by Anna Zaires
He doesn’t see me there, all his attention on Julian as he lifts his gun and points it at my husband. “Goodbye, Esguerra,” he says quietly . . . and I squeeze the trigger of my own weapon.
Despite my prone position, my aim is accurate. Julian had me practice shooting sitting, lying down, and even running at some point. The assault rifle bucks in my shaking arms, slamming painfully against my shoulder, but the two bullets hit Majid exactly where I intended—in his right wrist and elbow.
The shots throw him back against the wall and knock the gun out of his grasp. Screaming, he clutches at his bleeding arm, and I get up, heedless of the danger posed by the bullets flying outside. I can hear Julian yelling something at me, but his exact words don’t register through the ringing in my ears.
In this moment, it’s as though the entire world fades away, leaving me alone with Majid.
Our eyes meet, and for the first time, I see fear in his dark, reptilian gaze. He knows that I am the one who shot him, and he can read the cold intent on my face.
“Please, don’t—” he begins saying, and I squeeze the trigger again, discharging five more bullets into his stomach and chest.
In the brief silence that follows, I watch as Majid’s body slides down the wall, almost in slow motion. His face is slack with shock, blood dribbling out of the corner of his mouth, and his eyes are open, staring at me with a kind of numb disbelief. He moves his lips, as though to say something, and a rattling gurgle escapes his throat as more blood bubbles up out of his mouth.
Lowering the gun, I step closer to him, drawn by a strange compulsion to see what I have wrought. Majid’s eyes plead with mine, begging for mercy without words. I hold his gaze, stretching out the moment . . . and then I aim the AK-47 at his forehead and pull the trigger again.
The back of his head explodes, blood and bits of brain tissue splattering against the wall. His eyes glaze over, the whites around the irises turning crimson as blood vessels burst in his eyes. His body goes limp, and the smell of death, sharp and pungent, permeates the room for the second time today.
Except it’s not Julian who’s the killer this time.
It’s me.
My hands are steady as I lower the weapon again, watching the blood trickle down the wall behind Majid. Then I walk toward Julian, kneel down beside him, and carefully place the gun on the floor as I begin to work on untying his ropes.
Julian is silent as I free him from his bonds, and so am I. The sounds of gunfire outside are beginning to die down, and I’m hoping that means Peter’s forces are winning. Either way, though, I’m ready for whatever may come, a strange calm engulfing me despite our still-precarious situation.
When Julian’s arms and legs are free, he kicks the chair away and rolls onto his back, his right hand closing around my wrist. His left arm, still partially in a cast, is immobile at his side, and there’s more blood on his face and body from the beating he just received. His grip on my wrist, however, is surprisingly strong as he pulls me closer, forcing me down on the floor next to him.
“Stay down, baby,” he whispers through swollen lips. “It’s almost over . . . Please, stay down.”
I nod and stretch out next to him on the right, being careful not to aggravate his injuries. With the door open, some of the smoke in the room is beginning to clear out, and I can breathe freely for the first time since the explosion.
Julian releases my wrist and slides his arm under my neck, gathering me against him in a protective embrace. My hand accidentally brushes against his ribs, causing him to hiss in pain, but when I try to scoot back, he merely holds me tighter.
When Peter and the guards step through the door a few minutes later, they find us lying in each other’s arms, with Julian pointing the AK-47 at the door.
Chapter 29
Julian
“How is she?” Lucas asks, sitting down on the chair next to my bed. There is a thick bandage on his head, and he has to use crutches for his broken leg. Other than that, he’s already on the mend. He was unconscious in another room when Al-Quadar attacked the Uzbekistani hospital and thus missed all the fun.
“She’s . . . okay, I think.” I press a button to get the bed into a half-sitting position. My ribs ache at the motion, but I ignore the discomfort. Pain has been my constant companion since the crash, and I’m more or less used to it at this point.
