Page 243 of Mile High Ruin

Sloane moves behind me. I don’t let her pass. “Stay behind me,” I say.

“Vadim—”

“Stay behind me.”

Iosef sighs. “There it is again.”

His gun lifts a fraction. I move before he finishes the thought. Iosef’s finger tightens at the exact moment I get my body in front of hers, and the shot tears past my shoulder close enough for heat to skim through the fabric of my shirt.

Sloane cries out behind me, but I don’t look back. If I look back, I lose the half second I need.

I draw and fire once, forcing Iosef to step aside into the mouth of the warehouse corridor, and he moves with the quick, efficient calculation of a man who has already measured the space, the exits, the distances between rusted columns and broken machinery and the patch of open concrete where Sloane is exposed.

“Down,” I tell her.

She doesn’t argue. She lowers herself awkwardly, one hand on her stomach, the other braced against the concrete, and the sight of her trying to protect the child while a man I trusted for eleven years points a gun at her nearly empties my head of everything except murder.

“That’s the problem with love,” Iosef says, backing toward the open warehouse door. “It makes timing embarrassingly easy.”

“You think by killing me you’ll take my empire?” I rasp. “You can never be half the man I am, you’ll always be a coward who runs away with its tail between the legs at the first sign of trouble.”

Iosef looks enraged. Good, that’s exactly what I needed from him.

He fires again. I push Sloane behind one of the steel support pillars near the loading entrance and return fire as the bullet chips concrete from the wall beside us.

She grips the back of my shirt. “Vadim.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. I can’t move quickly.”

“I’m aware.”

“I know what you’re doing, Vadim,” Iosef says. “You’re buying time, but nobody is coming to save your ass today. I’ve got a gun, you don’t. Guess who wins?”

“Iosef,” I call, keeping one hand against Sloane’s side to hold her behind the pillar. “If you wanted me alone, you have me.”

“No,” he says. “If I wanted you alone, I would have killed her first.”

Sloane goes still. My entire body does the same.

His footsteps echo inside the warehouse, not retreating, not advancing straight at us, circling. “I wanted you compromised,” he continues. “I wanted you thinking with whatever piece of yourself she has ruined. That’s much better than alone. You’ll go down together. Poetic, isn’t it?”

Sloane whispers, “I’m sorry.”

I glance at her then. Her face is pale, her eyes too wide, and there’s a smear of dirt on her cheek from where she lowered herself to the ground.

“Don’t,” I say.

“But—”

“Not now.”

Her mouth closes.

I shift enough to look past the pillar.

Iosef fires from deeper inside the warehouse. The shot goes wide, meant to keep us pinned rather than kill. He wants me to come in.