Sasha swears and dives as the world snaps into a single vein of sound.
Then I run.
The water waits for me as I speed toward it. The bomb’s heartbeat rips through my bones, but I don’t count or breath. I just throw.
Metal kisses black river, and the night splits its lips. The blast punches the water up like a wall, spraying glittering shrapnel into the starless night. Then the echo rolls the docks like thunder laughing.
The silence after is a living thing.
Misha and Dragomir are beside me in seconds while Sasha drags himself up by a ladder, grinning and pale.
“That was not standard operating procedure,” he jokes.
“You’re welcome,” I mutter, dusting my hands off and shoving them into my pockets.
“Eyes up,” Yuri warns. “Cameras.”
I grin wolfishly. “Let her watch. She should know what she is up against.”
“Stasia, scrub the footage,” I order.
“Already done, boss.”
Sirens bloom in the distance, our cue to fade into the shadows.
Stasia meets us at the garage with a rolling cart and a frown. I slide the intact vials to her, hands trembling when they’re normally steady. She clocks the shake, but doesn’t say anything proving to me, once again, why I pay her more than the lawyer we have on retainer.
“Find me whatever the fuck she has hiding in this blood.”
“I’ll pull out every thread,” she promises.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I pull it out. Stepping into the dim corner, I slide my thumb along the screen. “Kisa,” I greet her, using a shortened version of her name I’ve become fond of.
There’s a pause and then a soft sound breaches the speakers, the kind you make when you’ve been holding your breath for too long. “Monster man.”
“Go to sleep,Lisichka,” I murmur, some of the iron around my ribs loosening.
“Bossy.” There’s a shift as she moves around in her bed. “I felt you do something stupid. What did you do?”
“Effective,” I correct.
“What?”
“I did something effective and saved my men’s lives. I will not apologize for that.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.” She exhales slowly. “You’re okay?”
“Da.”
When I expect her to poke, to push, to make a fight where there isn’t one, she instead sends what she sent earlier. Heat that is not just want and warmth that is not just tenderness. It slides through the bond like a palm to a fevered brow.
The echo of the blast quiets in my head, and I sigh in peace.
“You are dangerous,” I murmur, and I don’t just mean in the way her legs wrapped around my waist in the cemetery. “Go to sleep,Lisichka. I will see you tomorrow.”
“Promise?”
“Always.”
