Page 53 of Endless Love

I try to tell him that yes, I’m okay—or at least that I’m alive,okayis still undetermined—but all that comes out is a weak groan. I can’t take a full breath, and I can feel something warm trickling down my face.

Probably my own blood.

Ivan curses in Russian, fumbling with the catch of his own seatbelt. My vision clears enough for me to realize that he’s next to me, scrambling out of his own seat. “I’m going to get you out of here, Charlotte,” he promises. “I’m?—”

“Ivan!”

A loud, Russian-accented voice fills the air from Ivan’s side of the car, and a new fear fills the hollow space in my chest. I’d wondered, for one insane second, if it had been Bradley who had run us off the road. If he’d really been crazy enough to do that.

But now I know it’s not. It was Ivan’s brothers. One or more of them.Lev? My chest squeezes tightly at the possibility that it might be. Out of the three of them, I’m most terrified of him.

Ivan twists next to me, abandoning his efforts to get me out as he starts to crawl out of the shattered window on his side. I don’t even realize that he’s pulled his gun until I hear the shot,close enough that I know it’s him, the sound only adding to the ringing in my ears as I scream helplessly.

It makes me feel weak, but I can’t hold it back. This is too much. It’s all been too much for too long, and this feels like a tipping point, a moment past which I can’t pretend that I’m okay any longer.

None of this is okay, just like I’ve told Ivan from the very beginning.

The gunshot echoes outside the car as Ivan wrenches himself free, my ears hurting with the noise, and I vaguely hear a muffled cry of pain. My heart is pounding wildly, my chest hurting with a stabbing sensation that’s frightening, and I don’t know if it’s the adrenaline or an actual injury. I struggle against the seatbelt, desperate to see what's happening, but I'm trapped upside down, helpless.

"Ivan!" I manage to croak out his name, my voice, hoarse and barely audible. "Ivan!”

There's no response, just the sound of scuffling and grunts outside the car. I strain my ears, trying to make sense of the chaos. Another shot rings out, then another. My ears are ringing, and I can't tell who's firing or if anyone's been hit.

Suddenly, a face appears at the cracked window on the other side of me, in my periphery. A broad hand reaches in to grab me, and I wrench away, screaming again. I hadn’t thought I could be any more afraid than I already was, but now I know I was wrong. This fear, the fear of whichever brother is trying to drag me free of the wreckage, is new and sharp and compounds all the rest of it a hundredfold.

"No!" I scream, thrashing wildly against my seatbelt, trying to wrench further away from him. The movement sends jolts of bright, white-hot pain through my body, but I can’t stop fighting. I’m more afraid of being taken by them than anything else. There’s no coming back from that.

The hand withdraws for a moment, then returns with something glinting in the dim light. A knife. My heart leaps into my throat, fear of the knife jolting through me, but I quickly realize that he doesn’t plan to hurtmewith it. He’s going to cut me loose.

I renew my struggles, ignoring the agony it causes, desperate to stay where I am. At least in here, Ivan can still come for me. I’m still free ofthem. His family. The future awaiting us in Vegas isn’t the one I wanted, but it’s a better future than I’d find in the hands of Ivan’s family.

"Stop moving," a gruff voice orders in heavily accented English. “It will hurt more if I nick you with this. Andotetswill be displeased if you’re damaged.”

“I don’t know who that is,” I snap, still wriggling like a fish on a hook. “But I don’t fucking care.”

The man chuckles, reaching in anyway and starting to saw at my seatbelt, the other hand grasping the back of my neck with an intimacy that makes me shudder.

“Stop touching me!”

“Stop squirming,” he retorts, still sawing away. “Better if you?—”

He never finishes his sentence. The knife jerks backward, narrowly missing my stomach as the man is hauled back, away from the car, and I catch a glimpse of Ivan, bloodied and holding a gun in his other hand—a gun now pressed to his brother’s temple. The same brother that he had pinned to the car outside of our motel with that same gun.

I gasp, my heart pounding as hard as my head is as I watch Ivan drag his brother further back in the grass, blood smearing it as he does. There’s no sign of the other one, and I realize with a sinking feeling that means that Ivan’s either knocked him unconscious, or killed him.

I don’t know what it says about my own naïveté that I hope it’s the former. I should know by now, from everything Ivan’s told me, that their deaths were coming when they wouldn’t give up on chasing us. That Ivan gave them both their one chance, when he didn’t kill them last time.

Ivan’s face now is that same mask of cold fury that I saw with Bradley. There’s no mercy, no quarter that he’s going to grant. Cold wracks my body, and I wonder if I’m going into shock, or if this is just the natural response to watching a man who I’ve slept with, who I’ve spent days upon days with, who I could have fallen for, holding a gun to his own brother’s head.

Blood trickles down the side of Ivan’s face, staining his shirt collar, only adding to the savagery of the scene in front of me. But he seems oblivious to it, all of his focus on the man he has grappled in front of him.

“I told you the price you would pay if you came after us again,” Ivan growls, his voice low and dangerous. He’s never been more a predator than he is in this moment, violent and savage, a brutal creature on the verge of killing. “I won’t enjoy killing my own family. But it ends here. I won’t take this chance again.”

Niki, I think I remember. The bigger of the two. I think I remember Ivan saying his name. Niki laughs, as if there wasn’t a gun pressed to his head, the sound cold and hollow. “Or what, little brother? You’ll shoot me? You don’t have the fucking balls. You would have done it by now, if you did. Andotetswill never forgive you, if you kill me.”

“As if I give a fuck,” Ivan spits. “My forgiveness was gone the moment I ran with her, and you know it. And I don’t want to go back. I don’t want any part of this, not any longer. Besides,” he adds, his voice cracking with a bitter laugh. “Otetswon’t actually give a shit if you’re dead. He never would have, and he still won’t.”

I think, through my bleary vision, I see Niki blanch at that cruelty. And itiscruel, enough that I feel almost momentarily sorry for him—before I remember that he and his other brother ran us off the fucking road.

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