“Go ahead, Patient 34, make my day,” Donny says. “Come at me.”
“Fucking seriously?” Aleksio says. “Make myday?” He laughs and points at the road beyond the field. Way off far to the right. “And what about that? Does that make your day, too?”
Donny turns to look.
I look, too.
A blast to my left. I swing my gaze to Viktor. He lowers a weapon, grinning.
Donny’s down, crumpled in the weeds, a hole in his face.
“Do not threaten ourbratik,” Viktor says.
A shiver slides over me. These are my brothers.
Aleksio squints at the road. “Goddamnit.” He pulls Viktor and me in. “They’re coming. It’s a fucking caravan.” He checks his phone. “Tito and Yuri and the guys are twenty minutes out. Fuck.”
Viktor speaks in his strange language. He’s not happy.
“Who’s coming?” I ask.
“Lazarus,” Aleksio says.
“Him again,” I growl. “He shot Ann. He’s been after us.”
“Oh, he’s definitely been after you,” Aleksio says. “He needs you dead. Well, any of us.”
“Now he thinks he can get all three of us,” Viktor adds.
Viktor pulls one gun after another from his pack. He sets them on the padded bench. “Lazarus helped to kill our father and mother. He helped send you away and split us up. He is our greatest enemy.”
My head swims. This man who shot Ann—twice—is also why I never had a family? Why I never knew these brothers? And now he wants to kill us?
I begin to feel wild.
“Fucking surround us…” Aleksio tells us what he thinks Lazarus will do now. Fish in a barrel, he calls us.
Viktor pulls the one side of the back door closed. I watch him with a mixture of pride and anguish.My own brothers.They came for me. Now they’re willing to die for me.
My pack is larger than I ever dreamed.
Aleksio has unbolted the bench. He tips it on its side. Preparing for a shootout. “If they have C-4 with them, we’re fucked,” Aleksio says. “A van in the middle of a field. Fucked.”
“I have C-4.” Viktor pulls a small metal container from his pack.
Aleksio snorts. “That would be perfect—iftheywere the ones in a van trapped in a field.”
“I can hear them coming,” I say. “Two vehicles more. A lot of men, all coming across now.”
My brothers look at me. “You can hear all that?”
“Two different engines just now turned off. Boots crunching dried weeds. All sides. Trying to be quiet.”
Viktor hands me a gun. “You know how to handle one of these?”
I give it back. “No.”
“Oh. Okay.”