by Lauren Smith
“What are you guys doing?” she asked.
Leo turned his smile on her. “Well, we just found a back door in the Department of Homeland Security.”
“And I’ve gotten permission from the boss man to use my new drone.” Cody cracked his knuckles and leaned back in his chair with a cocky grin.
“A drone?”
“Yep, the boss man has military contracts. We’ve been working on a prototype that flies low enough to go unnoticed by most government systems. If we fly that over the woods, I’ll be able to see their heat signatures coming up on us. We’ll know how many there are and where they are.”
“That’s incredible,” Elena said. It boggled her mind that they actually had access to that level of technology.
“Dimitri asked for you to come find him when you’re done,” Leo said before he and Cody resumed their discussion.
Elena, not for the first time, was aware that she was the only woman in a house full of dangerous men. It unnerved her a little, even though none of them were a threat to her. She left the kitchen and began searching the house until she found Dimitri in the loft, which had a relaxing den with a sectional and a big-screen TV.
Maxim sat beside him on the couch, and they were speaking together softly in Russian. They stopped when they spotted her coming up the stairs. Maxim got up and nodded at Elena before excusing himself.
Dimitri patted the seat next to him. She came over, glad for a chance to cuddle up. He curled an arm around her shoulders and, not saying a word, she closed her eyes. Just being with him always brought on a wave of peace. She drifted off for a moment, only feeling a little guilty that he probably had better things to do than be her personal pillow.
Sometime later, she was shaken awake by a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Kiska, it’s time. You need to eat and drink some water.” Dimitri stood over her. Darkness had fallen outside.
“It’s time?”
“Yes.” Dimitri stroked her hair back from her face. “Leo spotted Vladimir in town a few hours ago. Fenn and Maxim were able to put a tracker on his car and have been keeping tabs on him, waiting to see what he’d do. He’s now headed up the mountain.”
Elena sat up, rubbing at her face as she tried to shrug off her weariness. Panic was starting to take over.
“How are you so calm?” she asked him.
He gave a wry smile as he stroked her cheek. “Because I’ve trained for this my whole life. Now come and eat. Then we’ll get you ready.”
She followed Dimitri into the kitchen, where everyone was eating protein bars and drinking bottles of water. They were all quiet except for Cody, who was calling out updates on where Vladimir’s car was.
“He’s one mile out, but he stopped alongside the road,” Cody said.
Leo frowned and bent over his laptop. Maxim was pulling a Kevlar vest out of a black duffel bag.
“Eat quickly,” Dimitri urged. Elena hastily chewed on a protein bar and drank a bottle of water, but her stomach churned. She had to concentrate on something else or risk throwing up. Dimitri took the vest from Maxim.
“Come here.” Dimitri led her into the bedroom and helped her remove her sweater, then put the Kevlar vest over her white tank top and covered it with the sweater.
“You will have a backpack with food, water, a space blanket, and a satellite phone. If we get separated, you will have what you need to survive for a few days. There is a list of numbers to call if something happens to me or any of us and you’re left alone.”
She gripped his sweater, halting him when he tried to turn away. “Nothing is going to happen to you, right?”
He caught her hand in his, kissing her fingers. “We will be all right,” he promised, but for the first time, she feared Dimitri was lying.
Emery appeared in the doorway of the master bedroom. “Leo said he picked up on thirty heat signatures moving up the mountain toward us.”
“Thirty? On foot?” Dimitri asked.
“Yes. Cody thinks Vladimir met his agents in the woods.”
Dimitri urged Elena toward the door. “We must go.”
As he turned her toward the garage and away from the other men, she heard Maxim address them in the great room.
“Leave no one alive. If any of them report back, Elena will continue to be in danger. If you have a problem with that, speak up now.”
No one said a word.
This last image of the small army defending her was burned into her brain. If she lost even one of them, she would never be able to live with herself.
Dimitri pulled her through the garage door. The cold wind from the winter snow made her nose tingle. It was dark and quiet in the garage, but she saw distant moonlight ahead. The large garage door was open. She knew the plan. They would leave on foot to reach a car they had hidden farther away. The others were to stay behind. This was the only way, get her out before the house was surrounded so their plan to draw in Vladimir and his men could work. Then they had to wait . . . wait to see who survived. It was a plan she hated because if felt like she was just running away, but she knew that if she stayed behind she would be a liability. She had to be at a safe distance so they could focus on removing the threat.
Elena held Dimitri’s hand as they hurried through the snowy woods. She turned back at one point, saw the stoic Emery Lockwood standing at the edge of the driveway still watching them. He held up a solemn hand in farewell. A chill of dread raked its way along her skin.
Be safe . . . She sent the silent prayer as she turned to face the woods again. She and Dimitri ran in silence. The only sounds were of their breathing and the crunch of powdery snow beneath their boots. The backpack slung over her shoulders was thankfully lightweight, but she knew if she had to keep going for hours it would begin to feel heavy.
“How far are we going?” she whispered.
“Another half mile,” Dimitri murmured back.