Ever since our rescue from that construction site in Tajikistan five days ago, Nora and I have been recuperating in a special facility in Switzerland. It’s a private clinic staffed with top doctors from all over the world, and I’ve had Lucas personally supervise the security here. Of course, with the most dangerous cells of Al-Quadar eliminated, there’s less of an immediate threat, but it still pays to be cautious. I’ve had all of my injured men transferred here as well, so they could recover faster and in a nicer environment.
The room Nora and I share is state-of-the-art, equipped with everything from video games to a private shower. There are two adjustable beds—one for me and one for Nora—with Egyptian cotton sheets and memory foam mattresses on each. Even the heart-rate monitors and IV drips positioned around the beds look sleek, more decorative than medical. The whole setup is so luxurious, I can almost forget I’m in yet another hospital.
Almost, but not quite.
If I never set foot inside a hospital again, I will die a happy man.
To my tremendous relief, all of Nora’s injuries turned out to be minor. The wound on her arm needed a few stitches, but the blow to her face left only a nasty bruise on her cheekbone. The doctors also confirmed that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted, despite her state of undress. Within a few hours of our arrival here, Nora was pronounced healthy and ready to go home.
I, on the other hand, am a bit worse off, though not nearly as fucked up as I could’ve been.
They’ve already performed two operations on me—one to minimize the scarring on my face, and the second one to put a prosthetic eye into the vacant eye socket, so I don’t resemble a cyclops. I will never be able to see out of my left eye again—at least not until bionic eye technology advances further—but the surgeons have assured me that I’m going to look nearly normal once everything is healed.
My other injuries aren’t too bad either. They had to reset my broken arm and wrap it in a new cast, but the gunshot wound in my left shoulder is healing nicely, as are my cracked ribs. I still have some crusted blood under my fingernails and toenails from the needle torture, but it’s gradually getting better. The beating Majid’s men gave me at the end bruised my kidneys a bit. However, thanks to Peter’s prompt arrival, I escaped other internal injuries and more broken bones. When all is said and done, I will have a few more scars—and potentially some weakness in my left arm—but my appearance won’t scare little children.
I’m grateful for that. I’ve never been particularly vain about my looks, but I want to make sure that Nora still finds me attractive, that I don’t disgust her with my touch. She’s assured me that my scars and bruises don’t bother her, but I don’t know if she really means it. Because of my injuries, we haven’t had sex since our rescue, and I won’t know how she truly feels until I have her in my bed again.
In general, I’m not sure how Nora has been feeling for the past five days. With all the surgeries and doctors in the way, we haven’t had a chance to talk about what happened. Whenever I bring it up, she changes the topic, as though she wants to forget the whole thing. I would let her—except she’s also been unusually quiet. Withdrawn in some way. It’s as if the trauma she’s gone through has caused her to retreat within herself . . . to shut down her emotions in some manner.
“So she’s handling it?” Lucas asks, and I know he’s talking about Majid’s death. All of my men know about the way Nora gunned him down, and about her role in my rescue. They admire her for being so brave, whereas I’m battling a daily urge to throttle her for risking her life. And Peter—well, that’s a whole other matter. If he hadn’t disappeared promptly after brin
ging us to the clinic, I would’ve torn his head off for placing her in that kind of danger.
“She is,” I say in response to Lucas’s question. My concerns about Nora’s mental state are not something I want to share with him. “She’s handling it about as well as can be expected. The first kill is never easy, of course, but she’s tough. She’ll get through it.”
“Yes, I’m sure she will.” Reaching for his crutches, Lucas gets up and asks, “How soon do you want to head back to Colombia?”
“Goldberg says we can leave tomorrow. He wants me to stay here one more night, to make sure everything is healing properly, and then he’ll oversee my care back at the compound.”
“Excellent,” Lucas says. “I will make the arrangements then.”
He hobbles out of the room, and I reach for my laptop to check on Nora’s whereabouts. She went to get a snack from the cafe on the first floor of the clinic, but she’s already been gone longer than ten minutes, and I am beginning to get worried.
