A perfect target.
The door was kicked open in a shower of splinters and a gun fired, chewing up the antique rug in the center of the room. It was Sevastian, my old adversary from back in Miami. The bastard. It didn’t surprise me. Only he would be overconfident enough to fire at what he couldn’t see. As cocky as he may have been, he wasn’t entirely mindless. He saw his mistake instantly and was already turning his weapon toward me when I shot him.
I took the chest shot. It was the easiest. With broad bands of muscle that rippled even through the covering of a thick black sweater, he was built like a bull, and when he fell, he shook the floor as heavily as one. Swiveling, I jammed my shoulder against the door to slam it shut. There was a resounding crash as someone hit the other side face-first. Yanking it back open, I straddled the fallen body and swung my foot into the shaking chin in a hard kick. And that was it for number two. Pavel had always been Sevastian’s shadow. Sevastian went first and Pavel mopped up what was left, which usually wasn’t a whole hell of a lot.
An arm came across my throat like an iron bar and my thoughts of Pavel vanished instantly. The crushing pain managed to cut through the layer of numbness that sheathed me. “I knew you’d fuck up one day, Korsak,” came the gravelly voice in my ear. The accent was still thick after fifteen years out of Moscow and he slipped into the Russian that came more easily to him. “Segodnya etot den.” Today’s that day.
I could feel his blood, hot and plentiful, soaking the back of my shirt. I should’ve known one bullet wouldn’t take the son of a bitch down. I started to bring my gun up to try for an awkward shot, but his other massive hand fastened around mine. The bones in my wrist creaked to the point of breaking as it was bent backward in an unforgiving grip. Before I could shift weight to try and throw him off, a knee hit the back of my thighbone and buckled my leg instantly. Sevastian had once been in the Russian army, and what he’d learned there trumped anything I’d picked up in my few working years. The fall was over before I knew I was going down. Sandwiched between the floor and a hulking mountain of flesh, my lungs expelled every molecule of air, leaving me wheezing desperately.
Ripping the gun from my hand, he flung it across the room. With his arm still around my neck he tightened the pressure until yellow and black spots washed across my vision. With all that air forced out and now with no way in, if I didn’t do something within the next few seconds, Michael would be on his own. He might be the fastest healer around, but I didn’t think that would save him from a bullet in the heart or brain. He was a boy, not a vampire. He wasn’t going to rise from the dead, and Sevastian wasn’t one to leave witnesses any other way.
Feebly I raised my hand up and behind me to scrape uselessly against his face. He chuffed a laugh stinking with the copper of blood against the back of my neck. The bastard’s lungs were filling up. Without medical help he’d be dead in fifteen minutes. It didn’t matter; I’d be dead in five . . . and that was a blue-sky estimate, a best-case scenario. If he let me asphyxiate, it would be minutes. If he snapped my neck, it would be seconds.
My hand continued its path up his jawline, the motions as fragile as those of a newborn child. “You’re barely struggling,” he said in a clotted whisper, switching back to English for my benefit. He knew my Russian wasn’t as fluent as his, and he wanted me to understand every word. “It’s so much more satisfying when you struggle. I want to feel you flop under me like a fish out of water. I want to feel every twitch as brain cell by brain cell you die, traitor.” A hard prodding at my hip told me what I’d always suspected. Death was the ultimate hard-on for Sevastian. Twisted and sickly perverse as he was, neither women nor men held much attraction for him. Killing was all. He lived it, breathed it, and if he could somehow make death itself tangible, he would probably fuck it.
The choking hold on my neck eased slightly as he cajoled, “Stay awake, Stefan. Stay and try just a little harder. Perhaps then I won’t rip that boy limb from limb when I find him.”
I barely heard the words. The roaring in my head had followed the curtain of spreading black before my eyes. My only concern was my traveling hand. Sevastian ignored its progress even as it touched his ear. He’d always had well-shaped ears, I thought dimly as my capacity for coherence began to unravel. It was peculiar to see: his bullet-shaped head, Neanderthal brows, soulless and cloudy eyes combined with a delicate seashell curve of ear that any woman would’ve been proud of. Whether Sevastian was proud of them, I didn’t know. It was, as they say, moot.