Page 6 of Breaking the Rules
The girl shook her head, her dark ponytail trembling. “It’s charging in my room,” she whispered.
Another burst of gunfire ripped through the night.Shit,Waverly thought. They needed to move. They were sitting ducks if they stayed here. One of the guards was growling into a radio in Russian.
“Anatoli to house. Do you copy?”
There was no response. Nor was there one on his second attempt.
“Okay, we need to find a better hiding place,” Waverly told Petra. “You’re going to stay right behind me and be quiet.”
Wide-eyed Petra nodded and then flinched at a new volley of gunfire.
Waverly signaled to the guards to follow her. They weighed their options briefly in the language they didn’t know she spoke fluently while Petra trembled at her side.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, guys,” Waverly muttered in Russian. “We need to move.” She pointed toward the boathouse at the edge of the lake a hundred yards away. Finally the short, thick-necked one with the radio nodded his assent. Wishing she had a gun or at the very least a dark shirt, she dragged Petra along behind her. The guards brought up the rear. They darted from tree to tree and tried to stay out of the moonlight.
For goons, Petra’s guards moved with relative silence, which said training. It was Petra stamping over twigs and leaves that made them sound like a drunken circus bear stumbling through firecrackers.
The last thirty feet to the boathouse were out in the open. Waverly paused for a second and listened. The air was eerily silent as if everything alive was listening desperately at the same time.
She gave Petra a three count, and they began the sprint toward the boathouse. There was more gunfire, and Waverly heard wood splinter next to her head as she shoved Petra inside. There was an active shooter targeting them in the dark, which meant nightscopes, and that meant not your run of the mill break-in. They were here for someone, not something. The bigger of the two guards rushed in the door behind them.
“Anatoli,” he said, gasping the name of the other guard and pointing to the door. “He is shot!”
Another round of bullets tore through the wood, and they dropped to the cement.
“Please tell me there’s a boat in here,” Waverly asked Petra.
“Yes!” she said through chattering teeth. “A m-motorboat.”
“Thank God, I thought we were going to have to kayak out of here. Okay, you! What’s your name?” she asked the guard in Russian.
“Yurgei.”
“Yurgei, you are going to put Petra and Pixie in the boat and motor your asses out of here. Stay on this side of the boathouse to block your escape and then stay down in the boat. Go to the other side of the lake and call this in.”
Yurgei grunted an okay.
“What about you, Waverly? Will you come with us?” Petra asked, shaking so hard Pixie whimpered.
“I’m going to find Dante.”
She waited until Yurgei had started the boat and raised the garage door before moving back to the side door. She would be a distraction while they made their escape.
The second the engine revved, Waverly was out the door, low and running. She zigged and zagged through the dark, hearing the bullets that hit the ground near her.
She saw the fallen guard. He’d dragged himself to the trunk of one of the pine trees that ringed the rocky beach, but he was still in the line of fire. She hustled to him. It was a leg shot, thankfully not life threatening unless the hilltop shooters decided to wander closer.
“Anatoli, can you walk?” she whispered.
“Not well, but yes,” he told her in thickly accented English.
She slipped his arm over her shoulder and helped him stand. She thanked God it had been him and not the heavier set guard who’d taken the hit. Anatoli weighed a good forty pounds less than his healthy counterpart.
“We’re going to run for those canoes,” she said, pointing at the heavy timber rack that held six polished wood boats. That should give you better cover.”
“Okay,” he gritted out.
“On my mark.” They tottered and stumbled, changing direction twice. Bullets tore into the ground, and Waverly felt a stitch in her side. They made it safely and she shoved him under the lowest canoe. “Gimmie your tie,” she instructed. His blunt fingers were shaking too much so she worked it free for him. She tied it around his thigh above the wound. “You got an extra piece on you?”
