Petyr hides behind his car as we make for the shed, there are some close calls, and I feel a pinch in my calf as a bullet grazes me. But there’s no time to see the damage. I rise up as we get behind the shed and my leg holds, so it’s good enough. I pull the switch, shutting off the lights so that we’re all at an equal sight advantage.
“Keep a low profile, harder to hit you that way,” I mutter to Alicia as the gunfire becomes more sporadic now that the men after us have been deprived of the light advantage. “Stay here and pop off a few shots to give me cover. But never fire from the same exact spot twice,” I caution her before slipping around the corner behind us to come out the other side of the shed.
“Wait, Mik-” Alicia starts, but cuts off, doing her duty like a real soldier, after only just one training session.
She fires that first shot, and it does the trick—the gunmen shoot in her direction but she’s a clever girl who waits behind cover. And I’ve never been so damn proud in all my life. Not of any medal or accomplishment I ever earned, that’s for certain.
With the shots focused on her and Petyr, I slip under cover of darkness into the tree line. There I’m at my best. Under cover of night, brush and tree, I’m a wraith. I know how to move through such terrain without making a sound, and I creep up on our attackers, their muzzle flashes a dead giveaway as I get nearer.
I reach down, taking my hunting knife out of its sheath, because tonight, I’m going to hunt the deadliest of prey.
Ducking low, knife in one hand, gun in the other, I come up on the first man. It won’t be as smooth and calculated as my hit on the hotel that night I met Alicia; things are moving too fast for that, her life on the line with every moment more we spend here. But I spring forward, knife lancing into the back of one gunman, driving right between his ribs and into his heart as I lift my gun over his shoulder and blow the head off another thug.
There’s a third man here, and he turns towards me, firing a shot. But the man dying in my arms serves as a shield of sorts and buys me time to kill him too. That’s three down, but I know there’s at least one more.
I hear the sound of Petyr crying out in pain as he’s hit, and I dash for his car in the dark. Bullets whizz by me but miss.
“You okay?” I ask Petyr, but before he can answer, a man with a submachine gun comes out of the bushes, blazing away at us. I crouch behind the car as the bullets shred its metal doors. I roll along the ground and pop up over the trunk of the car, blowing the man’s head off before he can turn his gun towards me.
Everything goes silent as I duck back down and take a breath.
“You alive, comrade?” I ask my old friend, and there’s only silence. I move back beside him and I find out why. He’s busy tying some torn piece of his expensive suit around his arm with his mouth, to prevent the blood from draining out of his wounded limb. I’m relieved, I’ll admit. Few buddies of mine have survived this long.
“Good work,” I tell him, but all relief drains away as the most distressing sound ever rises up behind us.
“Mikhail!” Alicia’s voice rises in panic.
22
Alicia
What am I doing?
I’m in a gunfight at an old baseball field in the middle of nowhere. Just months ago, I was a college student, wanting to earn enough to look out for my mom’s care.
What scares me most is how I’m keeping it together. For so long, I watched Mikhail and wondered how he could do it. How he could shoot and kill others. And here I am, doing just that without hesitation. When it came down to it—them or me—I chose me without blinking.
I can’t see things clearly, but the cries of pain and then the two distinctive sounds of Mikhail’s gun firing let me know he’s claimed some lives in our defense. And then I see him dart from the edge of the forest to his friend’s car like a ghost in the night.
I might be able to keep my cool surprisingly well in a fight, but I can’t move like he does or do the things he does with such precision and expertise.
Not yet, a voice in my head says, and that puts a chill down my spine.
Is that where my life is going? Training to become a killer with Mikhail?
I push aside those thoughts. They’re trivial. It’s too soon to relax. That much is abundantly clear as I watch a man walk out of the bushes, gun blazing. I line up a shot, but Mikhail takes him down first. He’s so damn good.
But as he and his friend Petyr settle down again, I keep an eye out. And then I see it.
We’re not done.
“Mikhail!” I cry out, but even he can’t be quick enough to save his own ass this time. The angle is all wrong, the gunman is too close.