Page 52 of Lethal Queen

“Finch,” he greeted, his raspy voice glacial. “Was Monaco not to your taste?”

The sleek, arrogant voice that replied made me flinch. “I’m surprised you fell for that, Saint. I thought you were a smarter man than you’ve proven to be.”

“It was a ruse,” I realised, anger swelling in me, filling every pore, every beat of my heart.

Finch jammed the gun harder against my head, but my smile widened. He couldn’t scare me into behaving. I’d outgrown that particular fear.

“You needed Jonathan and Eli gone,” Damien said, not taking his eyes off Finch behind me.

“I needed the Lynchpin’s attention elsewhere,” Finch corrected.

Lynchpin? Damien’s psycho uncle was the only reason Finch had stayed away all this time? We needed to get his attention back on us right now, but I didn’t know how to do that.

I licked my dry bottom lip, scrambling for a way to call for help, to escape Finch’s gun. I didn’t trust him not to fire it if I moved too much; he didn’t care whether I lived or died. He used and discarded people like me every week. Maybe every day.

“You’re right to fear him,” Damien said coldly, tension holding him in place. “He doesn’t take kindly to people fucking with our family. And with a gun to my wife’s head, you’ve almost certainly caught his attention.”

Finch laughed, smooth and smug like everything else he did. “He’s not watching us now.”

“You don’t know for certain though, do you?” Damien asked with a smile that matched mine.

My heart sped; I felt it’s hard fluttering in my neck. It pulsed in my fingertips where they pressed to the warm steel of my gun. I took a slow breath. If Damien could be calm when he was petrified to lose me, I could be calm too. I didn’t know how to get the Lynchpin’s attention back on us, but I did have an idea. Reckless, dangerous—but I had to do something.

I caught Damien’s gaze and flicked my stare down to my gun, flexing my fingers to test my mobility.

“You can’t think you’re getting out of this alive after stealingmybride,” Finch replied, burying any unease he might have about the Lynchpin.

When Damien nodded, I knew the gesture was for me. I took another measuring breath, my skull burning with cold where the gun pressed to me.

One,I mouthed.Two.

On three, I fired my gun, the bullet—round—blasting through Finch’s expensive leather shoes into his foot. I dropped in the same moment so his gun pointed over my head, a ripple of near-death awareness chilling my skin when a gunshot charged past me, close enough it ruffled my hair.

But I was alive. Pain bit into my arm where Finch dug his fingernails into my skin, but I was alive. He’d missed me.

I tore at his cruel grip at the same time Damien charged for us, slamming a fist into Finch’s wrist. The second I was free, sucking down gasping breaths, I threw my gun up and pointed it at Finch’s chest, not hesitating to fire again.

Instead of power throwing me back with the recoil, instead of an explosion of sound and lethal force making my ears ring, aclicksounded. My stomach cramped with sudden sickness, a plea escaping me in a whisper. I was out of bullets.

Finch’s slow smile made my heart skip. He looked exactly like the last time I saw him, dressed in a fine grey suit and ascot, his dark hair threaded with silver and slicked back from his narrow face, his blue eyes like glaciers, cold enough to kill.

“That’s the tragic thing about guns, Vasilisa,” he said, watching me in a way that made my hands shake. “They need ammunition to kill. A knife doesn’t have that problem.”

He lifted a small, razor-sharp blade, letting me see the blood drip from the tip. Blood—my blood?

I threw my gun aside and struggled for air, waiting for pain to rampage across my senses, burning away any strength I had. The truth hit me when Damien bared his teeth on a husky groan.

Everything went still inside my head. Without looking, I reached for the table just inside the doorway. I crept backwards, my heartbeat deafening, and palmed one of the handguns there, flicking off the safety. Praying it was loaded.

“Fuck you,” I whispered, fury and fear clashing inside me, the latter making my voice weaker than I liked. “Damien?”

“Fine,” he grunted.

“That can be rectified,” Finch mused, glancing between us. “You belong tome,Vasilisa. I have it in writing.”

I pointed my gun at his chest and fired at the same time light blasted from the end of his. Oh god, oh god. A bullet ripped through the air so fast I couldn’t track it. I twisted, desperate to reach Damien, to push him aside. I wasn’t sure what reached him first—my hand or the bullet.

Damien grunted when his back met the doorjamb, and a desperate cry bubbled up my throat when blood spread through his white vest, spilling so fast that my ears filled with noise. Static roared, drowning out everything else. I didn’t hear the impact of Damien hitting the floor when he slid down the wall, didn’t hear Finch move, didn’t even hear my own cry when the bastard grabbed my arm in a bruising grip.

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