Page 4 of Captured By the Pakhan

I pick him up, pulling him tight against my chest, and slowly start to rock him. Shushing him as I do so. Trying to soothe him.

"Whats your position?" Foster's voice rings hard and fast in my ear. "West. What’s your position?"

The boy's heels are drumming on the carpet. He's got a fistful of my sleeve, clinging to me, and I don't even think he knows he's doing it.

"West," Foster says again. When I don’t answer he pushes harder. "Raven."

I tuck the boy's head under my chin so he can feel the rise and fall of my chest, letting his little body syncronize to the methodical beat of my own heartbeat. Breathing steadily I make mine slow, and I start counting out loud into his hair while headlights come up the driveway and turn the whole hallway gold.

For another second I evaluate my options, I look at the stairs. I look at the door at the end of the hall and the black of the night beyond the window.

Through the floor I can hear movement. Not one. Several, moving fast — there is only a number of seconds between here and there and I can do that math as well as anybody else.

Two minutes to the tree line if I run now. Maybe less. I’ll never make it.

“Go without me.” I say into the comm, then I pull my earpiece out, my eyes dropping to the tiny human curled hard against my body on the carpet.

"I’m here. It’s okay," I tell the child. "I've got you. I’m not leaving."

Chapter 2

Ilya

Manhattan, 1:31 AM

The phone goes off at half past one and I know before I answer that something is incredibly wrong. Partially because of the time, and partially because there are only four people alive who have this number and only one of them would use it at this hour.

"Speak." I command a half second after I swipe the screen to answer.

"The north house was breached." Andrei's voice is the same voice he uses to report a shipping delay. "Six intruders. They were inside for four minutes."

I am already off the couch and reaching for my coat. "Sergei?"

"Alive."

Alive. The answer makes my heart tighten. Not with relief, not quiet yet.

"You're not telling me all of it, Andrei."

A pause. Choosing his next words carefully, Andrei has never in nine years had to choose his words with me. Which makes my heart drop to the pit of my stomach.

"He was shot." He finally admits, rushing to continue, “But he is fine. It was just a graze.”

My coat is in my hand and I’m headed for the door. I don't remember picking it up, moving instead on autopilot while continuing to analyze the situation as it’s presented to me.

"Where?"

"The left arm. It went through the meat. Bogdan has cleaned and closed it and the boy is awake and talking. It will heal, Pakhan. Another four inches though–"

"Another four inches and what?" I demand.

"It would have pierced ... his heart."

That causes me to stop, standing still in both shock, and something more primal – anger – in the middle of my living room in a building I own with the city burning white below me. I don’t say anything at all for four seconds. I know it is four seconds because I count them, I count the breaths, forcing myself to calm.

That’s how I deal, how I handle things under pressure. I count the seconds. Since I was nineteen years old, it is the only reason I am still standing here today. The discipline to fight my gut instinct to burn the world down around me out of pure volatile response.

"You will tell me the rest, leave nothing out," I say. "In order from the beginning of what you know, and you will not be mindful of any part of it. Now speak."