L
ucas
E
verything happens in an instant
. The second the shot rings out, I’m already in motion, leaping at Kirill. I don’t dare look back because if I see Yulia dead or dying, I’ll lose the last shreds of my sanity, and I can’t let that happen.
I have to save her brother.
We crash into the wall, and Kirill twists to protect the gun, but that’s not what I’m after. With both hands, I grab his left fist and squeeze tight, forcing his fingers to remain closed and his thumb to stay on the detonator. At the same time, I pull back and slam into him again, twisting so that my shoulder hits his right arm. The gun clatters to the floor, but before I can celebrate my victory, he uses his bulk to push me back and smashes his right fist into my temple.
My vision goes dark for a second, my ears ringing, but I hang on to consciousness and force him back against the wall. The rage and grief boiling in my chest give me superhuman strength.
The motherfucker shot Yulia.
With a roar, I squeeze my fingers harder and hear his bones breaking. He bellows and swings his right fist at me, but I duck this time, keeping my hands locked around his left hand. Distantly, I’m aware that Michael’s parents are scrambling to get out of the way, but I block out their panicked cries. The fight is happening with blurring speed; even a second of inattention could be fatal.
My ears ring and I taste blood as another blow connects with my jaw, but I move my leg in time to block Kirill’s knee coming at my groin. Simultaneously, I jerk back to avoid a third blow and turn sideways to elbow him in the ribs. I hit him hard, but he doesn’t even grunt this time. The bastard is built like a tank, and though his reflexes aren’t as good as mine, he knows what he’s doing. Under normal circumstances, it would’ve been a difficult fight, but with both of my hands squeezing his left fist, I’m at a severe disadvantage. I can’t let go of his hand, however, because I’m certain he’ll
trigger that bomb.
At this point, all the fucker cares about is revenge, and he’ll die to obtain it.
He raped Yulia at fifteen. He shot her.
The fury is like rocket fuel for my muscles. Spinning around, I slam the back of my head into his nose, crushing bone and cartilage, and before he can recover, I use my grip on his fist to swing him around and throw him against the opposite wall.
His eyes roll backward as his head hits the hard surface, but he manages to land a kick, his boot crashing straight into my kidney. My breath hisses out, my grip on his fist slackening for a moment, and he throws himself on the floor, dragging me along as I tighten my grip again. We collide and roll, and in the next moment I see what he was after.
The gun he dropped earlier.
He’s grabbed it with his right hand, and he’s aiming it straight at my head.
I see his finger start to tighten on the trigger, and things seem to slow. I register everything with vibrant clarity, as if my brain decided to take one last snapshot by sending my senses into overdrive. In that split second before I die, I see Kirill’s victorious snarl, smell the rank sweat dripping down his face, and hear Michael’s parents’ screams at the back of the hallway. I also think of Yulia and how desperately I hope she survives.
I’d die a thousand deaths to keep her living.
The gun goes off with a deafening blast.
Only I don’t die.
Instead, Kirill jerks with a scream, his right arm exploding into bloody bits. Stunned, I look up to see Michael holding my M16. The boy is panting, his pale face streaked with sweat and blood, and in the next instant, he squeezes the trigger again, releasing a round of bullets into Kirill’s right shoulder.
Howling, Kirill kicks out at Michael, and I refocus on my opponent.
It’s time to finish this thing.
Keeping my fingers locked tightly around Kirill’s left fist, I slam my forehead into his bleeding nose, again and again, reveling in the crunch as I hammer the bone fragments into his brain. This isn’t how I wanted the bastard to go, but it’ll have to do.
When he’s lying there unmoving, his face a bloody mess, I look up at Michael, my head throbbing. “Shoot his left arm,” I order hoarsely, and the kid gets it right away.
Without hesitation, he unleashes another volley on the dead man’s upper arm. The bullets cut the bone clean through. All I have to do is yank on the fist, and the arm separates from the body.
Ignoring the blood gushing from the stump, I climb to my feet, holding the severed appendage by the fist wrapped around the detonator. My heart thumps in a hollow, uneven rhythm as I turn toward the entrance. Behind me, Michael’s mother is sobbing and his father is groaning in pain, but I don’t give a fuck.
All I care about is Yulia.
She’s lying unmoving amidst shards of broken mirror, her body crumpled like a rag doll’s. Her long blond hair covers her face, but there’s blood everywhere, all over her slim frame.
The hollowness in my chest spreads.
No. Fuck, no.
She can’t be dead. She can’t be.
“Yulia,” I whisper, sinking to my knees beside her. I feel like I’m suffocating, like my lungs are collapsing in my ribcage. “Yulia, sweetheart…”
She doesn’t move.
