than years of torture and starvation?” He steps behind his desk. He puts both his fists on it, straightens his elbows, and angles his body forward. “It was the moment I learned my own brother … my own brother … did this to me.”
I stop wrestling with the knot and blink up at him, unable to grasp the irrationality of this statement. His brother?
“You look like Katarina,” he says softly, “but you have our mother’s eyes. They are neither gray nor green nor blue. Baltic eyes, our mother called them.” Abramovich is staring not at my eyes, but through them.
He opens a desk drawer and lifts out a Tokarev pistol. He loops his forefinger into the trigger, dangles it from his hand, and walks back around the front of the desk.
A choking sob rises from the back of my throat. I don’t want to believe him, but his words pierce my veins like a syringe of venom, infecting me.
“You’re wrong,” I say. “Anton died protecting his family! He would have never hurt his brother—”
“You didn’t know your father!” Abramovich roars. He pushes the barrel hard into my temple. His eyes are alight, little flames burning in the irises. “He was a traitor to his country, to his family.”
He’s going to kill me.
“This is all I want,” he says. “To see you this once, my only family.” He looks exhilarated. “I made myself live to see this moment. To see you. To finally achieve вендетта.”
Vendetta.
He thumbs off the safety.
At least he has the courage to look me in the eye.
A gunshot sounds. Followed by another. Pop! Pop!
Neither bullet strikes me.
Abramovich crumples back against the mahogany desk, blood pouring from the silk handkerchief in his pocket.
CHAPTER 60
Craning my neck, I stare, shocked.
Standing in the hall, backlit into a silhouette, his towering physique fills the doorframe.
There is a moment of complete silence—then everything goes into overdrive.
Tucking his SIG into a left hip holster, Aksel rushes toward me. With a knife, he saws at the ropes on my hands first. Dropping to his knees, he cuts the rope binding my ankles. He loosens it around my feet before wiping the blood off my cheek.
He scans my features, the green of his eyes growing fierce and bright; his face betrays how bloodied and bruised I must look.
His fingertips skim my jaw, tracing toward the nape of my neck. With my face braced between his hands, he leans forward and kisses me.
I clasp my hands around the back of his head, tangling my fingers into his hair. We kiss again, more desperately this time, and his hands tighten against my back, drawing me into him.
He kisses me hard. Our lips cling; my body trembles in shock. Aksel is here?
I’m breathless; our foreheads touch.
“Looks like you’ve got your aim down,” I murmur, nodding at the SIG.
Aksel pulls away from me, smiles, brushes his lips against mine once more, and lifts me from the chair. “Actually, I meant to hit him in the head,” he utters under his breath.
The rope had cut off the circulation to my feet, so I stomp, flinching in pain, to get the blood flowing.
“I have to find Bekami,” I say to Aksel, who is holding me tight around my waist as I stumble along with him into a cavernous hall.
“We have to get you out of here,” Aksel says.
We reach a landing overlooking a courtyard. We are on the third floor of what must be Abramovich’s estate—an old Ottoman palace with wood-paneled walls, intricate tile work, and arched moldings.
It is eerily quiet. Men like Abramovich don’t live without security—where is his guard?
“How did you even get in here?” I ask Aksel as we descend two flights of a blue-mosaic staircase.
Before Aksel can answer, a pop-pop-pop of automatic fire interrupts us. We have found Abramovich’s security, or they have found us.
At the bottom of the staircase, we turn into a glass-roofed atrium with a black-and-white parquet floor and lush ferns sitting atop marble pillars.
Aksel pulls me behind a pillar. “I’ve got her,” he shouts to the figure letting off the thick pop-pop rhythm.
Todd backs over to us, firing an HK on semiautomatic.
He glances in our direction. “Then it’s time to roll.”
Through the atrium windows, I count nine guards scattered among the ring of cypress trees outside the palace entrance. All are shooting in the same direction. Ours.
Glass shatters behind us. We cover our heads and dart for the atrium’s back door. Aksel moves first, sweeping me aside as a bullet hits the wall beside