Once my tears ran out, I sat on the freezing ground and cataloged the hurts I’d taken slowly and methodically. My fear and shock were fading, and cold, hard anger was replacing them.
Franco and his son needed to die. How dare they go against my father’s wishes like this? The rage warmed me. I couldn’t think too closely about how hurt Niko was. The memory of him ripping the pipe off the wall, and the blood coating his arms, his shoulder hanging oddly, was too much to endure. That he could be comforting me when I only had bruises and a tender spot on my head made me feel things I couldn’t deny.
Nope. I was truly done resisting what my heart had known for five years. I cared about him. He might be crazy, and I might be disowned, but none of that mattered anymore. Nothing mattered except surviving another day to get out of here alive.
As I thought of him, I realized he’d been quiet for a long time.
“Nikolai?” I called through the grate. He’d been right here, comforting me the entire time, though he had to be hurt beyond my imagining. The man’s tolerance for pain was not of this world.
“Hmm?” His voice sounded dreamlike and far off.
Wasn’t it bad to fall asleep when you were losing blood and so injured? What if he didn’t wake up? A new anxious sob worked up my throat.
“Will you tell me a story? You offered to once when we were running,” I heard myself ask into the darkness. My hands were bound in front of me with the same zip ties as they’d use on Niko. They hurt if I so much as flexed my wrists wrongly. I couldn’t imagine how deep the cut was from pulling the pipe off the wall.
“A story?” Niko mused.
“It’s dark in here and cold. I’m so tired, but I’ll never be able to sleep,” I muttered, feeling wretched. “I’m so scared.” The confession slipped from me, whispered guiltily into the darkness.
What right did I have to be scared compared to Nikolai? There was a hell of a high chance Silvio would demand Nikolai’s head when he woke up, and it didn’t look like Franco planned on stopping him. Add in the fact that my father’s health was declining, and the future was looking especially dark for the man in the cell next door. It might be hard for me, too, but somehow, the thought of Niko dying was the one that was torturing me.
“Okay, prom queen. I’ll tell you a bedtime story,” he said quietly, his voice comfortingly familiar. “Once upon a time, because that’s how all the good stories begin, there was a boy. He was a child of the woods, and the trees were his only friend. At night, he lay in the loam and counted the stars.”
His addictive murmurs swept a veil of ease over me. I thought of my younger self lying in my bed upstairs with the curtains drawn, staring at the stars stuck on the inside. Maybe I had always been meant to meet this man, since we were two lonely souls with nothing but the stars for company.
“He was a wild thing, and sometimes, he seriously considered walking farther into the woods and never returning to the world of men. In the end, he couldn’t, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because the boy wasn’t as whole as the animals he played with in the forest. He had a cage around his heart… one without a key. He could smile, and laugh, and pretend to be a real boy, but deep inside, he wasn’t.”
A chill crept through me at the painful melancholy of Nikolai’s words.
“There was a hole inside him, inside that locked-up place, where he couldn’t reach it.”
My eyes closed, and I hugged my knees hard. “You shouldn’t tell sad tales as bedtime stories.”
“Ah, but this story isn’t sad. One day, when the boy became a man, and his heart was blacker than the purest tar, he met a girl. One who once stared at the stars at night and dreamed of being loved, too. It didn’t matter how terribly he had lived his pathetic life. When she smiled at him, it felt like the fucking sun had finally risen for the first time in his life. He could feel the light on his face when she looked at him.”
I smiled. His words were so sweet and surprising. There were layers upon layers to this complicated man who’d stolen my heart, despite my best efforts to guard it. I wanted to spend my life discovering them, but there was a very real chance I’d never get to.
Weariness weighed me down. I was so tired; I let my eyes close, so I could imagine I was far away from this horrible, cold room filled with memories of other people’s pain.
Nikolai’s voice continued at a steady drone, but his words slipped from my understanding as I fell into a fitful sleep.
A bang against the wall behind me sent me flying from restless dreams. I tried to stand, and my tied hands immediately threw me off balance. I tipped to the side, banging my shoulder hard against the floor. My mouth felt stuffy, and it was freezing in the room. I hardly had any clothes on, so my teeth chattered immediately. My brain struggled to remember why I was tied up in the cold.
Nikolai.
The thought of him immediately pushed into my mind as I connected where the noise had come from.
“Nikolai?” I called frantically, pressing my face near the grate.
