as he levels his SIG at my face, his tone full of the same ice that floods my veins.
“D, what are you doing?” I take a step forward and he cocks his weapon, lifting his other hand to steady the shaking one.
“I said, don’t fucking move.”
Another step has him firing a warning shot at my feet and I freeze. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t fucking have to.”
My heart starts pounding to a different rhythm, one that has it on the verge of breaking but I can’t stop it. Not when my alpha, my scent match, my bonded mate is standing maybe ten feet away from me with a gun pointed at my head while he acts like he doesn’t know who the fuck I am.
We’re best friends. Step-brothers. Confidants. He’s my fucking mate, for Christ’s sake.
We’ve been together for almost fifteen years. Longer if you count all the time we spent growing up together.
Dimitri was almost seven when I met him.
I was only three but something inside my little malnourished heart knew we were going to be friends.
I knew we were going to be something special.
He did, too. He knew it, and he even learned how to help with my G-tube when I had to have it put in because of it.
I was basically a fucking toddler and I couldn’t handle eating, not without throwing up after having next to nothing for so long, and I would have died if they didn’t put the feeding tube in, but it scared me. Dimitri is why I got over that fear.
He learned how to use it, how to help me eat in the only way I could, and he’d sit with me the entire time I was hooked up to it, either reading to me or playing with our toys.
Dimitri never let me go through that alone and when I was finally healthy enough to actually eat and they removed it, he helped me relearn how to feed myself, too.
When I developed an eating disorder later on, Dimitri was the one who noticed, the only one, and he busted his ass to make sure I didn’t let it consume me. Then he did it two more times over the years when it got too hard for me to handle certain things.
This man has never let me down, he’s never been unavailable to me.
He’s supported everything I’ve ever talked about doing, even pushed me to do a lot of it.
Dimitri taught me how to fight, how to defend myself if he wasn’t around to protect me.
He showed me how to use every weapon I’ve ever picked up, and he’s had my back on the brink of death more times than I can count.
This man, this alpha in front of me, doesn’t seem like he could have thought up the words in the note on the mirror let alone actually left it for me.
Dimitri shifts the slightest fraction as we stare at each other, stealing his spine while he keeps his aim right between my eyes.
Why?
Why is he doing this? I don’t even know what the fuck it is he’s doing.
In more than two decades, I don’t think Dimitri has ever raised his voice to me let alone anything like this. He’d sooner take a bullet himself; he’s told me that on more than one occasion.
Proved it just as many. Hell, he wears the fucking proof of that on his goddamn face.
The huge burn scar around his left eye, the one that starts just below his eyebrow and spreads along the side of his nose and down over his cheekbone before it webs back into his hairline and toward his ear? That’s for me.
It’s because of me.
He almost lost his fucking eye and there’s still a possibility of that happening if the nerves are too scarred.
But Dimitri told me none of that mattered because I was okay, because I was still with him, alive and breathing.
It was that connection, that deep, vulnerable, unfiltered connection I felt that allowed for our relationship to become what it is now.
He knew we were scent matches before I did, knew it the moment I presented as an omega, and he waited for me to catch up before he said or did anything about it.
There was no pressure, no expectations. Our relationship was the same but I thought we were getting closer and then one day it clicked.
I should have known when I started jerking off to fantasies of him but even then I wasn’t sure, not until the magnitude of that realization hit.
I’d never been sexually attracted to anyone before Dimitri, and I wasn’t even attracted to him until I went through puberty but it was bound to happen.
I felt this man all the way to my bones and that’s when I knew.
We matched, and we’d always been in love with each other.
The alpha in front of me has been my best friend, my protector, my only lover, my entire fucking world since I was conscious enough to understand it, and that has never once wavered.
Until right now.
“D, please. Please, just tell me what’s going on. I don’t understand any of this.”
He swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing painfully but that and his steady breathing is the only move he makes as he rips my heart right out of my chest and smashes it on the snow-covered ground between us.
“You know what I am, Nikolai, and you know what I do. Put the fucking pieces together, you dumb fuck.”
Kaboom.
The pain explodes behind my ribs and if I wasn’t looking straight down the barrel of his gun, I’d have thought Dimitri shot me, but he didn’t. No, with a few simple words, my alpha breaks my heart, ruins our bond, and spoonfeeds me the bullshit I’m having a hard time digesting.
“A contract?” My eyes burn as I blink away my tears. “There’s a fucking hit on me?”
He doesn’t speak, doesn't nod, but he doesn’t need to.
Dimitri is a hitman, a hitman for the Volkov Bratva, and I know what he does because it’s what I do, too.
I shake my head and take a step backward. “Why? Why the hell would Boris put a hit out on me?”
“You’re a smart little omega, you tell me. Why would my father take out a contract on his own goddamn family?”