Page 10 of Tarnished Queen

“How thoughtful,” he mutters. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

We climb out and move down the street towards the abandoned warehouse, Christo a few paces ahead of me. The afternoon is wearing thin, the sky darkening into early evening, and the sidewalks are empty.

“Do you have a plan?” I ask.

“As long as you have a gun on my back, my plan is to do whatever you tell me to do.”

I almost smile. It sounds like something Arslan might say. “Find Belle. Help me get her away from Xena.”

He ducks beneath a grimy window, and I follow suit. Bending over sends a hot flash of anguish up my side and across my ribs, but I grit my teeth through it. Once I have Belle back, I’ll worry about myself. Until then, pain is merely another sensation.

“I don’t know what’s waiting for us in there,” Christo says as he pauses outside of a metal front door. Rust is peppered across the surface, chewing away at the corners. “But last I knew, this is where Xena was going to bring her.”

“Do you know the layout?”

He shrugs. “Not as well as I’d like. I haven’t been here in years. But it should be a shallow entrance area that runs the length of this wall and then a second door that leads into the warehouse floor. My dad had the equipment cleared out years ago. There are some hanging walkways along the ceiling that are used for lookout positions, but otherwise, the room is empty.”

“Then you focus on taking out any snipers above, and I’ll focus on Xena and Belle.”

With a plan, the knot of unease that’s been growing inside of me releases slightly. I know how to do this: formulate a plan and execute it. Executeher.

But standing back and worrying? That is not in my skill set.

Christo nods. “Good. Then let’s go.”

He pushes open the door slowly and carefully, but the hinges still squeal with disuse. The first room is dark and empty. It smells musty, and I can’t imagine Xena Simatou choosing to be anywhere near this place. She may be a cold-blooded murderer, but she also refuses to drink water unless it is handed to her in a glass bottle.

I bite back another smile, thinking about Arslan filling a glass bottle with hose water before one of our meetings with the Simatou delegation.

Then I think of him slumped against the hubcap of a car as the lights left his eyes.

That hurts worse than the bullet wound.

“Clear,” Christo whispers over his shoulder.

“Yeah, I have fucking eyes,” I fire back.

He ignores me and moves forward. The second door opens much more quietly, like someone sprayed the hinges recently. Christo slips through it. I follow him a second later.

He peels off to the right, gun trained upwards, as I move into the middle of the room. But there’s no need for the formation. The place is empty.

I cross the distance between us in two strides and press the gun to his spine. “Where the fuck are they, Christo?” I snarl.

“Shit,” he mumbles under his breath. “Nikolai, I don’t know. I swear. This was my best guess.”

“Your promises don’t mean a damn thing to me.”

“Something must have gone wrong,” he protests. I snatch the gun out of his right hand, and he doesn’t fight me on it. “Maybe Xena knew I would cross her. Maybe she changed the plan. Or maybe something went wrong on their way here.”

“No wonder Xena is in charge instead of you,” I growl. “You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re doing. You were in her ranks until two days ago and you don’t know where they are? You don’t have any way to figure out what is going on? You should have maintained a mole on the inside.”

His head sags between his shoulders. “I didn’t want to risk it. You’ve worked with her and my dad for a long time, but… but you don’t know what she’s really like. If anyone knew what I was planning to do, they would have told her. I’d be dead right now.”

“She’s a crazy bitch, not a god.”

“Maybe not to you. But to them,” he insists, “she’s as good as such. Those men are scared shitless of her. They’ll kill for her. They’d kill me. Which is why I’m not going to be safe until Xena is dead. I’m on your team, Nikolai, I swear it.”

I jam the gun against one of his vertebrae. He groans, but does his best to stay standing tall. “I don’t give a single fuck about your safety. I want Belle. That’s all.”

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