Numbly, I tighten my left hand around Kirill’s fist, pressing down on the thumb to secure the detonator inside, and with my right hand, I reach for her. My fingers are drenched with Kirill’s blood, and as I brush aside her hair, I have a sudden horrible feeling that I’m polluting her with my touch, that I’m destroying something pure and beautiful… an angel who doesn’t belong in my ugly world.
Her lashes are brown half-moons on her pale cheeks, her mouth slightly parted. It’s as if she’s sleeping, except there’s blood.
So much fucking blood.
“Yulia…” My hand shakes as I touch her face, leaving bloody fingerprints on her porcelain skin. The hollowness inside me expands, my very bones creaking under the pressure of the emptiness within. I can’t picture a life without her. Fuck, I can’t picture a single week without her. In a few short months, she’s become my entire world. If she’s dead, if she’s gone… My fingers graze the side of her neck, feeling for her pulse, and I freeze, a violent shudder rippling through me.
There is a beat. A faint, but unmistakable beat.
“Yulia!” I bend down, gathering her against me with my free arm. She’s soft and warm, unmistakably alive. I feel the puffs of her breath on my neck, and my pulse roars with fierce joy.
She’s alive.
My Yulia is alive.
For a moment, it’s enough, but as my head clears, a new fear seizes me.
Why is she unconscious, and where did all the blood come from?
Lowering her to the floor, I frantically pat her down, looking for the bullet wound. She has numerous small cuts from the broken glass, and there’s a bloody gash on the side of her head, but I don’t see where the bullet went in.
“Is she okay?” Michael says, and I glance up to see him standing there. He’s swaying on his feet, his face greenish white. For a moment, I think he’s going to puke from the sight of the severed arm I’m still holding, but as I watch, he sinks to his knees next to me—or, more precisely, collapses to his knees.
Frowning, I start to reach for him and stop.
Blood is dribbling from under Michael’s dark T-shirt.
“Misha?” Yulia croaks hoarsely, and I turn my head to see her eyelids open. As she focuses on us, horror crosses her face, and I know she’s reached the same conclusion.
Her brother has been shot.
Y
ulia
I
n the next ten minutes
, everything seems to happen at once. There’s blood everywhere: on Misha, who lies down beside me, on Lucas, around Kirill’s mangled body, and on the severed arm Lucas is holding. A couple of meters away, Misha’s father is groaning in agony, his leg bleeding uncontrollably, and Misha’s mother is weeping and rushing back and forth between her wounded husband and son. Lucas’s men—who must’ve heard the unsilenced gunshots—burst in, weapons ready, and Lucas starts barking orders at them. Within a minute, he has two men working on disarming the explosives, and two more trying to stem Misha’s and his father’s bleeding. I try to get up to help, but every time I move, a wave of nausea hits me and I have to lie down, my skull throbbing where I split my head open on the mirror. My frantic questions go unanswered in the chaos, but by the time we’re back in the armored SUV and speeding toward a hospital, I piece together what happened.
It wasn’t a bullet that slammed into me. It was my brother. Misha knocked me out of the way, pushing me headfirst into the mirror that shattered. In the process, he took the bullet meant for me. According to Lucas, it went through the fleshy part of his shoulder, knocking him down on top of me. It’s mostly Misha’s blood that covers me, though I also bled from my head injury and the glass cutting into my skin.
“He’ll be fine,” Lucas says for the fifth time as I reach for Misha, who’s passed out in the backseat next to me. “He lost a good amount of blood, but we stopped the bleeding and he’ll be okay. He saved us all. If he hadn’t gotten my M16—” He breaks off, but a chill streaks down my spine as I fill in the unspoken words.
We’d come within seconds of dying, all of us. In one fell swoop, I could’ve lost my brother and the man who’s become my entire life.
My hand trembling, I squeeze Misha’s palm, and then I reach for Lucas, who’s sitting on the other side of me.
Only he doesn’t let me hold his hand. The minute I touch him, Lucas pulls me into his lap, wrapping me tightly in his embrace, and buries his face in my hair. I can feel the shudders wracking his big body, and I can no longer restrain myself.
Clutching him with all my strength, I cry.
I just hold Lucas and cry.
A
local hospital
takes care of Misha’s and Viktor’s gunshot wounds and the gash on my head, and then we fly to Switzerland to recuperate at a private clinic Lucas has used before. Misha’s parents come with us, not wanting to be separated from their son despite their fear of me and Lucas.
I do my best to reassure them that they’re safe, but I know that to them, we’re scary strangers from a violent world—a world that invaded their lives in the most brutal way. What Kirill did, the way he terrorized them, left scars that will never go away.
Before that awful day, they knew what Natalia’s brother did for his country, but they didn’t truly understand it.
“We woke up that morning, and he was there, holding a gun on us,” Natalia sobs as she tells us what happened. “He tied Viktor up and strapped the bomb to me, and then he did the same thing to him. We thought he was a terrorist—we thought we were going to die—but then he started talking about you and how he was waiting for you, and that’s when we realized what he was really after…” She breaks down in hysterics at that point, and Lucas has to call a nurse for a sedative to calm her down.