Was something happening? Carefully, I pushed myself to my feet and swayed. It was impossible to tell what time it was without windows or a watch. I guessed it had been a good few hours, maybe as much as five or six.
“Nikolai!” I called again toward the wall of his cell.
Another bang came from the room, like metal shifting, and the inaudible murmur of voices. Fear like nothing I’d ever felt before threatened to choke me. Who was there? Why wasn’t he answering me? Had he passed out? Whose voices were those?
I saw our entire history at that very moment.
Every single second, from the moment we’d met in the bar and he’d stolen my drink. Somehow teaching me a lesson about leaving drinks unattended at the same time as striking up a conversation. Now that I looked back on it, that had been the defining moment of my life. Everything that had happened since had been shaped by that single meeting. I’d been changed by it in a way I could never undo.
The seed of my curiosity about a dangerous man, who seemed to have limitless potential for violence, but had never hurt me, had been planted in my heart. Prom night, the race through the woods, shared hotel beds, and that terrifying moment hanging from the broken fire escape, with only Nikolai’s hand to tether me to safety, all bled into one.
The stark reality that the man who had starred in every one of those terrifying and precious memories could be lying next door, bleeding to death, or worse, already lifeless, broke something inside me.
All the fears and emotions I kept locked inside me streamed out. My hands found their way into my hair, and I pulled hard, throwing my head back and screaming. The sound echoed around and around the small cell. The sound of human misery at its purest. Terrible, pathetic, hopeless. I was all those things at that moment. I stopped caring who would hear. I didn’t care if Silvio or Franco came.
“Sofia? Lastoshka?”
I was interrupted from my blank staring contest with the wall, my throat burning. The door had been unlocked.
Nikolai and Angelo stood in the doorway.
My scream died, and my heart clenched as if Niko had reached into my chest and squeezed it. He was looking me over, checking for hurts, a worried expression tensing his face. He was still confused when I reached him. A sob on my lips, I hurtled myself into his arms. He brought his own up just in time to catch me.
“I thought you were dead. I heard them kill you,” I cried against his neck.
He was still, stunned by my show of overwrought emotion. Slowly, his hands tightened on my back, and he squeezed me carefully.
“I told you I wasn’t leaving you, prom queen. I told you I’d get you out of here, and I always keep my word.”
Angelo cleared his throat, looking nervously down the hall. “I hate to interrupt this, but we need to get out of here before Franco, Silvio, and their men get back from the hospital.”
“Right, are you okay? Have you recovered?” Niko asked, drawing back a little. His gaze fell over my nearly naked body, and he frowned.
“No. I don’t think I’m ever going to recover,” I muttered.
Niko cut my restraints, and gestured to Angelo, and my bodyguard shrugged off his suit jacket. Niko guided my arms through the sleeves. I finally took him in properly. The absolute mess of his arms broke my heart. His wrist looked nearly cut to the bone in places.
“Oh my god, your hands… isn’t it sore?” I asked dumbly and then recalled how I’d thrown myself into his arms, practically forcing him to catch me just minutes before. “I just jumped you.”
He chuckled. “Worth it. If I ever don’t want you to jump me, check for a pulse. I’m probably dead already.”
“Okay, let’s move now. We need to get going,” Angelo said, looking as jumpy as hell.
“What about Chiara?” I asked my bodyguard as we started from the cell.
“She’s outside the compound, already waiting. I just need your brother to come through.” Angelo shot Niko a hard look.
Niko only nodded and took my hand, keeping me close as we hurried silently up the hallway.
“He’ll come through. That’s the thing about Kirill, he’s boringly predictable.”
“Are we just strolling out of here? We’ll get caught,” I whispered frantically as we headed upstairs.
Angelo had his gun pulled and was looking around every corner before moving. It was still light in the house, and the sun shining in the windows made it seem like late morning. I’d slept all night.
“No, not strolling. There’s about to be a lot of commotion, and at that moment, we’ll get the fuck out of here,” Niko reassured me.
“What kind of commotion?”
“The cops. They’re on their way.”
“The cops! That’s your plan? The local police won’t do anything to the De Sanctis family. They are all on my father’s payroll.”
“Give me some credit. I know how to cause a little mayhem. We didn’t call in for help… we called in a bomb threat. That’ll bring them running.” Nikolai grinned. “That’s what you heard me rigging up.”
“A bomb? You made a bomb?”
He took in the panicked look on my face. “Just a small one,” he muttered, tearing a manic laugh from me. “Just a little homemade distraction to see us out the door safely.”
