Page 44 of Crowned

I don’t like the way she’s turned pale so fast when her cheeks were flushed not long ago. “You need to sit down. You’re going to make yourself sick.”

“You’re the one who is sick,” she seethes. She whimpers again, shock flickering over her face. Then she staggers.

“Lilia?” Panic slices through me, and I cross the room and grab her arms. Her skin feels cold and clammy and there’s sweat on her brow.

“I feel… I feel…”

Alarm blares in my skull. Elyah described to us how she collapsed when she had her miscarriage. The police invaded her home. Lilia’s safe little world that she’d built for her baby was encroached upon and she couldn’t bear it.

The three of us have done the same thing by coming here tonight.

Lilia collapses in my arms, her face chalk white and slack, and her eyes closed.

“Lilia!”

8

Elyah

The car is exactly where Lilia said it would be, abandoned in an alleyway behind the restaurant. It’s so dark that we have to cup our fingers around our eyes and peer through the windows to see if it’s the right one. When I open the passenger door, the top half of Maxim’s dead body flops out of the vehicle. He’s wearing a dark suit and tie and his white shirt is soaked in blood that’s poured from a wound in the side of his neck.

Kirill sticks his finger in the bloody hole and wiggles it. “Damn. Lilia got him good.”

I grin at the grisly sight. She sure did. One clean stab of the slender blade and this piece of shit was done for. “Where are his keys?”

Now that we have Lilia back, I don’t think I’ll ever stop smiling.

Once they’re fished out of his pocket and we’ve stashed his body in the trunk, we head north out of the city, me driving Maxim’s car and Kirill following in our rental.

We don’t have to travel far from Prague before we’re in the dark, deserted countryside, downriver from the city. Kirill gets to work mangling the man’s fingertips and knocking out his teeth with a rock. While undressing the body, I gather his ID and credit cards, then point out tattoos to flay from his flesh. Using the man’s shirt, tie, and pants, we lash heavy stones to the body and hurl him into the river.

Another mile downstream, I spot a hill above the river where we can roll the car into the water. With the handbrake off, Kirill and I push it over the precipice and watch it race down the slope and sink beneath the surface.

Kirill brushes his hands together. “Nice work. Hungry? I wonder if Lilia has any food.”

Food is the last thing on my mind as we head back into the city. We stink of blood, but I barely notice that when all my thoughts are of Lilia.

She’s having my baby.

My baby, as it should have been from the beginning. I’m being given a chance to put things right for her. There’s a warm weight in my chest and a smile touches my lips again.

Beside me, Kirill is running his fingers through his hair, his knees spread wide as he lounges in the bloodied passenger seat. “I don’t know what you’re smiling about. It’s my baby.”

I roll my eyes and ignore his nonsense. “Your timing is all off, my friend. Be careful she does not stab you in the throat for sticking a gun in her pussy. That is what should be on your mind right now.”

“Will that be before or after she slits your throat for threatening to break her arms, or promising to kill her, or nearly killing her by putting a noose around her neck?”

I grind my teeth together and glare at the road ahead. “We are lovers. We have been lovers for more than two years and the world has been against us. Of course, there have been misunderstandings. I will make everything up to the woman I love now that I know the truth and we are going to be a family.”

“Fuck your family. I want that baby.”

An ominous feeling rolls down my spine. I know everything about what landed Kirill in prison all those years ago. He told me the whole story between us beating our enemies to death and adding new ink to our bodies. We’ve been closer than brothers ever since, but if he’s set his twisted heart on making Lilia and that baby his, then he and I are going to have a big fucking problem.

Both of our phones chime at the same time. Kirill reaches for his and reads the screen.

“It’s from Konstantin. He says get back there now.”

I grip the steering wheel. “What? Call him. Find out what is wrong.”

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