Chapter 17
Naomi
My heart was in my throat when the door opened and Gavril stood there, his face streaked with God knows what and a look on his face that immediately told me something was wrong. I was up and out of the chair before he could take another foot inside the room, flying into his arms heedless of what was on him. “You’re all right,” I sobbed into his bare chest.
His arms locked around me, and for a moment we stood there, his face buried in my hair and my tears wetting his skin. When I had first heard the gunshots, I’d realized that all our planning could be the end of his Bratva.
We could actually lose the fight. As much as I wanted to go outside the house and protect the man I loved, I had stayed in the room like he had asked. Gavril would have been distracted if I had shown up, and what was I going to do anyway?
Get myself killed or him killed? I couldn’t let that happen.
When the gunfire faded, I’d never felt helplessness and worry as I had then. I didn’t know if it was going to be my husband that walked through the door next or Jon or someone else, and I would be at a loss of how to stop them if it wasn’t Gavril.
But it was, and for the moment, my world clicked back into place.
Gavril pulled away and shoved his hands through his hair, his eyes doing a quick search of me. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I replied, trying and failing to give him a smile. “What’s wrong?” I had never seen him so rattled before, so unsure of himself, and it wasn’t a good feeling. Gavril was unflappable, confident, in charge most of the time.
Finally, he seemed to pull himself together and gave me a quick shake of his head. “I don’t want to linger here. Come, let’s go.”
Wordlessly I followed him through the house, noting how two guards immediately flanked us the closer we got to the outside. They were two I hadn’t seen before.
Something was truly wrong.
Outside it looked like a war zone. I gasped as I saw the bodies being dragged into a pile, too far to see who they might be or what side they were on. There were overturned SUVs, two on fire, and a car sitting close to the front door of the house, riddled with bullets. It then dawned on me that the car had gotten close to the house before it was stopped.
This could have had a very different outcome.
A truck sat idling on the other side of the car and Gavril tucked me into his side as we passed, as if he was trying to shield me from whatever carnage was still near the car. “Don’t look,” he murmured, his hand pressing into my side. “It will haunt you if you do.”
I wanted to ask all sorts of questions but refrained for now. There would be a time and place.
Gavril helped me into the truck before moving around to the driver’s side and climbing in. “We are going to take the back way out,” he explained as he put the truck into drive. “It might be bumpy, so hold on.”
I did as he asked, grabbing a hold of the door as he maneuvered the truck to the back of the house. Sure enough, there was a small drive leading through the woods, the tree branches scraping the sides of the truck as we barreled through. “You’re driving,” I realized as he pulled out onto a long, desolate road. “Shirtless.”
“I can drive, you know,” he answered after a moment, some of the tension bleeding out of his broad shoulders. I didn’t know if it was because I was trying to distract him or because whatever danger he was expecting was now behind us, but my anxiety ratcheted down just a hair regardless.
“I know,” I said lightly. “I just don’t think you’ve done it often.”
“Then I will remedy that for the future,” he answered. “Hampton didn’t show.”
All the air left my lungs, and I gritted my teeth to keep from shouting. “We have to do it again,” I said immediately. “We have to bait him, Gavril. He’s going to come; I know it.”
“Stop.”
Gavril’s hard voice rang out in the small cab and I stared at him, my mouth frozen mid-sentence. Sure, he had raised his voice before, but not like this. “What happened?” I asked softly, reaching over to lay my hand on his thigh. His cargo pants were streaked with blood and there was a hefty smell of gun smoke lingering in the air, reminding me of the carnage that we had just left.
“I lost men, Naomi,” he started, his hands clenching the wheel. “Good men that I couldn’t protect. Yuri is fucking dead. Pavel is likely to lose his fucking leg.”
My throat closed at his words. I had just met them today and now they were gone, just like Anatoly. Gavril had lost the men that he depended on.
“The Krasnaya showed up,” he continued, his eyes on the road before him. “Sent by Hampton to try and eliminate the threat so he could get to you. I got rid of my war, but yours, hell, it’s still game.”
I clenched my teeth so hard that my head hurt. Jon hadn’t come. After all his talk on the phone, he had sent in men instead. I shouldn’t be surprised. Jon probably knew that he was looking at a trap and had decided to test the waters.
“Konstantin gave me some information before I killed him,” Gavril said a moment later, glancing over at me. I knew what he was expecting. He was expecting me to freak out that he had killed a man, but I couldn’t. That was part of him, and I had to either accept it or walk away.