AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But Alina’s mouth was too dry. Her throat closed.
“Don’t do it,” Meg said, her voice as gruff as always.
“Beg,” the man demanded.
Alina’s voice remained hidden, as if it had run to avoid begging all along.
“Don’t you—”
Meg’s words stopped when the gun fired.
Alina screamed.
It sounded different from the one that came before. That one had been filled with fear.
All she could feel was rage as she tried to wrench her arms free or kick her legs.
The bell above the door jingled.
Then it was the men who were screaming.
The knife with her blood on it fell harmlessly beside her as the man scrambled to draw his gun.
Alina’s legs and arms were freed, and her hand felt numb when it closed around the handle of the knife. If she wasn’t staring at it, she’d wonder if it was there in her grip at all.
“Ivankov’s pet?” the man said in horror as he tried to aim for the moving shadow. “But he was the one who—”
Alina lunged for him.
His gun fired, but she didn’t care. It could have hit her, or it could have not. Her body was too numb to be able to tell. All she cared about was the way the knife sank into his stomach.
They both fell to the ground from her momentum, and she was already stabbing him again. This time she went for his neck because it looked like he was talking, but his words just added to the rushing in her ears. Then more blood ran from him, no words. She couldn’t stop stabbing. She plunged the knife into the man’s stomach and chest and anywhere she could reach, over and over, so similar to the way she’d stabbed his father.
Eventually, exhaustion filled her. Too much to allow her to pull the knife free.
She scrambled off the body, staring down at her hands.
Near her, near enough to touch, Luka crouched.
Bodies were strewn around the diner. A dozen Bratva and the two people who had died because they’d been kind to her. Alina wanted to move to them, to separate them from the others, but it was as if an accusation lay within their dead eyes.
Luka took off his shirt. He covered her with it, careful to touch as little of her body as possible. Then he held out his hand.
Once again, Alina took it.
Chapter 22
Luka’s hand ached where Alina gripped it over the glove, but it also felt so very warm, even through the material—proof that she was alive.
He hesitated next to the white tennis shoes he’d once watched her purchase. Now the white cloth was speckled with blood. The men who had been attacking her had taken her shoes off. Last time she’d walked barefoot, she had hurt herself.
He wanted to kill each Bratva soldier again, more slowly the second time. They’d died much too quickly. Each of his stabs had been lethal, purposeful, his sole focus on Alina surviving the attack.
Luka was to blame for what had happened. He’d heard Mikhail Balakin when he’d promised his sons would come for her. He should have killed them immediately after that.
Alina’s hand tightened on his as it began to shake.
He crouched down at her feet. He had to release her hand in order to offer her the first shoe. Alina hesitated, but then her touch was whisper light at his shoulders as she steadied herself and slipped her foot inside. Sparks of pain tried to distract him where she brushed his bared skin at the edge of his undershirt. Soon the second shoe was on, and he had her hand in his gloved one again. It still felt warm, but she shivered as if with cold as she stared down at a body.