Logging in, I pull up the report from the trackers and see that she’s standing in the hallway, about fifty feet away from the room. The dot showing her location is stationary; she must be chatting with someone there.
Relieved, I close the laptop and place it back on the bedstand.
I know my fear for her is excessive, but I can’t control it. Seeing Majid’s knife at Nora’s throat had been the worst experience of my life. I had never been so terrified as when I saw the blood trickling down her smooth skin. I literally saw a wall of red at that moment, the rage pumping through me giving me a surge of strength I hadn’t known I possessed. Killing that terrorist hadn’t been a conscious decision; the need to protect Nora had overwhelmed both my instinct for self-preservation and common sense.
If I had been thinking more clearly, I would’ve come up with some other way to get Majid’s attention away from Nora until the reinforcements could arrive.
I had begun to suspect the rescue plan as soon as Majid mentioned shopping. It made a terrible kind of sense: Nora knew that my enemies would want her as leverage, and she knew that she had the trackers. I couldn’t believe that she would put herself out there like that—or that Peter would let her—but it was the only thing that could explain how Al-Quadar were able to lay their hands on her in my absence.
Instead of staying safe at the estate, Nora risked her life to save mine.
Knowing what Majid was capable of, she faced her nightmares to rescue me—the man she has every reason to hate.
I don’t know if I believed that she truly loved me until that moment . . . until I saw her standing there, scared, yet determined, her small body swathed in a man’s shirt ten sizes too big for her. Nobody had ever done anything like that for me before; even when I was a child, my mother would slink away at the first sign of my father’s temper, leaving me to his tender mercies. Other than the guards I hired, nobody had ever protected me. I had always been on my own.
Until her.
Until Nora.
As I’m remembering how fierce she looked with her gun pointed at Majid, the door to the room opens, and the subject of my musings walks in.
She’s wearing a pair of jeans and a brown long-sleeved top, her thick hair caught in a ponytail behind her back and her feet clad in ballet-type flats. The bruise on her cheekbone is still there, but she covered it up with some makeup today, probably so she could video-chat with her parents without worrying them. She’s been talking to them almost daily since our arrival at the clinic. I think she feels guilty about scaring them with her disappearance again.
She’s also munching on an apple, her white teeth biting into the juicy fruit with evident enjoyment.
My heart begins to thump heavily in my ribcage as my chest expands with joy and relief. It’s like that every time I see her now, my reaction the same whether she’s been gone fifteen minutes or several hours.
“Hi.” She walks over and gracefully perches on the right side of my bed. Leaning down, she presses her soft lips to my cheek in a brief kiss, then lifts her head to smile at me. “Want some apple?”
“No, thanks, baby.” My voice turns husky as her touch makes me painfully aware of the fact that I haven’t fucked her since leaving the estate. “It’s all yours.”
“All right.” She bites into the apple. “I ran into Dr. Goldberg in the hallway,” she says after swallowing. “He said you’re getting better, and we can go home tomorrow.”
“Yes, that’s right.” I watch her tongue flick out to clean up a tiny piece of fruit from her lower lip, and a bolt of heat tightens my balls. I am definitely getting better—or at least my cock believes that I am. “We’ll leave as soon as he okays it.”
Nora bites off another piece of apple and chews it slowly, studying me with a peculiar expression.
“What is it, baby?” Reaching for her free hand, I bring her delicate palm up to my face and rub the back of her hand against my cheek. I know I’m probably scratching her soft skin with my stubble—I haven’t shaved in over a week—but I can’t resist the lure of her touch. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”
She puts the apple core down on a napkin on the bedstand. “We should talk about Peter,” she says quietly. “And about the promise I made to him.”
I tense, my grip on her palm tightening. “What promise?”
“The list.” Her fingers twitch in my grasp. “The list of names you promised him for the three years of service. I told him I’d give it to him as soon as you had it—if he helped me rescue you.”
