Page 12 of Kidnapped Bride

Fifteen minutes later, we parked two blocks from the convenience store where the police had set up a perimeter and officers held back the crowd. Tyren kept the car running while Yakov and I approached on foot, hoping to survey the damage.

From what I could tell, it was mostly a firefight, though the windows of the store had been shot out and would need replacing.

And I saw a body on the sidewalk covered by a white sheet.

This wasn't good.

"What do you think?" Yakov asked me. He stood a few inches taller than me, able to see over every head in the crowd gathered to gawk at the sight.

"I think we need a different way in, or we need to back off before we are connected to this." My chest was uneasy being this close to a bunch of cops. It was no secret that I wasn't a straight shooter and they'd been trying to pin me down for years. "Let's circle around back," I told him, nodding toward the alley.

Yakov led the way through the crowd and up the alley.

We were halfway to the back of the shop when Vlad stomped around the corner and nearly ran into us.

His head jerked up and he looked startled.

"Boss, fuck… I swear we never saw them coming." I could see the shame in his eyes and knew how angry he was over this mess.

"Yeah, well, we all have to be on our toes more… Tell me what happened." My fingers itched to find the man responsible for this particular hit and put a bullet in his skull. The only way to stop these bastards from continuing to come after me was to stop them dead in their tracks and make a lesson of them.

"Okay, so we were just a block away when we heard a commotion and by the time we got here, it had escalated to shooting. There were three of them, but Gregg took one of them out. He's hit." Vlad glanced over his shoulder. "Not bad, but I have to get to him before the cops haul him off. He has that domestic, you know… And he's in the back of the bus over there." He nodded down the alley where we'd just come from and I recalled seeing the ambulance parked there with the back doors open.

"Get to him," I grumbled. "Did you see where they went? Which way?"

Yakov stepped out of Vlad's way as he continued on his path toward the front of the store and the ambulance to get Gregg out of there before police came to question him.

When he twisted, his jacket shifted, revealing the Makarov shoved in his waistband.

"That way," Vlad said, turning to walk backward. He pointed in the general direction we were headed and said, "But one of them is dead. I think they said something about a coffee shop, but there was so much shooting."

With blood in the water, there was no time to lose. We lost one of ours and another was injured, and they were limping away. "Come on, Yakov. We don’t have any time to lose. They could be anywhere by now."

We stormed up the alley checking around every corner, and about a block away, we started to see blood.

First it was just a few drops here and there, but it got worse, like whoever was bleeding had slowed down, giving more time for their wound to leave traces of them.

The bloody handprint on the back door of a shop made me pause and gesture at Yakov.

I brought my finger to my lips to hush him and nodded at the handprint.

He scowled and understood what I meant, pulling his weapon.

If those men were here, we would root them out and send them back to Markin with a message that would ruin his day.

"Go around front… If I chase them out, shoot 'em." I crept toward the building as Yakov jogged along the side of the building toward the front entrance and as he disappeared from sight, I pulled the back door open.

Both of the men were there just inside the entrance as I walked in, and they both looked up at me.

One of them was slumped against the counter with his hand clamped over his side, blood soaking through his shirt and dripping onto the floor.

The other turned at the sound of the door and brought his weapon up, but he hesitated for half a second when he saw me, and that was all it took.

I fired and hit him in the chest, dropping him where he stood. He stumbled back into the counter and collapsed, dropping his gun. It spun away from both of them, under a low table where it came to rest before he slid down the counter and smeared blood everywhere.

Shouting erupted in the front of the coffee shop and I heard chaos unleash, but I didn’t slow my march to the injured man, who tried to aim at me, but his arm shook too badly to hold steady.

I could see he was already losing strength.