She. Fucking. Is.
And I’ll be damned if I let her reunite with her lover before I get to the bottom of these turbulent emotions.
We keep following her for over two hours, until she stops, then appears to be running toward what looks to be a giant field on the map. If my guess is correct, she’s used at least four means of transportation at this point.
By the time we arrive, she’s about half an hour in. I can’t follow her on foot, because I’ll probably miss her. Or, more accurately, I’ll allow her to reunite with the fucker without my being there.
“Get me a snowmobile,” I tell Viktor.
“It might take me a while.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Make it happen.”
He steps out of the car, but juts his head back in.
“What?” I snap.
“If you were a woman, I’d say you’re PMS’ing, but you’re not. So I’m not sure how to categorize this behavior.”
“Then don’t, and do as you’re told.”
He stares at me for a beat, as if making sure I’m the same person he’s known his whole life, shakes his head, and finally goes to make himself useful.
It takes him fifteen minutes I don’t have to bring me a snowmobile, but Sasha still appears to be running, so I can make it.
Viktor throws me a thick white coat and thermal pants. I hastily change into them, pull on the snow binoculars, and hop on the snowmobile.
My guard clutches the handlebars. “I’ll drive.”
“No, you’ll stay here until I get back.”
“I’m not letting you go in the middle of nowhere alone.”
“You don’t have a say in it. Don’t follow me.”
“But—”
“That’s an order, Viktor. Wait here.”
He goes rigid, seeming taller and even more like a mountain than at any other time. He’s never liked being separated from me for any reason. Viktor really thinks his role in life is to ensure my safety and that if he fails that lifetime mission, he has no purpose.
“It’s not a dangerous situation,” I offer in a half-assed attempt to lessen the blow, but I don’t wait for his reply as I cut off the GPS transmission to the car. If I don’t, he’ll follow the signal until he finds me and insist we fly back to New York immediately.
After making sure I’m the only one with the tracking signal, I grab the snowmobile’s handlebars and go off like a bullet in the snow.
It takes me about fifteen minutes to reach her, but Sasha stopped moving five minutes after I started.
Her location is inert in the middle of the vast field she was running through earlier, and the area looks to be deserted. I had thought she was headed toward a village nearby, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
I pick up speed to climb a hill that separates me from the field. After I reach the top, I catch a glimpse of a warehouse. The structure is creepily similar to the one where my men died in our last mission for the military.
I’m someone who’s always followed his instincts. That, coupled with quick reflexes, has saved me from death countless times.
And now, my instinct is screaming at me to turn around and speed in the opposite direction.
I don’t.
Because that would mean leaving Sasha with her lover, and that option is simply not on the table or even beneath it.
However, the view that materializes in front of me does make me question my reasons for being here.
Not far from the warehouse stand men dressed in black, their faces hidden with balaclavas like in some terrorist snuff movie.
All of them have rifles slung across their chests, except for one who’s holding a gun.
Although her coat looks different and her face is hidden, I know it’s Sasha. I gave her that gun soon after we got to New York, and she scratched an ‘S’ on the handle because it looks too similar to Maksim’s gun, and she wanted to avoid a mix-up.
Red alerts go off in my head. Most of them start and end with ‘run.’
A lot of questions sling through my head. First, who the fuck are these people? How is Sasha related to them? But most importantly, why the fuck does this smell like a trap?
Because it is, you fucking idiot.
I start to turn the snowmobile, but it’s too late. The man beside Sasha opens fire.
Pain explodes in my chest, and I lose my grip on the handlebars. The snowmobile and I tumble down the hill, flipping twice.
Motherfucking fuck.
I try to control the fall, but it’s impossible on such a steep hill. Pain flares from my wound, but I don’t think it’s near any vital organs—
“No!” Her raw shout echoes in the air as another bullet hits me in the chest. Again.
This time, I can’t attempt to control anything.
I fall and roll, and my vision turns misty red. Not due to the wound or the fact that I’m probably dying.
It’s the reality of knowing that Sasha led me here so that whoever these men are would kill me.
She betrayed me.
Fuck.
Sasha betrayed me.
All the fight leaves my limbs as my world turns black.
2
SASHA
The scene starts in slow motion, but then it’s too fast. Too raw.
Too…surreal.
It’s strange how some events overlap in a completely different rhythm while they happen in real time.
For a moment, I think I’m dreaming. Maybe this is another one of my cruel nightmares where I keep losing the people I care about the most.
That’s a plausible explanation…right?
The person who’s rolling in the snow after being shot for the second time cannot be Kirill.
He just can’t.
When his huge body comes to a halt at the bottom of the hill, my heart nearly does the same. Then, within a fraction of a second, it roars back to life and almost explodes out of its confinements.
This is not a nightmare or a cruel play of my imagination. This situation is happening.
Right now.
Right in front of me.
Uncle Albert raises his rifle, but before he can take the lethal shot, I jump in front of him.
My limbs tremble and the only thing that plays in a loop through my mind is: what makes you think the first or the second shots weren’t the lethal ones?
Kirill is probably dead—
No. I kick that thought out of my head as I remove my face covering and throw it down, my upper lip unconsciously lifting in a snarl.
“Get out of the way, Sasha,” my uncle orders in a foreign voice. Papa was the one who spoke in this authoritarian tone—not to us, but to the people who worked for him. Uncle Albert would never.
It feels like I’m seeing him through new eyes. As if maybe he’s not the same uncle I’ve known for my twenty-one years of life.
He starts to push me aside, but I push back as hard as I can and actually manage to make him stumble in the snow.
“Stop it!” I scream, my raw voice echoing in the emptiness surrounding us.
“What do you mean by stop it?” Uncle Albert steps forward. “He’s the man behind our family’s death, Sasha.”
I shake my head more times than needed. “I don’t believe that.”
“Why the hell wouldn’t you?”
“I just don’t!” I jut a finger at his chest. “I’m going to get him medical help, and if you try to stop me, I don’t know how I will react. I’m warning you. Unless you want one of us to die today, do not stop me, Uncle.”