“Fucking hell!” I spring out of the darkness, running toward him as he drops onto the fire escape and grips the rusty pole. The structure separates from the building with Aleksio clinging on. It twists and groans.
Aleksio drops to the alley. He makes himself into a ball and rolls. I grab him, pull him behind the dumpster. He is hurt. His ankle, I think.
“Fucking hell,” I say as the assault weapons start.
A trap, like we worried.
Our men shoot back.
“Where the fuck did they come from?” he gasps.
“We have it, brat.” Our men are suppressing. The cops will be here soon. “Can you walk?”
Aleksio wears a grim look. He will.
“I got him,” Tito says. “You help cover.” Tito wants me shooting because I am the marksman here. I rest my forearms on the metal lip of the dumpster lid and focus my senses on our attackers. I focus and calm myself, breathing, squeezing the trigger, breathing, squeezing. My bullets find their targets as Tito gets Aleksio away.
Soon the guys scream up in an old Cadillac. I dive in the back with the others.
We head out, losing our attackers easily. They thought we’d be inside for the explosion. They were set up to pick off survivors, not for a full firefight.
Aleksio rides in back with me. He concentrates on breathing, pushing back the pain. Yuri throws back the first aid kit. I pat my thigh, and Aleksio heaves his leg there. He grimaces as I begin to untie his shoe.
I instruct Yuri to call his guy—the one holding Aldo Nikolla. It is time to send the clip.
I get his shoe off. The pain on Aleksio’s face is not just his ankle. Yes, I know what those frittatas meant.
“Just sprained,” he grates out.
“You hope.” I touch his anklebone. He winces. I touch another spot.
“Stop it. The ankle is messed up, okay? Is there something we need to know beyond that?”
I rip up an old shirt and begin to wrap it.
It is very bad that we did not get those files. There is only one route to the information now—through the old man. Aleksio does not want to show the cocksucking clip to Aldo. He’ll do what it takes to save Kiro, though.
His head is tipped back. He’s out of his mind with pain of every kind.
“Aldo Nikolla’s awake,” Yuri calls from the front.
“Good. We go now,” I say. “We show the movie. Tell him how much worse it will get for her next.”
Aleksio hisses out a breath.
I grab his phone, unlock it and scroll. He knows it has to be done. Lazarus is hunting now. He killed Ligne, torched the Worland Agency. He wants to get to Kiro before we can.
“Where is the movie?” I ask.
Aleksio takes it and scrolls. Scowls.
“What?”
“Wait,” he says, and he taps some more. Then, “Fuck.” Then, “Fuck!”
“What?”
“Gone.”
“How?”
He casts his gaze sideways. “She erased it.”
I shut my eyes. Our leverage on the old man is gone. Or at least the video is.
Chapter Ten
Aleksio
Yuri’s got us moving at top speed in that old Caddy with its shitty shocks the Russians have been driving around. Every bump sends starbursts of pain through my ankle and jars my vision, because yeah, I hit my head on something in that fall, and focusing isn’t that easy.
Viktor wants to stop at an office supply store. He prefers the paper cutter to the cleaver.
“No,” I say.
“The paper cutter is cleaner, brat. More leveraged. I have seen it both ways. The butcher knife leaves room for error. It’s good in a pinch but—”
“We can’t—”
“You would let Kiro die?”
I’m feeling dizzy, having trouble focusing. “We’ll cut up the old man—”
“Until he passes out from pain?” Viktor says.
That’s the intel on the old man. Pain doesn’t crack him. People have gone at him before.
“She shouldn’t have erased it,” he says, like she brought it on herself.
“Fuck you,” I growl, head spinning to find another way to show the old man we’re serious.
The car takes a corner, and my ankle fires like shards of glass.
Suddenly Viktor’s in my face, pinning me to the inside of the car door. He has my arms trapped up to my chest, panting with the exertion of it.
He calls up front to Yuri—a stream of Russian.
“What are you doing? What did you say to him?”
Yuri is talking back. The car is slowing. Yuri’s pulling over. It’s Yuri and Mischa up there. Both of them Viktor’s guys.
Fuck.
I lash out at Viktor, going for him with everything I have, going for every blow I can think of, even a head butt. He’s ready for them all. The car stops. Mischa’s out. I struggle harder, get an elbow into Viktor’s jaw.
The door I’m backed up against opens. I freefall against a tank-like chest and feel an arm loop around my neck, muscles like iron. Precise pressure. Mischa.
I kick out.
“This we do for you, brat,” Viktor says, suppressing my legs as Mischa puts the choke on me. A perfect triangle hitting the veins that feed the blood to my brain. The edges of my vision dim.
Fuck!
I wake up curled on my side, enclosed in darkness. The vibration below me tells me I’m in the Caddy trunk and that we’re back on the road. My head is woozy. My ankle screams. I pound like a madman. My good leg and two fists. Nothing.
I check my pockets for my phone, thinking to call Tito and have him put a stop to this. I can’t let them hurt Mira. I have to protect her.
No phone.
I go crazy on the trunk top in the darkness.
Chapter Eleven
Mira
The two guys who stayed back to watch me think it’s hilarious to hang around by the pool and help me get my gun spin down while I say the Sergei Kazan phrase. They told me it means, “You go ahead and try it, baby, and I’ll fill you so full of lead it’ll be coming out of your ass.” A really tough movie star apparently says it.
The better I get at it, the more they laugh.
I don’t see what’s so funny, but then again, American movie lines don’t seem like much out of context, either.
I monitor them for signs that they’ve heard something from the Worland raid. Have they gotten there yet? What if something goes wrong? Will they know? They don’t seem worried, but I am. If things get dangerous, Aleksio will be front and center. It’s how he is. If there’s trouble, he’s at the center.
The Russians have their suit jackets off, shirtsleeves rolled up. They’re lounging around like disreputable waiters from a thug café, smoking and drinking Beluga vodka like there’s no tomorrow. Petitioning me again and again to do the gangster character impression.
It’s taken a while to get the double gun spin down. I dropped them a lot at first. Obviously they’re not loaded. I keep practicing, though, the amusing trained monkey. I even try to say the line with the intonation they prefer. It’s not that I want to amuse them. I have to believe that one of these times, one of the guns they’ll give me will be loaded. Or somehow they’ll drop their guard.