Chapter 26 - Fiona

I stare at Olive, who's kneeling over James, crying and breathing so hard I think she might be hyperventilating.

"Olive," I say, "if you don't untie me now, he's just going to keep hurting me."

Olive nods shakily and crawls across the floor, her fingers trembling so hard that for a second, I think she might not be able to cut me free with the knife. Once she gets my hands free, I take the knife from her, cutting my legs free yet again.

My ankle hurts like hell from when I fell on my side, and it was smashed between the chair leg and the floor, but I ignored it. I grab a gun from the table and scramble over to James.

"No!" Olive screams. "Don't kill him—Fiona, please."

She's crying harder than I've ever seen. I get it—I understand this flavor of daddy issues more than she could ever know.

"I won't," I say, leaning down enough that I can hear him breathing. "He's still alive," I say, getting to my feet and cocking the gun. "I'm sorry, Olive, but we need to get out of here."

She nods but doesn't move.

"Like, now . Is there anyone else here? Are they outside the room?"

"Two guys," she says, and I nod, taking a deep breath. A second later, with Olive behind me, I kick the door, waiting for the first guard to step in front of me before shooting him in the chest.

"Oh my god!" Olive screams before I swing around the corner and shoot the second. The gun has a silencer, but that doesn't mean the other guys in this place wouldn't have heard it go off. Two gunshots will draw attention—if James was going to kill me, it would only take one.

"Which way?"

Olive is sobbing, too hard to hear me or to answer.

"Olive!" I say, shaking her, "Which way out?"

When she doesn't answer, I grab her by the hand, dragging her with me down the hallway and around the corner. I hit a guy over the back of the head with the gun to preserve bullets, and we continue. I'm trying to find the way out on my own, but it's like a maze, another underground area with no windows or signs.

"Shit," I whisper when we turn the corner, and I see three guys down at the end of the hallway. I pull us back before they can see us, but Olive lets out a little sound, and I hear them coming to explore. I swing around the side, firing once, twice, but the third shot is an empty clicking noise.

"Fuck," I mutter, tossing the gun to the ground and feinting to the right when the guy tries to hit me in the face. Taking control of his arm, I spin, bringing my elbow down on his and forcing it in the opposite direction. My hope is to break his arm, but he's pretty muscular. There's a dull pop, and he cries out in pain, but the arm isn't out of commission.

"Run," I say to Olive, backpedaling and grabbing her, trying to drag her along with me. I can't leave her behind. Not after she went up against her dad like that to save me. The guy I'm grappling with is at least twice as big as me. That means, without the element of surprise and with nowhere to run, he'll have the upper hand if he gets his hands on me.

If he gets his hands on either of us.

When we round the corner of another hallway, there are four more guys heading our way. I turn around, trying to get Olive to run in the other direction, but she's practically comatose, and we're suddenly surrounded on all sides by James Allard's men.

***

When I come to again, I actually feel the stinging, sickening pain coming from my arm, and I realize there's a, there's a bloodied bandage where the tracker should be. Bile rises in my throat, and I think about the horrible scar I'm going to have there now.

Anton had looked surprised but willing when I pitched the idea to him, and he'd practiced his sutures on fruit for a long time before finally putting the tracker in for me. He was so careful. So precise.

And now my arm is a bloody, mangled mess.

"Good morning, sweetheart," James says, his words a little slurred. He's sitting in a chair, and from this angle, I can see a bandage on the back of his head where Olive hit him. He's got to have a pounding headache from that little blow.

"Do you like my handiwork?" He gestures to the bandage on my arm. When I glance back down at it, it makes my stomach turn. If Anton saw it, he would hate it. It's definitely not sterilized. "I could take the bandage off and make a few updates to it."

My stomach turns at the thought of him digging around in my flesh, but I do my best not to show that on my face.

"Have you seen this before?" James asks, leaning to the side and pulling something from his pocket. I think it's going to be a gun, and I wince, but then I realize it's a little rubber ducky. Despite everything—the situation and the fact that I might be staring death in the face, I have to roll my lips into my mouth to keep from smiling.

It's one of the little French ducks Viktor used to get back at Allard. As I look at it, I realize the tie around my left leg is a bit loose—probably the result of James doing it himself, concussed.