“Fuck.” I stare at her in disbelief. I had been wondering how she’d persuaded Peter to disobey a direct order, and here is my answer. “You promised you’d help him get revenge if he assisted you in that insanity?”
Nora nods, her eyes trained on mine. “Yes. It was the only thing I could think of at the time. He knew that if you died, he wouldn’t get the list at all—and I told him he’d get it earlier if he helped me.”
My eyebrows snap together as a wave of fury rolls through me. That Russian motherfucker put my wife in mortal danger, and that’s not something I can ever forgive or forget. He might’ve saved my life, but he had risked Nora’s in order to do it. If he hadn’t disappeared after carrying out the rescue, I would’ve killed him for that. And now Nora wants me to give him that list?
Not fucking likely.
“Julian, I promised him,” she insists, apparently sensing my unvoiced reply. Her gaze is filled with uncharacteristic determination as she adds, “I know you’re mad at him, but the whole plan was my idea—and he didn’t want to do it at first.”
“Right. Because he knew your safety should’ve been his top priority.” Realizing I’m still squeezing her palm, I release her hand and say harshly, “The bastard’s lucky he’s still alive.”
“I understand that.” Nora gives me a level look. “So does Peter, believe me. He knew you’d react like this—which is why he left after dropping us off here.”
I inhale, trying to hang on to my temper. “And good riddance to him. He knows I’ll never trust him now. I ordered him to keep you safe on the estate, and what did he do?” I glare at her as the memory of her getting dragged into that windowless room, bloodied and scared, scrapes at my brain. “He fucking hand-delivered you to Majid!”
“Yes, and by doing so, saved your life—”
“I don’t care about my fucking life!” I sit up all the way, ignoring the jolt of pain in my ribs. “Don’t you get it, Nora? You are the only person I care about. You—not me, not anyone else!”
She stares at me, and I see her large eyes beginning to glisten with moisture. “I know, Julian,” she whispers, blinking. “I know that.”
I look at her, and the anger drains out of me, replaced by an inexplicable need to make her understand. “I don’t know if you do, my pet.” My voice is quiet as I reach for her hand again, needing its fragile warmth. “You are everything to me. If something happened to you, I wouldn’t want to survive—I wouldn’t want a life that doesn’t h
ave you in it.”
Her lips tremble, the tears pooling in her eyes before spilling over. “I know, Julian . . .” Her fingers curl around my palm, squeezing it tightly. “I know, because it’s the same for me. When I thought your plane went down—” she swallows, her voice breaking, “—and then afterwards, when I heard the gunshots during our call . . .”
I draw in a breath, her distress making my chest hurt. “Don’t, baby . . .” I bring her hand up to my lips and kiss the inside of her palm. “Don’t think about it anymore. It’s over—there’s nothing more to fear. Majid is gone, and we’re on the verge of completely eradicating Al-Quadar . . .”
As I speak, I see her expression flattening, her gaze growing strangely shuttered. It’s as if she’s trying to pull back her emotions, to build some kind of a mental wall to protect herself. “I know,” she says, and her lips stretch into the kind of empty smile I’ve often seen her wear since our rescue. “It’s done. He’s dead.”
“Are you sorry about that?” I ask, lowering her hand. I need to understand the source of her withdrawal, to get to the bottom of whatever is causing her to shut down like this. “Are you sorry you killed him, baby? Is that why you’ve been upset the last few days?”
She blinks, as if startled by my question. “I’m not upset.”
“Don’t lie to me, my pet.” Releasing her hand, I gently grasp her chin and look into her shadowed eyes. “Do you think I don’t know you by now? I can see that you’ve been different since Tajikistan, and I want to understand why.”
“Julian . . .” Her voice holds a pleading note. “Please, I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Why not? Do you think I don’t get it? Do you think I don’t know what it’s like to kill for the first time and live with the knowledge that you took a human life?” I pause, watching for a reaction. When I see none, I continue, “We both know that Majid deserved it, but it’s normal to feel like shit afterwards. You need to talk about it, so you can begin to come to terms with everything that happened—”