Viktor—Misha’s adoptive father—is in a similar state, though he tries to put on a brave face for his wife. Whenever Natalia starts to cry, he comforts her, telling her that he’s fine, but the nurses told me that he himself wakes up screaming from nightmares.
The bullet that entered Viktor’s leg shattered his kneecap, and he may never again walk without a limp.
The only bright spot in the whole mess is that Misha’s shoulder wound has indeed turned out to be as clean as Lucas said. My brother lost a lot of blood, but the doctors promised that he’ll be back on his feet—albeit with an arm sling—within a week.
While we recuperate, Lucas’s men tear apart Rudenkos’ apartment to figure out how Kirill got in unseen, and what they find gives us all pause. It turns out that Misha’s parents’ new apartment—where they had been relocated after I returned—had originally been a UUR safe house. As such, it had a secret apartment concealed behind the living room wall—a place stocked with medical supplies, ammunition, and enough food to last for several months. It was there that Kirill must’ve gone to heal when he escaped from the black site. How he survived the trip and concealed his tracks will always be a mystery, but judging from the state of the apartment, he’d been hunkered down there the entire time we’d been searching for him. Misha’s parents swear they had no idea he was there, and after questioning them extensively, Lucas decides they’re telling the truth.
Apparently, they heard noises in their living room several times, but chalked them up to strange acoustics of their new apartment building.
“I thought it was a ghost,” Natalia Rudenko whispers, her eyes red and swollen in her pale face. “Viktor told me I was being an idiot, and I shut up. But I should’ve listened to my instincts. I’ll never forgive myself for what happened.”
Lucas starts to fire another question at her, but I stop him by laying my hand on his arm. The poor woman is in no state for further interrogation. “It’s not your fault,” I assure her gently. “Kirill was a seasoned agent. If he wanted to stay hidden, you didn’t stand a chance.”
“That’s what Viktor said, but still, I should’ve known.” Squeezing her eyes closed, she pinches the bridge of her nose with trembling fingers. “There were little clues, like our computer getting hacked that time, and a few things seeming to get moved on occasion…”
Secretly, I agree that she should’ve found those things suspicious—I certainly would have—but she’s a civilian, and I’m not. Regular people aren’t trained to look for those types of patterns, and even though Natalia wasn’t a complete stranger to the shadowy world of intelligence organizations, she couldn’t have imagined that a secret agent would be hiding in her apartment.
“The hacking of the computer must be how Kirill learned we were coming,” Lucas says grimly, and I nod in agreement. I don’t know if my former trainer used Rudenkos’ apartment because it was the best hiding spot, or because he suspected I might return with Misha one day, but either way, he was well positioned to strike when we least expected it.
The guards were keeping watch for danger from the outside, but the enemy had been inside all along.
To my relief, Misha seems far less traumatized than his parents. I don’t know if it’s his UUR training or what he’s already lived through during Lucas’s attack on the black site, but my brother is recovering quickly in more ways than one. Far from being distraught and remorseful about his role in Kirill’s death, Misha seems proud that he got to participate in the takedown of the man who hurt me and nearly killed his parents.
“I’m glad I got to shoot the bastard,” he says fiercely when Lucas and I visit his bedside. “It’s the least he deserved.”
“You did well, kid,” Lucas says, patting his uninjured shoulder. “Your hands didn’t even shake when you shot off his arm.”
I wince at the graphic imagery, but Misha just nods, accepting the praise as his due. He and Lucas appear to be on the same wavelength now, as if fighting Kirill together brought them closer. I like that development, but it does disturb me to see my fourteen-year-old brother being so casual about a man’s gruesome death.
“And why should he be upset?” Lucas says when I mention my concern to him later that evening in our private hospital room. “He’s old enough to understand that you have to do what’s necessary if you want to survive and protect those you care about. The kid’s growing up, and whether you want to admit it or not, he’s not a delicate flower.”
“Neither is he a remorseless killer—or at least he shouldn’t be,” I retort, but Lucas just sits down on the edge of the bed and picks up my hand. His gaze is hard and shuttered, but his grip is gentle. He’s been this way, caring yet distant, ever since we got to this clinic, and no matter how much I try, I can’t figure out why he does nothing more than cuddle me at night.
The doctors cleared me for sex the day before yesterday, but Lucas still hasn’t touched me.
“Sweetheart,” he murmurs, squeezing my hand lightly, “your brother is not like you. He never was, and never will be. It was his choice to join UUR, and whether you want to admit it or not, he belonged there more than you ever did.”
