Page 30 of Sexting the Silverfox

Blue and red lights flash brightly behind me, and the sound of sirens fills the air.

The police are finally here.

“Audrey!” I gasp and holster my gun as I rush over to her.

She’s shaking like a leaf, dirty, scratched, and bloody. I pull the bag off her head to find her with puffy, crying eyes and quivering lips, a look of horror having drained the color from her face. “Oh, Jason … Oh, God …” she manages.

“Fucking hell, Audrey, are you all right?” I ask, scanning her from top to bottom.

“Yeah. I think so. How’d you get here so fast?”

“It doesn’t matter. Who were those guys? What happened?”

Boots thud across the pavement. Uniformed police officers swarm the scene, pouring into the alley with their guns out. A flurry of orders and instructions are being shouted, muttered words that make little to no sense to me. The cops have questions, and Audrey immediately shuts down, her gaze lost somewhere in space.

Shock is setting in.

I have questions, too. So many fucking questions, I don’t even know where to start.

But I am also shaken to the core. My fingers are trembling, and my body burns hot from anger and fear; I feel dangerously close to snapping.

I almost lost Audrey tonight.

Who were those people? What did they want? And how the hell is Audrey involved with them?

Chapter 13

Audrey

Ihate lying, although I’ve been doing it a lot lately, like tonight. Tonight, I lied like my life depended on it because, in many ways, it does.

Jason is angry and befuddled, but he is also worried sick about my safety and well-being. If I tell him the truth now, he may never want to speak to me again. Nothing horrifies me more than the idea of losing him, especially now with the pregnancy. I’ve decided he needs to know about that, at the very least.

But tonight is not the time to drop that bombshell on him, which only adds to my guilty conscience about keeping such an important issue from him. What a hot mess this has become, and I couldn’t have predicted any of it.

Wrapped in a thick blanket, I lean against one of the squad cars with its flashing red and blue lights. My teeth chatter as I try to focus on what Officer McKinley is asking.

He’s taking copious notes while his colleagues cordon off both ends of the alleyway with yellow tape and collect bullet casings, prints, and any other evidence they can gather.

“Miss Smith, you’re sure you don’t know those men?” he asks again, eyes narrowed with what I assume is a natural tendency to treat every victim with a smidgen of doubt.

I shake my head vehemently. “I swear, I have no idea who they are.”

“Audrey, they broke into your apartment specifically. Yours isn’t a ground floor or even on a lower floor, which would normally be the target of choice for burglars,” Jason says. A paramedic is treating our scratches and scrapes with gentle dabs of a stinging antiseptic. Jason winces from the discomfort, then gives me a hard look. “This was a targeted attack.”

“I don’t know who they are or what they wanted from me,” I insist. “All I remember is being half asleep when they busted through the door of my apartment.”

“So, you have no Russian-speaking friends or enemies?” Officer McKinley asks.

“No. I’m a kindergarten teacher, for Pete’s sake.”

And the daughter of one of the most powerful Bratva leaders in New York, but that’s for me to know.

I couldn’t bear the shame of Jason learning the truth. They say we don’t get to choose our family, but in most cases, we have the option to walk away. I ran away two years ago, and I’ve been living in a shadow of fear ever since.

What worries me the most is that I truly have no idea who those two brutes were. The one with the scar on his temple seemed familiar because he looked like the literal stock photo of any Bratva family member—a big, burly Russian dude with some form of disfigurement and a dead-eyed glare that made me fear for my life.

I know my family’s people, and they certainly wouldn’t come after me the way those bastards did—with guns and balaclavas, not with using force and threatening me with death.

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