"It's hilarious, right," James says, tossing the duck onto the floor between us. " So funny. You know, my great-grandpa was a member of the Corsica back in the 1920s when we were at the height of our game. Then, of course, the Russians and the Italians came and ruined everything. There's a certain finesse to the French way of doing things. The Russians are all brute force, and the Italians are just—well, I don't have to explain to you why the Italians are less than savory, do I?"

He stands from the chair, moving closer to me. Slowly, as though each movement pains him, he pulls a gun from the holster at his waist and points it at me. It feels like my heart stops like time stops altogether.

A person can pretend to be as fearless as they want, but everyone shits themselves when they come face-to-face with death. Nowhere to go. If Allard had already pulled the trigger, I would be dead on the floor, a bullet in my forehead, eyes staring blankly across the room.

"My grandpa and my dad shared the same dream: to bring the Corsica to its previous strength. And here I am, doing my best to fulfill that wish. To carry on our legacy. All of this is to say that I don't take people mocking my heritage lightly. To get back at the Milovs, I've decided that I'm just going to kill you instead of fucking around."

Just as James flicks off the safety, I get my foot free. I swing out, knocking my body into him, sending both of us sprawling across the floor. I think I'm going to have a second to scramble away, to do something, grab the gun, get my arms and legs free, but there's no time—James is on top of me, his hands coming around my throat.

I can't do anything. My hands are still pinned. I can't even claw at him.

With my remaining strength, I try to buck him off me, but it's not enough. He's bigger and heavier, and he holds me down. I see little black dots in my vision. I realize I am about to die on the floor of this compound somewhere.

I also realized something else: I don't regret a single second of how I've been living my life. At least for the past few months, I've been living a life that fits me instead of sitting in an office all day and pretending to be someone else.

I don't regret falling in love with Boris. And I don't regret using some of my last words to tell him that. Meeting and getting to know the Milovs and joining their family, at least in spirit, if not in name, has been one of the greatest joys of my life.

I'm thinking all this when the door bursts open, and people run in. My cynical, oxygen-deprived brain thinks it's more of Allard's men, here to cheer him on as he squeezes the life from me, but I recognize those Doc Martens.

Someone knocks Allard off me and I get a breath of sweet, sweet air. I gasp and gasp, my cheek pressed against the ground until someone reaches down and grabs my chair, righting me.

"Anya?"

"Should I be insulted?" Viktor shouts, working quickly to free me. My vision is swimming as I look at him. Distantly, I register the fact that Boris and Anton are busy fighting people near the doorway.

"I thought—" I rasp, but it doesn't come out clear. I thought I saw Anya's white Doc Martens. When I turned around and saw her standing there, I thought I must be dreaming. There's no way her brothers allowed her to come.

She's standing over the top of James, pointing a gun at him. It looks like Boris got him over the back of the head again, where Olive hit him originally. He's groaning and grasping at the wound, little whimpers coming from him.

For someone who seemed to derive so much pleasure from causing pain for others, he sure doesn't seem able to take it himself.

I step closer to Anya, gesturing for her to hand me the gun. Across the room, I see Boris drop the last guy. They all come to a stop, staring at me as I point the gun at James.

"What do you think?" I rasp, eyes flicking up to Boris, who's looking at me like I'm back from the dead. I feel the bruises around my neck and realize that may very well have been the case if they were even a minute later.

"I'm in love with you," Boris says all in one breath, which makes me smile.

"I meant about Allard," I say, swallowing to try and ease the pain in my throat. My entire body feels like it's floating, hearing him say it, finally. "But I love you, too."

"If you don't kill him," Boris says, "I will."

I nod once, then pull the trigger, splattering his brains all over the wall behind him. If my throat didn't hurt so fucking bad, I'd say something clever to his body about just doing the job and skipping all the monologues.

" Daddy ?" someone says from the doorway, and I try to move in front of Olive's line of sight, but it's too late. She breaks down into total hysterics, falling to her knees in front of her father, screaming and soaking her hands and knees in his blood.

"Oh, fuck," Anton says, scratching his head with his gun, "that's gonna leave a lot of trauma behind."