Page 18 of Scorch

She’s mine.

Mine.

“Don’t kill him,” Aleks mutters, his eyes darting from the rearview mirror to mine. “If he didn’t do that, she’d have fought you and probably opened the door or something.”

I growl and look out the window, reluctant to admit he probably did the right thing. I could’ve handled her if she fought me. I might have even liked it.

“I told you I had her. It’s easy enough to restrain her, you fucking asshole.”

She stirs against me, and I lower my voice. “Now how will she trust me knowing we took her and drugged her?”

Lev shakes his head. “Don’t overestimate how important it is to get her safe first, Vik. Look, you’re not thinking straight. Once you?—”

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” I snap. I do. He doesn’t understand how many times I’ve thought about this, about her. How goddamn determined I am to make sure that she’s safe, secured, and well protected. “Let me make this clear. None of you so much as fucking breathes on her again.”

“Jesus, Viktor, don’t take your anger at Yudin out on us,” Aleks says.

Rage claws at my chest when I think of what could’ve happened tonight, but it isn’t misplaced. I breathe in to settle my fraught nerves the way Kolya taught me.

Aleksandr’s phone rings, coming through loudly on the speakers. Lydia stirs against me.

“Shut it off,” I snap. “For fuck’s sake.”

“It’s Mikhail,” Aleks argues. There’s an unspoken rule that we answer Mikhail’s calls immediately, without question, no matter the time of day.

“I don’t care.”

Lev and Aleks share a look before Lev takes the call. “Yeah. We’ve got her.” He shakes his head. “No, he got away, but we had a backup crew below the bridge, and we’re confident they’ll get him.”

They have strict instructions to find him and then deliver him promptly to me. No one gets to touch a hair on his head.

They speak in hushed tones until, finally, he ends the call.

“Mikhail wants an update.”

“Text him.”

“Viktor,” Aleks begins, looking at me in the rearview mirror again. “You have to be reasonable.”

I hold his gaze for a few seconds before he snaps back to looking at the road.

“Let’s pretend for a moment this were Harper,” I say in a low voice. “Let’s pretend you just fucking got her away from someone who not only planned on marrying her but fucking using her and then killing her.”

A muscle tenses in Aleks’s jaw. “I get it,” Aleks finally says. “I just want you to be rational.”

“I’ll be rational when Timur fucking Yudin’s no longer breathing and the Ledyanoye Bratstvo is destroyed. I’ll see reason when I put a ring on her finger and secure her safety to me. Until then, I’ll be the most unreasonable son of a bitch you’ve ever fucking met.”

We lapse into silence, only broken by occasional updates from Lev, texting the rest of our brothers. She stirs against my shoulder as I make my plans. Until I get further updates, I have one goal: keep her safe.

“There’s no word from our men,” Lev says, shaking his head. “Jesus. I expected better.”

It was more important to me to secure her than it was to get our enemy. I had to choose one or the other.

I chose her.

I will always choose her.

Yudin’s a fucking dead man walking. I’ll see to that.

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