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“Why are you like this?”
“Like what, dear sister?” he sneers.
“Evil.”
“I’d tell you to ask our father, but he’s dead. Torn apart by your new brother.”
“You’re hideous,” I accuse. “And sad. Pathetic.”
He shrugs. “And you likely will be as well.” He laughs. “When the Prince is done with you.”
I’m about to speak when the sound of his phone ringing pulls his attention from me. He answers in clipped English, which is a surprise. I’d thought he’d take his call in Russian. But when he hisses, “They killed them all? Your whole army is gone?” And then a pause, “The Yakuza doesn’t pull back. You are not weak! You fight!”
I watch Artyom as he loses hold of something that clearly matters deeply to him, although I am unsure what that something is.
He says some more words, but they are angry and rushed. I think maybe I sense a hint of fear through the thick bleed of his heavy accent.
And then he hangs up, his hateful eyes cutting to me. “If I didn’t need you, I’d cut you up and deliver you in a fucking box to your fucking husband.”
I shrink away from him, the terror of such a possibility having me wishing to become one with the tacky wall.
Artyom stands, and roars. Veins burst under the skin of his neck, and in his forehead. Big fists clench in rage so violent, so vicious, I whimper.
“Fucking Ilya Volkov!” he shouts. He’s a very dangerous, very grown man, throwing a very uncontrolled tantrum. When he lunges for me, his hands banding around my throat and squeezing, terror like nothing else spreads wildfire through my veins. “He killed my brothers, my father—and now he’s butchered the men of my ally. Butchered my fucking ally! They set me up to take the fucking fall!” Spittle flies from his mouth. His eyes are wild. Crazed. “The Yakuza is going to come for me now. It looks like I set them up for this. I’m the only one who knows they’re here!”
His hands squeeze tighter around my throat. “I’m going to die now. I may as well have the pleasure of killing you myself.” His hands shake as I try to pull his fingers from their mission to crush my windpipe. “I’ll be seeing our father in Hell.” He lifts me off the wall, slamming me back into it with a crack that has an explosion of black stars winking in my vision. “But at least I’ll be bringing his little angel with me.”
No.
He means to kill me now. He truly means to kill me.
I can see it in his eyes. The end. Our end. My end.
My baby…
My fear is strong. So strong, it’s crippling. But my will to live is stronger. The will to save the life that grows inside me, a flicker, a blessing, a gift from above—well, it’s stronger than the fear that threatens to paralyze me.
I reach up and claw at his face, scraping my nails down his flesh as he screams in my face. Blood pebbles his flesh as he lifts me a second time from the wall only to slam me back into it again. And again. And again.
Blackness hovers at the edge of my vision as my hands fall away from the man who means to kill me. A man I share blood with. A monster.
And that’s when I feel it. The slide of the scalpel in my sleeve. It hits my palm, threatening to prick me even as I curl my hand around it. Artyom’s hands squeeze me around my throat again. He thinks he’s won. I can see it in the crazed determination in his eyes. He thinks he has this upper hand on the Volkov family who has bested his family in every way. My family.
But he hasn’t won.
I won’t let him win this.
I never thought I could kill a man, but as I lift my hand with the scalpel, plunging it into his temple, I know that I can.
I don’t expect the bloodlust that overtakes me, however. Or maybe it’s fear. Because with the first plunge of the scalpel into his temple, his hands around my throat slacken. His face drops, his eyes wide. He teeters, and I give him a push with my knee, pulling the scalpel free as he falls to the floor, a gurgling sound of death welcoming him into the black.
Adrenaline rushes in my blood. Fear, and anger, and so many emotions erupting from the depths of my chest in a scream I’ll forever associate with the call of the reaper. I don’t think as I climb onto his chest, sinking my little blade into him repeatedly. Blood sprays. His body is limp. But I keep sinking the blade in. Again, and again, and again.
He doesn’t even look like a person anymore. His suit is in tatters and his chest is gaping when the door flies open, cracking against the wall.
I scream again. A battle cry of the unhinged leaking from me even as I keep killing what is already dead.
“Fucking fuck.” A voice rougher than any I’ve ever heard cuts through my insanity as iron bands clamp around my waist from behind. I’m tugged back into a hard body as the same rough voice rumbles in my ear, “You are safe. I have you, Little Ruby. You are safe.”
