Page 53 of The Russian's Innocent Prey
The thought should have brought peace. Should have made letting go easier. Instead, it filled me with a rage so pure it burned hotter than the flames starting to lick at the undercarriage.
I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t done. Had too much left to do, too much left to say.
Had promises to keep.
Darkness took me then, and I let it. Sometimes, surrender is the only strategy left.
But darkness, it turned out, had limits.
I heard a voice first. Familiar. Too familiar. The kind of familiar that belonged to ghosts and fever dreams.
“Lev. Jesus Christ, Lev, can you hear me?”
Trev. Had to be Trev. Which meant I was dead after all, because the living don’t get visited by the brothers they’ve been mourning for twenty-seven years.
Then Drew’s voice, sharp with panic. “He’s not responding. We need to get him out of there before this whole thing goes up.”
Oh. Drew was dead, too. That was unfortunate. He had potential.
Maybe the afterlife was just voices and memory, fragments of the people who’d mattered cobbled together to ease the transition from breathing to not. It wouldn’t be the worst way to go. At least I wouldn’t be alone.
But then I smelled something that didn’t belong in any version of heaven or hell my Catholic upbringing had prepared me for.
Vanilla. Lavender. That subtle sweetness of expensive skin cream.
Anya.
My heart kicked once. Twice. A stuttering rhythm that had no business existing in a dead man’s chest.
She wasn’t dead. Which meant I wasn’t either.
This was real. The living felt this warm, this broken, this desperately, impossibly alive.
The fire inside me—not the flames eating at the wreckage, but the one that had been banked to embers—roared back to life. Weak but awake. Burned but breathing.
I tried to move, tried to speak, tried to do anything that would prove to myself that I was still on the right side of the dirt. My body felt like it belonged to someone else, someone who’dbeen taken apart and put back together by a blind man with shaking hands.
“Lev.” Anya’s voice again, closer now. Her hand found mine—when had she taken off my glove?—and the contact sent electricity straight to whatever part of my brain still worked. “Can you hear me? Please. Please be okay.”
I wanted to tell her I was fine. Wanted to crack some joke about my legendary inability to die properly. Wanted to pull her against me and prove that we were both still breathing, still fighting, still here.
Instead, I managed to squeeze her fingers. Once. It was pathetic, but it was all I had.
“He’s responding.” Drew’s voice, tight with relief. “We need to move him. Now.”
“Carefully,” Trev added. “His leg’s fucked, and God knows what else.”
They worked around me like a pit crew, voices clipped and professional but edged with the kind of panic that meant they’d thought they were too late. How long had I been out? How long had they been looking?
How the hell had they found me at all?
“The pendant,” Trev muttered, and everything clicked into place.
The tracker. The fucking tracker he’d admitted to in the hospital, the one that had been broadcasting my location since we were kids. I’d forgotten about it in my rage-fueled rush to end Petro once and for all.
Sometimes being a control freak’s twin brother had its advantages.
They lifted me with the efficiency of men who’d done this before, and the pain that shot through my ribs was so sharp, so immediate, that it cleared the last of the fog from my head. I was definitely alive. Dead men didn’t hurt this much.
