Page 41 of The Enemy's Defector
18
NIKOLAI
Once more, we hurried away.
I hadn’t suggested that we relocate for any specific reason. I’d wanted to err on the side of safety and not risk becoming a sitting duck, too vulnerable for anyone to find.
“I thought you said you didn’t see anything,” Katerina hissed as we snuck out a side door, avoiding the front where someone seemed to be snooping.
“I didn’t,” I whispered. I really hadn’t. But I was damned glad that I was more or less proven right about the need to stay mobile.
Especially then.
Right when she was asking me to more or less commit to her. She had put pressure on me to say whether or not our time of hiding together would have an expiration date or if we would keep this up for good.
As we crouched and snuck away, holding hands and having each other’s back like this, it seemed ridiculous to ever think we wouldn’t be partners. Being with her made too much sense to consider the opposite.
“Get them!” someone shouted from behind us, further back in the alley.
Fuck!I didn’t waste time to mutter it. I reacted only with speed.
Katerina heard it too, and she sprinted right alongside me. This woman wasn’t dainty and prone to panicking at the worst times. She wasn’t fragile and weak, unable to withstand the need to push herself. Because of that, among so many other reasons, she was the ideal woman to be my other half. Katerina wasn’t an outsider like Sloane, who’d need to learn the Mafia lifestyle and accept our risks. She knew them already.
She was perfect. For me. But pressed to tell her how I’d plan to keep her as mine forever, I was stuck without any words.
And I couldn’t focus on forming a reply now.
Together, we bolted as fast as we could. With the sounds of multiple footsteps behind us, the race was on. The need to flee was urgent. Fucking again.
For them to be on us this quickly, they had to have placed men around the block. Because of that, it was pointless to think about slowing to get into the stolen car we’d left behind. Running like this wouldn’t last long. But we had to rely on the maneuverability of slipping around corners and leaping over boxes and other obstacles in this alley.
“This way,” I said, praying she heard me over the panted breaths I managed. This wasn’t an ideal occasion to chat. I was fit, despite my time in captivity. She was able-bodied to run hard too. With my heart racing this fast and adrenaline fueling to me a panic-worthy urgency, it seemed impossible to draw a full breath and speak.
I didn’t need to worry about giving her directions, though. She matched my stride and was so clued in to my actions that we really did move as a team. As one.
Guiding her around more dumpsters and parked cars, other odds and ends of debris and garbage shoved into this narrow streetway, I risked glancing over my shoulder. Just one look. And it pissed me off that there were more men than I figured. A team of five or six were catching up. All of them were unidentifiable, strangers I didn’t recognize or men mostly masked up and covering their faces.
More independent thugs.
More hired contractors.
I wished against all wishes that whoever was so determined to get me would reveal themselves. All I wanted was to know who to pay back. I had to know which man or men were waiting for death because of their attacks on my family, their decisions to poison my father, and their action of having me kidnapped.
Wait. That’s not right.
Tuning out the worst of the adrenaline ramping me up to sprint and evade these men, and ignoring the sounds of our hurried footsteps as we went, I realized a critical difference.
Last time when we’d been found and had to relocate, they’d shouted out toget her. They were targeting Katerina by singling her out with their orders to each other. This time, they had said to getthem, meaning both of us.
Why would Anton hire out thugs to get his niece?It would’ve made more sense to send Kozlov soldiers after her—and to retrieve me.
This layered question of who was responsible for what bothered me, but I couldn’t begin to analyze it when we were on the run and dodging them through this grimy alley.
The only thing that mattered now was getting Katerina away from these men. We ran and ran, not giving up, but before we could reach another building that I knew of on Ivanov territory, they caught up to us.
I still wasn’t fully healed. Recovering from the long ordeal I’d faced in captivity would require more time and rest. While I wasn’t one hundred percent, the need to keep Katerina safe propelled me not to quit or slow down.
“We’re trapped,” Katerina worried aloud when we seemed to face a dead end. In front of us, a tall brick wall prevented us from going any further. To our right was a chain-link fence that barricaded us from the metal stairwell we had to reach.