The white birch trees that filled the woods seemed to watch them with a thousand dark eyes. She tried not to picture Russian agents crawling through the woods toward her friends. She didn’t want anyone dying for her, but there was no real choice. They’d started this fight, and she and her friends had to finish it.
Cody stared at the figures on his monitor as they advanced toward the cabin. The trip wires they’d set sent flares into the sky as they were triggered by the enemy. Every major entry point was covered by someone inside the house. The fingers of his scarred hand twitched as memories of old pain came back. He closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and pictured himself deep beneath the ocean, the water above him rippling with sunlight.
Hans put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay, kid?”
Cody opened his eyes. “Yeah.” He reached for the handgun next to his laptop. “Give everyone the signal.”
Hans tapped on the small communication device nestled in his ear. The tap reverberated in Cody’s ears as it came through the comm. They weren’t to speak using the comms unless necessary since it would be easy for the Russians to pick up any chatter as they got closer.
Cody closed his laptop, slipped it under the table, and put on his thermal goggles, raised up until needed. Then he and Hans took up their positions by a window near the kitchen. A moment later, the window exploded. Cody and Hans dove to the floor as glass rained down around them. Hans shielded Cody’s head before he scrambled up and opened fire through the gaping hole where the window had been. Cody crawled across the floor to the other side of the window and peeked up over the sill, sweeping the woods for heat signatures. Two figures were partially visible behind trees. He remembered what Hans had told him.
“If you are to my right, shoot the targets on your right.” Cody unloaded several rounds at the figure on his right before he had to duck back down. The explosion of return gunfire was deafening. Someone in the woods shot a flare gun straight at them, blinding him through the thermal goggles.
“Fuck!” He ducked down again as his eyes burned in his skull from the bright flare, and h
e flipped them up. In a vengeful haze, he reached for a flash-bang strapped to his Kevlar vest and hurled it into the woods.
“Going bright!” he called through the comms a second before the flash-bang went off. More shots came through the windows, shattering wood cabinets and dishware.
Pain tore through Cody’s shoulder, and he fell back below the sill, clutching his shoulder and cursing a blue streak. Hans was there, holding a hand to the wound as he tried to see it in the dark.
“You hit?”
“Just a graze,” Cody panted through the pain. “I think.”
Hans pulled him up to a sitting position and dragged him away from the windows.
The gunfire continued. It sounded like the shots from the woods were getting closer.
“Dammit,” Cody gasped. He couldn’t finish because Hans was binding his wound with a strip of duct tape.
“Duct tape? Are you kidding me?”
“Handyman’s secret weapon,” Hans said.
Cody clutched his gun against his chest as he met his friend’s gaze. “I knew the odds were bad . . . But . . .”
“What is it you always say from that movie, kid? Never tell me the odds?” Then Hans rushed back into the fray just as the Russians breached the cabin.
Elena stumbled the second the flares began arcing in the sky and the shooting echoed in the distance. Dimitri caught her, holding her close. In his other arm, he held a firm grip on a sniper rifle with a flash suppressor. They both stood silent for a moment, listening. Dimitri adjusted his grip on the rifle, his gaze locked on the woods leading back to the cabin. She knew what he was thinking, and she felt it too. Another flare lit the sky as more men set off the snares they’d set up around the cabin.
“Oh God, Dimitri, we have to go back.” She turned toward the sound of danger, needing to be there, to stand alongside the men who were risking their lives for her.
“No, we have to keep moving.”
Dimitri spun her to face away from the cabin. Her eyes blurred with tears as she tried to follow him.
A few moments later, a deafening explosion behind them sent them both tumbling to the ground. Dimitri covered her body with his. When they got their bearings back, she looked over her shoulder. Part of the cabin was on fire. She saw the agony carved into his features. The urge for them both to go back deepened.
He surged to his feet, lifting her up with him. They started to run even faster toward the escape route they’d planned. In the distance, she saw the SUV ahead of them. Dimitri pulled his gun out and froze, halting her beside him, and then he moved them both behind a tree. He lifted his rifle up, sweeping it across the woods, searching. If he fired, the flash suppressor would keep their location concealed more easily, but any shot fired would still give away their general location.
“Dimi—”
“Shh . . .” He continued to scan the woods.
Elena pressed close to him, blood roaring in her ears. Her eyes scanned the darkness. Between shafts of moonlight, she saw several figures sweeping in on them. They were surrounded. He picked off three men with his rifle before they both faced the awful truth—they were heavily outnumbered.
“Dimitri,” she gasped, terror squeezing her chest of all breath.
He held her tight, his lips touching her ear. “Whatever happens, know that I love you, kiska.” Then he shoved her down into the snow and rushed into the open, drawing the fire of the men advancing on them. Time slowed down, like a nightmare where her legs wouldn’t move. Dimitri was hit—once, twice, three times—and fell in a hail of gunfire and lay still twenty yards away.
She was frozen in place, unable to tear her gaze away from Dimitri’s body. No, no, no . . . She took a step, but bullets fired, digging into the trees around her, and that more than anything forced her back into motion. She had to draw the men and their fire away from Dimitri. If she ran, these men would follow . . . and maybe Royce and the others could find Dimitri. It was the only way she had to save him, even if it was but a sliver of fast-fading hope.
