Page 36 of Emerald Malice

Nikolai Rostov.

He’s lost a tooth since I last saw him. Lost some weight, too. His cheeks are hollow and gaunt. He looks exactly like what he is: a shadow dweller, a fucking ghoul of the underworld.

He sees me.

I see him.

I wonder if he knows just how much the stakes have changed—what I’m now willing to do for the woman waiting beneath me.

Then I catch a blur of motion off to the side.

One of the men I thought I killed raises his gun. Fires. I flinch away, but the bullet burrows itself into my shoulder.

Pain explodes instantly, hot and savage. A firebrand digging into my muscle. The power of the blast sends me stumbling backward, backward, backward…

I hit the railing of the fire escape with the backs of my knees…

And tumble over the side.

The last thing I hear is Natalia’s scream.

13

ANDREY

I wake up with one hell of a headache.

An arm-, leg-, and torso-ache, too, actually.

Hell, even my hair hurts.

But I start to sit up, because pain has never stopped me before and it sure as fuck won't stop me now. Nothing in my world is different except?—

I’m a father now.

That's different.

The realization of everything I found in that shithole of a doctor’s clinic sits me right back down in my bed.

“Fuck,” I mutter, just as the door opens.

“Oh, stop your whining. It’s not so bad.”

The whip-sharp words are followed by the sweet old lady who voiced them. Short, grizzled, and hunched, Yelena walks over with a basin full of water.

“I could always push you out of a third-story building and see if you still feel the same way,” I grumble.

She sits down on the edge of my bed. “Don’t let my appearance fool you. I’m nimble as a cat. I always land on my feet.”

“Shut up and pass me the water, will you?”

Chuckling, she hands me the tall glass by my bedside, her brown eyes bright and perceptive behind her horn-rimmed glasses.

“What?” I snap when she doesn’t look away.

“Care to tell me about the pretty little guest in the room downstairs?”

At least that saves me the trouble of having to ask. “Just a stray I decided to bring home. Don’t get attached.”

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