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Who? I didn’t even ask the question out loud. I just stared at her with my eyebrows pulled together and a ticking clock in the back of my mind.
When I didn’t respond, Clover’s eyes finally opened. She turned her head and gazed up at me as if she were staring into the sun. As if looking at me caused her physical pain.
“There are four women back there,” she whispered, eyes pleading, voice raw. “I can’t just—”
The rest of that sentence went unspoken, cut off by four gunshots that sounded as if they’d been fired inside the building. Clover’s face contorted from pleading concern to utter devastation in the span of a single breath. Tears filled her eyes as they widened in horror, and I felt her pain as if it were my own.
Because a week ago, it had been.
I knew what it was like to try to save someone a moment too late. I still saw the white house with the yellow door every time I closed my eyes. Which was exactly why I didn’t have time to comfort her. I would not make the same mistake twice.
“Come on,” I whispered, sitting back on my heels and zipping up my trousers. “Time to go.”
CHAPTER 19
DAMIEN
Ipushed open the front door with Clover’s limp body draped over my shoulder and winced into the sunlight. Men in camo marched up and down the pier, entering and exiting every vacant shop and restaurant with their guards up and guns drawn. As soon as they saw me, they stopped and raised their hands in salute.
I opened my mouth to announce that I’d found the prisoner, but didn’t get more than the first syllable out before I realized that I was about to say it in English.
Fuck.
Clearing my throat, which made the hole in my side throb worse than the lifeless body I was carrying, I started over, stating the obvious in Russian. “Got her.”
Then, I walked straight to the edge of the harbor before anyone could get too close. I gave Clover’s thigh one reassuring squeeze before tossing her in like a sack of flour. She did as I’d said, staying limp the entire way down, and after the splash receded, she was gone.
I should have been relieved that the water was dark, shadowed by the harbor wall and the row of boats docked next to it, but panic tugged at the edges of my awareness the second she disappeared. It whispered that she was gone forever. That she’d be floating face down in a few minutes, just like the blonde a few meters away.
“That her?” a Russian voice asked to my right, out of breath from jogging over.
I turned and glared at the commander, trying my best to remember how to look intimidating. Technically, he was my superior, but I was Bratva royalty. I had to behave like I was untouchable, not some traitorous murderer who would be dragged back to Siberia and tortured to death if anyone found out what I’d done.
I nodded once.
He lowered his hand and straightened his back. “How did you find her? We looked everywhere.”
“Everywhere?” I snapped, simply repeating the last word he’d said to make sure my Russian didn’t fail me again.
A crowd was beginning to form behind him. At least two dozen men approached and stood at attention, waiting for me to give them orders.
Fuck.
“Sir, what do we do now? With the bodies? What do we tell their families?”
I stared them all down as I rehearsed what I was about to say in my head. I didn’t trust my Russian anymore, especially not while my mind was preoccupied with Clover’s safety and my body was preoccupied with the agony of thirst, hunger, adrenaline withdrawal, a head injury, and a fucking gunshot wound.
“You tell them what happened. One of Russia’s finest was tending to an injured prisoner when she took advantage of his kindness and stole his weapon. Our men hesitated to return fire because they didn’t want to harm a woman, and they paid for it with their lives.”
I must have spoken fluently enough because the men were nodding in agreement instead of giving each other questioning looks.
“Call the admiral’s office in Saint Petersburg and arrange transport for the bodies. The rest of you …”
I was about to tell them to move the bodies into the walk-in refrigerator, if there was one, but while I tried to remember the Russian word for refrigerator, the front door of the fish market began to open behind them. Something about the way it moved—in slow, jerky increments—made my heart race. The crowd noticed my distraction and followed my gaze to the cracked entrance, where a man in a camouflage shirt was dragging himself out. Blood poured down his face from what I knew was a bullet wound at the top of his forehead, but the round must have clipped his skull instead of going straight through.
Fuck.
Maybe he won’t remember what happened.
