Denis stares at me in shock. Well, my entire family does too but he’s the one I care about the most right now.
We stare each other down.
“Shoot him,” Mom says. It makes me gasp. Can I kill my own uncle? To save my sisters, I have to try.
But when I raise the gun, Denis ducks under the table. I hear footsteps heading towards the dining room. The other guards.
“Run, Natalya,” Mom says. “Go.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“Yes, you can. Just go.”
I meet the eyes of my sisters but I linger the longest on Sasha. She’s been disappointed by me time and time again and I cant let that happen any longer. I give her a nod and run out of the dining room. I head out the back door and run around the side of the house. Since the other guards were drawn to my gunshot, none of them are waiting outside to stop me.
I keep running with everything I have in me until I’m at least a mile from the house. I look over my shoulder to make sure no one is following me but no one is. That doesn’t mean they won’t be after me soon.
I hurry to the nearest subway station. The gun in my hands will draw attention, that much I know, so I have no choice but to throw it away as I pass a trashcan. I can’t risk any police stopping me at the moment, even though the gun is a good deterrent against Denis’s guards.
I don’t let myself breathe until I’m on the subway and it’s moving. I have to get back to Mikhail’s house.Myhouse. I’ll be safe there. I can tell his men what happened. They’ll save him.
It takes around forty minutes to reach my house, which is forty minutes I don’t have. The longer it takes for me to help Mikhail, the closer to death he gets.
I see the gates of my house and run for them. But before I can reach them, a car pulls up alongside me. Something in my gut tells me I need to be afraid.
The back window rolls down and before I can even think, I take off running. “Help!” I scream, hoping that Mikhail’s guards out front will be able to save me.
But when I reach the gates, I see that the guard always on duty is dead. A bullet hole to his head.
The car parks next to me.
“Get in, Natalya.” I don’t recognize the voice.
Steeling myself, I turn towards the car and look at the man in the backseat. Around Mikhail’s age with brown hair and even darker eyes, he would be handsome if I wasn’t so afraid.
“Who are you?” I whisper, hating how scared I sound. I managed to escape my uncle only to fall into the clutches of someone bad. Because even though I don’t know this man, I know he’s bad. My gut is screaming at me.
“I’m Nico Bernardi.”
Soreallybad.
“What do you want?”
“You. So get in the car. You can try to run but you know we’ll just chase and I’ll make it worse for you.”
I wish I hadn’t thrown my gun away. If I still had it, I could have shot Nico in the face and saved myself.
But I don’t have a gun.
With shaky fingers, I open the back door and get inside. It’s a large back space with two seats facing each other. I sit across from him.
Once the door shuts, his driver takes me away from my house. I was so close to freedom and now I’ve lost it all again.
“Why do you want me?” I ask. The more information I have, the better.
“Because I want to hurt Mikhail.” He pulls out a cigarette but doesn’t light it; only rests it between his lips. “I figured kidnapping his lovely new wife would be the way to do that. So I came by his house and shot his guard and waited. But no one came out. Strange, right? I was about to leave when you came running down the sidewalk. Talk about destiny.”
I shiver. “How did you find our house?”
