Page 96 of Enforcer Daddy
But the sounds of violence didn't stop. They just changed.
Through the smoke, I heard Dmitry working. The crack of bones breaking. The wet impact of fists against flesh. A scream cut short by something I didn't want to identify. He moved through the chaos like it was choreographed, like he knew exactly where every guard would be, how they would react, where they would run.
Bear was howling from his crate—long, terrified wails that cut through everything else. My baby was scared, trapped, probably choking on smoke, and I needed to get to him. I used my shoulders to drag myself across the floor, the chair scraping against concrete, each movement maybe gaining me six inches. The floor was getting wet with something that wasn't water,sticky and warm, and I tried not to think about what I was crawling through.
"Dmitry!" I called out, but my voice was lost in the chaos.
More gunfire, but different now—controlled bursts from the entrances. The Volkovs had arrived, adding their violence to the symphony. Bodies hit the floor with sounds like dropped sandbags. Men screamed in Russian, in English, in that universal language of pain that needed no translation.
Through the smoke, I caught glimpses of the battle. A guard stumbling past, holding his throat with both hands, blood seeping between his fingers. Another on his knees, trying to crawl toward an exit that was already blocked by Volkov soldiers. Dmitry appearing like a wraith, there and gone, leaving bodies in his wake.
The smoke was choking me now, making my eyes stream, turning every breath into a struggle. But I kept crawling, following Bear's cries, using them like a lighthouse in fog. The concrete tore at my shoulders through my shirt. The chair caught on something—a body, probably—and I had to wrench myself free with a sob that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with exhaustion.
"Please," I whispered to no one, to everyone, to the universe that had brought me to this moment. "Please let me get to him."
A figure loomed through the smoke above me, and for a heartbeat I thought it was Dmitry. But the shape was wrong, the stance too unsteady. Chenkov stood over me, his perfect suit torn and bloody, his face a mask of rage that had passed beyond sanity into something primal. He held his gun in a shaking hand, blood running from a gash on his forehead into his eyes.
"I’ve got you,suka," he snarled, the words thick with blood and fury.
The gun barrel looked enormous from this angle, a black hole that would swallow everything I'd fought to become.
I closed my eyes, not wanting Chenkov's face to be the last thing I saw. Instead, I pictured this morning—Dmitry's face soft with sleep, the golden light painting patterns on his scarred skin, the weight of his arm around me promising safety I'd been too naive to doubt. That was a better last image. That was worth dying with.
The gunshot was impossibly loud, even through the ringing in my ears.
But there was no pain. No impact. No darkness rushing in.
I opened my eyes to see Chenkov falling forward, a hole in his chest that hadn't been there before. He crumpled like someone had cut his strings, landing next to me with eyes that saw nothing, would never see anything again.
Behind him stood Dmitry, smoking gun in his hand—one he'd taken from a dead guard. Blood covered him like paint, his own and others', turning him into something from a nightmare or a classical painting of war. But his eyes when they found mine were desperate with love, with relief, with the kind of devotion that walked into certain death and made death uncertain.
"Eva," he breathed, and my name in his mouth sounded like a prayer answered. “Baby girl.”
Dmitry dropped to his knees beside me, the gun clattering forgotten as his hands found my face, my shoulders, checking for damage with fingers that shook—the only sign I'd ever seen of his fear.
"Are you hurt? Did he—" His words tumbled over each other, nothing like his usual controlled speech. His thumb traced the cut on my cheekbone, came away bloody, and his expression darkened into something that would have been terrifying if it hadn't been born from love. “I’ll resurrect him and kill him again.”
"I'm okay," I gasped, though okay was relative when you were zip-tied to a chair on a blood-slick warehouse floor. "Dmitry, I'm okay, but Bear—"
He was already pulling out the guard's knife, sawing through the zip-ties with careful desperation. The plastic gave way, and my arms screamed as blood rushed back into hands I hadn't been able to feel for the last hour. The chair fell away in pieces—it had cracked worse than I'd realized when I'd hit the ground—and suddenly I was free, though my legs wouldn't quite work right yet.
"Bear!" I said again, more urgently, because his howls had turned to whimpers that were somehow worse.
Dmitry didn't hesitate. He crossed to the crate in three strides and kicked the door with enough force to tear it off its hinges entirely. Bear shot out like a gray missile, launching himself at me with his whole body wiggling despite everything we'd just survived. I caught him against my chest, his small body shaking as hard as mine, and buried my face in his fur that smelled like fear and warehouse and somehow still like the puppy shampoo from this morning's bath.
"It's okay, baby," I whispered to him, to myself, to the universe. "We're okay."
The warehouse had become a different kind of chaos now—organized, systematic. Through the clearing smoke, I could see Alexei directing Volkov soldiers with hand signals, his face cold as winter while he orchestrated violence with the precision of a conductor. Bodies littered the floor—some moving, most not.
Ivan stood near the entrance with his laptop balanced on a crate, because apparently even all-out warfare couldn't separate him from his technology. His fingers flew across the keyboard, probably already erasing evidence, creating alibis, turning this massacre into something that never officially happened.
"We have to move," Dmitry said, pulling me to my feet with Bear still clutched against my chest. My legs shook but held, though I had to lean against him for balance. The adrenaline was wearing off, leaving me aware of every hurt—my raw wrists, bruised ribs from hitting the floor, the cut on my face that wouldn't stop bleeding.
It was over.
TheSUV'sleatherseatsfelt like clouds after the warehouse's concrete floor, though I couldn't quite shake the feeling that this was all a dream I'd wake from back in that metal chair. Brooklyn blurred past the tinted windows—normal Saturday afternoon Brooklyn, with people walking dogs and buying bodega coffee and living lives that didn't include watching men die in warehouses. The contradiction of it made my head spin, or maybe that was the adrenaline crash hitting.
Dmitry's jacket hung around my shoulders, heavy with the smell of gunpowder and blood and him. He'd wrapped me in it the moment we'd reached the vehicle, like fabric could somehow retroactively protect me from everything that had already happened. His arm hadn't left my shoulders since, holding me against his side with a grip that suggested he might never let go again.
