Page 10 of Mile High Ex's Dad
Hands slide beneath me, lifting carefully. Pain slices again across my ribs, sharp enough to clear some of the fog from my skull. I hiss through my teeth and look down as they move me, my palm instinctively pressing to my side. When I pull it away, there’s blood there. Dark in the rain. Not as much as there should be.
“Easy,” Yuri says.
I would tell him to go fuck himself, but at the moment I’m more interested in staying conscious.
They get me upright and half carry me toward the street, boots splashing through dirty water while gunfire fades into the distance behind us. Whoever took the shot either missed his second chance or never got one.
Good.
Amateurs would have aimed center mass and prayed. This was meant to finish me.
It should irritate me more than it does, but right now all I can think about is the woman in the rain. The one I lost seven months ago. The one who looked down at me like an angel from heaven. The one who should not have been here and yet was.
“Stay with us,” one of my men snaps.
I nearly laugh.
As if I have ever done anything else.
They carry me all the way to the curb where the car screeches into place, black and gleaming under the rain. The rear door isyanked open. I’m shoved inside. I lean back against the leather and bare my teeth as one of the men tears open my shirt.
Hands probe my side. A flashlight cuts across blood-slick skin.
“Hold still.”
“I am still,” I growl.
“Like hell.”
The car lurches forward, and pain pulses hot and rhythmic beneath the pressure on my ribs. My shirt is peeled back farther. Fingers spread over the wound, searching.
Then: “It grazed him.”
Another voice, tighter with disbelief: “What?”
“Bullet track across the lateral side. Tore through skin, maybe muscle, but didn’t bury. He’s bleeding, but it’s a graze. Barely fucking kissed him.”
I close my eyes for a moment.
Relief is not what I feel.
Annoyance, perhaps. A cold, simmering fury that someone was bold enough to try. But beneath that, lower and stranger, the image of her still lingers. Rain silvering her skin. That soft smile. The impossible calm of her face in the middle of gunfire.
“Pakhan,” Yuri says hoarsely from the front. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what happened?”
I open my eyes again and stare at the blood on my hand. “Yes.”
Attempted assassination. A failed one.
But that is not the truth I sit with in the darkened car, rain racing over the windows while my men pack gauze against my side and bark updates into their phones.
The truth is quieter. Less rational.
I should have taken that bullet deeper than I did. I know angles. I know luck. I know the difference between a miss and a mercy. And though I say nothing, though I would never gift sentiment to a room full of armed men, the thought settles inside me with unnerving certainty.
