Gilded Cage: A Russian Mafia Romance (Kovalyov Bratva Book 1) by Nicole Fox (free novel 24 .txt) 📗

Her eyes find mine. I see the shame and guilt written across her tear-stained face.

“Oh, Esme… Esme, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she sobs. “I didn’t want to… but he… He threatened to kill me. He told me that if you ever contacted me, I was to inform him immediately. Esme, I’m so sorry.”

I hold her hands tightly, marring her pale skin with the fresh blood that’s all over me.

Our eyes meet. I wonder if I’ll ever see her again.

“Esme…”

“We have to leave now,” Artem interrupts, grabbing me and pulling me to my feet, breaking my hold on Tamara.

She stares up at us with a shell-shocked expression on her face.

“You’re going…?”

Sirens sound in the distance.

Artem’s right. We have to go, but for some reason, my legs aren’t budging.

“Esme,” Artem growls again.

“I can’t just leave her.” I’m staring down at Tamara and seeing only the bright-eyed little girl I once knew.

“You have no choice,” he snaps, pulling me towards the stairwell next to the elevators.

“The police…?” I whisper.

“The police are the last of our fucking problems,” Artem says. “Another contingent of Budimir’s men will be on their way by now.”

“Esme!” Tamara cries out hysterically.

Even as Artem pulls me along, I crane my neck back to stare at her.

“I’m sorry,” I say, a tear slipping loose from my left eye. “I’m sorry, Tamara. I have to go.”

She says my name one more time. It’s pitiful. Heartbreaking. Her voice teeters on the brink of collapse.

Then the door shuts and she disappears from my line of vision.

I don’t have time to think as Artem pulls me down the staircase, to the ground floor of the building. He stops at the last landing. There are two doors, placed on opposite ends of the landing.

One leads into the building’s lobby. The second leads to the back alley.

He pulls me into the alley. The smell of putrid food and urine fills my nostrils.

I expect him to keep moving, but he pulls me to a stop in front of him and pulls out a handkerchief of all things, from the back pocket of his trousers.

“You own a handkerchief,” I say, before I can stop myself.

“You really wanna talk about that now?” he asks as he rubs down my face first and then his own.

It does little in the way of making us both presentable. We still look like we’ve exited a war zone. But it’s better than nothing.

“That’s the best I can do for now. Keep your head low and keep pace with me,” Artem instructs as we make our way down the alley.

There’s chaos churning all around the building. People are milling about the street and looking up. Some are even taking pictures. I realize that there’s glass on the sidewalk, a result of the broken window in Tamara’s living room.

“Head down,” Artem tells me. We turn the corner of the alley and walk purposefully in the opposite direction from where the crowd is forming.

I keep my head down like he said, but I can still feel eyes on me. Even with Artem’s hand around me, keeping me steady, I still stumble.

Fatigue, fear, and the trauma of the last few hours was making me sluggish. I look ahead and see a corner.

Instinctively, I force myself to move faster. I tell myself that if we can just round that corner, we’ll be okay. We can walk away from here and it’ll be as easy as hailing a cab and getting as far away from this city as possible.

Still just a little girl. A little girl who believes in fairytales.

I make the mistake of looking up. I watch a woman pass by us. She’s curly-haired and spectacled and her eyes go wide as she takes in the blood staining the front of my white blouse.

Of course—it had to be a white blouse.

“Keep walking,” Artem orders. “Don’t look back.” His voice is growing more urgent.

I realize a second too late that his body has gone taut once more.

Someone has eyes on us.

Someone knows who we are.

Danger, my body instincts warn me, at the same exact time that Artem hisses, “Run!”

My heart feels like it’s going to beat right out of my chest as we sprint into a run that has the blood rushing back to my ears.

We whirl around the corner, causing a couple to break apart as we push between them. Someone screams, someone curses, but we don’t stop—we just run.

Behind us is the hard thumping of running feet. Three people, maybe more.

But my only focus is on Artem’s hand in mine.

He doesn’t let go of me and I’m secretly grateful. Without his momentum pulling me forward, I don’t know if I’d be able to move at all. Or if I’d just stand still and turn to embrace the oncoming death machine.

We turn another corner. People see us coming and flee in every direction but closer. That’s when I notice that Artem has pulled out his gun with his free hand.

Even as he runs, he twists around and fires twice at the masked men on our tail. They fire back.

More screams. More glass shattering. More bystanders cowering in fear.

An old woman doubles over to protect her dog.

A young man presses his girlfriend up against a wall to keep her safe from the wild bullets.

So many innocent people brushing up against this sick, twisted world of ours. Getting stained by it. Hurt by it.

None of them will ever be the same.

My mind takes snapshots of the chaos we’re causing as we run, but I can’t process anything more. I have to save the rest of my energy. I need to convince myself that my lungs aren’t going to give out on me a few seconds from now.

Suddenly, a dull blue Toyota careens around the bend, taking a turn so sharp that for a moment, I think it’s going to tip over.

But the car veers back into place with a metallic thump. It screeches to a halt right in front of Artem and me right as