The conviction in Lucas’s voice distracts me from the puzzle of his behavior. Frowning, I say, “I don’t think so. Misha probably imagined it would be glamorous, being a spy and all. I’m sure that’s why he joined: so he could play at being James Bond. But when he saw what it was really like—”
“He still wanted it,” Lucas says quietly. “Or wants it, I should say.”
Struck, I stare at him. “What do you mean? He’s going back to school.”
“He is—but only to make you and his parents happy.”
“What? How do you know that?”
Lucas sighs, his thumb stroking the inside of my palm. “He told me. Yesterday. He wants to come work for me when he’s older, but for now, he thinks it’s a good idea to finish civilian school so he could ‘blend better into the general population.’” He pauses, then adds softly, “Those are his words, not mine.”
“I see.” Pulling my hand from his grasp, I get up, my temples throbbing with a headache that has nothing to do with the half-healed gash across my skull. I should be surprised, but I’m not. On some level, I already knew this.
Like Lucas, my brother is drawn to danger, and he’ll eventually embrace this kind of life.
The pain creeps up on me; it’s just a faint ache at first, but with every second, it grows stronger, welling up until it chokes me from within. My throat constricts, and I feel myself start to hyperventilate, frantically sucking in air to fill my stiff and empty lungs. A hoarse sob bubbles up, followed by another and another, and then Lucas is on his feet next to me, drawing me into his embrace as raw, ugly sounds tear from my throat. It feels like I’m cracking inside, like I’m crumbling into bits. I try to stop, to control myself, but the sobs just keep on coming.
“Yulia, sweetheart, it’s okay… Everything’s going to be okay.” Lucas’s arms are around me, holding me tight, and the knowledge that he’s here, that I’m no longer alone, opens the dam even more. The tears pour out, burning and cleansing at the same time, a toxic flood that destroys and renews at once.
I cry for my brother’s future and our past, for all the lies and losses and betrayals. I cry for what might’ve been and what has come to pass, for the cruelty of fate and its incongruous mercy.
I cry because I can’t stop, and because I know I don’t have to.
I trust Lucas to hold me as I break, to lend me his strength when I need it most.
Somehow we end up back on the bed, with me curled in his arms as he rocks me on his lap, cradling me like I’m the most precious thing in his world. And still I cry. I cry until my throat is raw and torn, until my agony drowns in exhaustion. I’m only half-aware when Lucas lays me down and removes my clothes, and by the time he slides in beside me, I’m asleep.
Asleep and purged of all my fears.
I
wake
up to find Lucas sitting on the edge of the bed, watching me. Instantly, the recollection of last night comes to me, and I flush, remembering my inexplicable breakdown.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter, clutching the blanket to my chest as I sit up. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Lucas doesn’t move. “You have nothing to be sorry for, baby.” Despite the reassuring words, his gaze is inscrutable, his expression still closed off and distant. “You were due for a good cry.”
“Yes, well, I had one, that’s for sure.” Feeling embarrassed, I slide from under the blanket and grab a robe, then slip into the adjoining bathroom to take a quick shower and brush my teeth before the nurses make their morning rounds.
When I come out, I see Lucas still sitting on the bed, unmoving. The bruises on his face—the mementos of his fight with Kirill—are faded now, and with the morning light spilling across his hard, masculine features, he resembles a warrior’s statue more than a living, breathing human being. Only his eyes belie that impression; sharp and clear, they track my every movement the way a big cat watches its prey.
My breath catches, and I find myself walking toward him, my legs carrying me to the bed almost against my will.
When I’m next to him, he curls his hand around my wrist, pulling me down to sit next to him.
“Lucas…” I stare at him, feeling strangely nervous. “What are you—”
“Shh.” He presses two fingers against my lips, his touch incredibly gentle. His eyes burn into mine, and to my shock, I see a dark shadow of agony in his pale gaze. “I’m only going to say it once, and I want you to listen,” he says quietly, lowering his hand. “I’ve deposited some money into your account—about two million to start. Later, I’ll add more, but that should be enough to get you settled in the beginning. Of course, if you ever need anything, you and Michael can always come to me—”
“What?” I reel back, certain I misheard. “What are you talking about?”
“Let me finish.” His jaw is rigid. “I will also provide you with a set of bodyguards,” he continues, his voice growing more strained with each word. “Their job will be to protect you, but I expect you to be smart and not do anything to endanger yourself. If you have to fly somewhere, I’ll send someone to take you, and I’ll personally oversee the security perimeter around your new house. Also—”
“Lucas, what are you talking about?” Shaking, I jump to my feet. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“Of course not.” He stands up, his muscles all but vibrating with tension. “You think this is easy for me? Fuck!” He spins around and starts to pace, his every movement filled with barely controlled violence.
Stunned, I watch him for a couple of moments; then the neurons in my brain start to fire. Stepping forward, I catch his arm, feeling the coiled strength within. “Lucas, are you—” I swallow thickly. “Does this mean you’re letting me leave?”