Page 177 of Kingmakers, Graduation

We wait in silence until the engine growls to life and their car pulls away again.

Before anyone can act, I bellow, “Nobody fucking move!”

I step between Sabrina and all the men behind me, arms spread, trying to cover as much of her as I can.

Yuri’s men are on my left, the Wolfpack on my right. I can feel them shifting and creeping around on both sides, Yuri’s men so they can get behind Sabrina and trap her in the warehouse, mine so they can triangulate and cover me from as many angles as possible.

The tension is so high I’m afraid a single bolt of lightning will startle us all into firing. The rain pounds against the roof, leaking down in a dozen places. My fingers freeze around the handle of my gun.

“What are you doing?” Yuri hisses at me. “Shoot her.”

Sabrina’s eyes widen, even the one horribly swollen and bruised. Her lips part, but no sound comes out.

“NOBODY MOVE!” I repeat, throwing a swift and furious glance at Rafail, who’s trying to creep up on my left side.

Vlad has his rifle pointed at Rafail’s chest.

Still, Rafail smirks at me.

“You can’t be serious …”

I take another step forward, until Sabrina and I are barely an arms-length apart. She looks up into my face, terrified and shaking.

“What are you doing here?” I whisper.

Her eyes dart around the room, to all the guns pointed directly at her.

So soft I can barely hear her, she says, “I just wanted to tell you … that I’m sorry.”

Her eyes are huge and wet in her battered face. She blinks. Tears run down both cheeks, cold and silvery like the rain. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her cry.

I stare at her, mouth open, unable to believe what I’m seeing, what I’m hearing. Every sense is keyed to the highest pitch, my nerves so tight they feel like they’ll snap. Any moment I expect to catch a storm of bullets from both sides.

“I fucked up,” she sobs. “And you don’t love me anymore.”

I’ve lied to Sabrina, mislead her. But this is the one point on which I could never deceive her: “There is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you.”

She closes her eyes, tears running down her face in a steady flow.

I’d give anything to pull her into my arms, but I can’t move. If I even blink, someone couldfire.

She looks up at me again, lips pressed together so tight that the split opens, red and raw. It doesn’t matter how fucked up her face is—nothing in this world can take away her beauty. It shines out from within, a fire that can’t be extinguished. Not even now.

“It’s not enough, though,” Sabrina says, her voice cracking. “If love was enough then we would have made it.”

Rafail stands directly to my left, halted by Vlad’s rifle. Spider-like in his dark suit, Yuri creeps around behind Sabrina instead. All of Yuri’s men have their guns trained on my closest friends.

I point my Beretta at Sabrina’s forehead, the barrel an inch from her skin. Her lips tremble, but she doesn’t beg, she doesn’t even flinch.

“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” I say.

“I’m sorry, too,” she says. “For everything.”

Yuri is behind her now, raising his gun.

I glance at Jasper on my right.

Jaw tight, he gives me the smallest of nods.

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