Elena had a mere second to react. She sprinted toward the SUV, but something arced in the air over her head, and in the next second, the SUV exploded in a fireball.
Elena was blown back, landing in the snow, ears ringing and vision blurred. As she regained her breath, three men dressed in black advanced, guns pointed at her. The man in front pulled off a black ski mask and goggles and tossed them to the ground. He looked older in person than she had expected, but she recognized him from the surveillance pictures Leo had shown her.
“Vladimir,” she whispered.
“Ms. Allen.” Vladimir nodded at the men on either side of him. They bent and grabbed her arms, hauling her up onto her feet. Somewhere along the way she’d lost her backpack, but that didn’t matter now. Nothing did. She wasn’t getting away from this.
They dragged her deeper into the woods, and with each step Elena’s body grew heavier as the shock of what had just happened wore off. Dimitri was dead. Odds were, most of the other men were too. She didn’t want to go one step farther, not now, not ever. Dimitri had become her world, and now she was alone. She didn’t think that she would ever love anyone but him. It was strange, but she knew it was the truth. Deep in her heart, there was no other but him.
She jerked free of the men who held her. Vladimir held up a hand when one of the men raised his hand, ready to strike her. The man lowered his arm.
Vladimir scrutinized her. “You look so like your mother.”
Her heart began to skitter wildly. “My mother?” She hadn’t expected him to speak. She’d been told they’d just kill her without hesitation.
“Your birth mother, of course. I was sent to kill her twenty years ago. She got away. She was pregnant with you, and I assumed she would die in the snowstorm. I never imagined she would survive long enough to get to a hospital. To find you alive after all these years . . .” He frowned. “And to learn what you really are . . .” Vladimir slowly reached out and gripped her hair in his hand as though fascinated.
“A Romanov. Anastasia’s blood runs through your veins.” He smiled wryly. “So little, too, only twelve point five percent, but it is enough to warrant your death.”
Elena was numb as she stared back at him. “I was no one, just a woman living a quiet life. You could have left me alone to live my life.”
“Perhaps. But so long as you lived, there was always the risk of someone finding you and using you as a symbol. There have been pretenders before, but even if any of them had been heirs, it was impossible to prove. You, however . . . the proof lies within your very blood for all to see. And that proof gives others hope.” He looked at the other two men. “Leave us. I will kill her myself.”
The two men walked away into the now silent woods. The fight—her fight—was over. Vladimir raised his gun, aiming at her chest, then changed his mind and began to raise his gun to her head.
Elena’s life flickered before her eyes, moments of bliss and pain in equal measure, moments that had changed her forever. Her mother holding her when she’d skinned her knee riding her bike. Her father hugging her the day she’d graduated high school and shown him her college acceptance letter. Dimitri holding her in the waves. Maxim, Leo, and Nicholas kneeling before her, tying their fate to hers. The faces of the men in the cabin as she glimpsed them one last time . . .
A million different memories blended and merged into one single final image, an image that changed everything. It wasn’t even her memory, but that of a young woman from more than a century ago. Staring down a firing squad of soldiers in a dark basement, men who believed violence was the only way to change the world.
That girl had survived against all odds, and Elena as her descendant owed it to her to never give up. If Elena died now, everything that girl and all who came after her had gone through would be for nothing.
Elena bowed her head as Vladimir’s gun moved toward her head. Then she struck out, knocking his arm up and away, sending the gun deep into a snowbank.
&nbs
p; Vladimir recovered fast and lunged for her as she turned to run. He gripped her arm from behind, the other arm going around her throat. Adrenaline spiked through her, but instead of struggling, she turned right into him while jabbing her free hand, thumb out, straight at his face.
He hadn’t expected that. With a grunt, he jerked back, and she twisted farther in his direction, giving him a swift knee to the groin. The second her knee connected, he landed a blow to her temple. Elena staggered back, but now that she was free, she bolted.
“Stop her!” Vladimir cried.
Elena heard the other men charge after her. She had abandoned the shelter of the deep woods when the two men circled her from the front, guns raised. She skidded to a stop, hoping to duck behind a tree, but there were none to be found.
Then one of the men who had his gun trained on her turned and shot the man next to him. Elena stared at the fallen man, not quite sure she understood what had happened. The man left standing removed his mask and thermal goggles.
Cody grinned at her. “I always wanted to do that. Pretend to be one of the bad guys, I mean, not shoot some random asshole.”
“Cody?” Elena stared at him.
She had a mere second to process what had happened before Cody yelled and tackled her to the ground. Bullets peppered the snow all around them as Vladimir opened fire. Then everything went deathly still. Elena and Cody cautiously raised their heads to look. Vladimir was lying on his side, blood pooling from a hole between his eyes. A dozen feet behind him, Dimitri stood, one hand gripping his side and his other holding a gun.
Elena blinked, trying to clear her vision.
“I’ve been wondering where the hell you were.” Cody got up and helped Elena stand. Her legs shook as she ran to Dimitri and fell against him.