“That’s crazy. What about the other people in the house?”
We were edging down the hall, approaching the kitchen. From there, we could take the door to the garage and disappear into the woods, like Niko had originally, over a week ago.
“Everyone will be fine. I told you, it’s just a little thing, more bang than buck… probably.”
“Don’t worry, Sofia. He made it with household supplies and contained it,” Angelo called to me.
I gave up arguing about it. We needed to get out of here, and there was only one other person I cared about in the entire building.
“We need to warn Carmella,” I said as Angelo pushed into the kitchen.
“Warn Carmella about what?” The housekeeper’s hard voice brought all three of us to a stop.
Turning into the room, I saw the very woman in question. She was standing beside the door, holding a gun. My heart fell as I took her in.
“Sofia, come over here to me,” she said, and held out her other hand. She was eyeing Nikolai like he was the bomb himself, about to go off at any second.
I shook my head. “I can’t. I don’t want to. Carmella. I’m leaving.”
“You can’t leave. You’re Antonio De Sanctis’ daughter. You’re the future of this family. You can’t leave us,” Carmella said, her bottom lip wobbling.
I shook my head again. “I don’t want to stay anymore. I want to be free. Free of Antonio and Silvio and his father. Please, Carmella, just look the other way and let us go.”
“What will I say to your brother when he comes home?” Carmella demanded.
“You don’t need to say anything. I’ll come home then. Ren will fix everything, but until he’s here, it isn’t safe for me to stay.”
“And who is going to keep you safe? Him?” She jerked the gun toward Niko.
I nodded. “I trust him. He’ll keep me safe.”
“Tesoro, you’ve fallen for his lies. You told me yourself he’s a silver-tongued devil.”
“He is a devil, I can’t deny it… he’s a devil through and through, but…” I trailed off, unsure how the hell to explain my relationship to Nikolai in a short sentence.
“I’m her devil,” Niko said, suddenly stepping in. He walked steadily toward Carmella, not even looking at the gun leveled at his chest. “No matter who comes for her, or what they want to do to her, they’ll have to go through me. I’ll protect her with my life,” he said quietly.
Silence fell as Nikolai and Carmella stared at each other. Tension built, knowing that the cops were on their way and the distraction wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference if we weren’t ready to use the opportunity it presented.
“Go then. Go now, and don’t get caught. I’ll be here, waiting for your brother to come home.”
Carmella’s words sank through me, taking a few moments to register. She was letting us go.
“Be here, but not actually here, as there might be a tiny explosion,” I said, hurrying to her and hugging her hard.
She hugged me back, her gun still gripped in her hand. “Take care of yourself, Sofia, my precious girl,” she muttered into my hair.
“I will,” I reassured her.
“So will I,” Niko murmured beside us, and took my hand again.
Carmella pulled back, wiping under her eyes with a finger. “Go on then. Hurry up, before they get back from the hospital. They are already on their way.”
With fresh alarm beating through me, I followed Nikolai into the garage.
The familiar smells of the grease and motor oil, all the usual things I loved, filled my head. I’d come so far in the days since Nikolai’s first escape attempt, when I’d walked in here and right into his waiting arms. Now, we were escaping together, his hand was firm around mine, and I wasn’t letting go.
We made it through the garage and to the door on the farthest side.
“Okay, I’m going to open it, and when I do, you take Sofia and run,” Angelo said, positioning himself at the side, his gun at the ready.
“Be careful. Chiara will kill me if you get hurt.” I knew, without a doubt, my best friend was as vengeful as they came.
“She would, wouldn’t she? If I do, tell her… I’d do it all over, just to have the time we did again,” he said gruffly, softening my heart.
“Fuck, man, that was touching as hell, but you can tell her yourself,” Nikolai prompted, and pulled me close. “Let’s do this.”
We had no idea if there was someone waiting for us outside. Franco might have expected this, they might have already suspected Angelo. I had no idea.
Nikolai caught my eye, his silver gaze brushing fondly over my features. “Just remember, lastochka, it’s better to die than do nothing,” he told me quietly.
Those words seemed a good fit for him. He was a man who had clearly lived by them and been lucky enough not to die for them so far.
I nodded and straightened my spine. I was Sofia De Sanctis, Mafia princess, knife fighter and Nikolai Chernov’s lastochka. I wouldn’t go down with a whimper.
Angelo watched us, and seeing we were ready, opened the door.
And all hell broke loose.
