Chimera (The Korsak Brothers #1)(48)



I chose to beat him senseless.

Grabbing a handful of his short brown hair, I cracked his skull repeatedly against the tile until he stopped twitching. It was the lesser of the evils. Unconsciousness and a fractured face beat death hands down . . . from the point of view of the spit-bubble-blowing vegetable anyway. From my perspective, leaving any of Jericho’s men alive wasn’t exactly in my best interest, but that was the price you paid to walk the path of the righteous. Yeah, world’s biggest frigging humanitarian, that was me.

“Come on, Michael,” I rapped. “Let’s go.”

Inscrutable gaze on the fallen men, then on me, he flowed past me as insubstantial as a ghost. I followed behind him, my shoes flattening fries into greasy yellow skid marks. The restaurant was empty, but the glass doors were still swinging and people were sprinting through the parking lot. Taking Michael’s arm, I held him back and moved ahead of him as we reached the doors. “Stay behind me.” I scanned the lot with sharp, hard eyes. “And if I go down, run.” I tightened my grip on him. “Okay? Run like hell and find a Saul Skoczinsky in Miami. He’ll help you.”

He pressed his lips together but reluctantly nodded when I gave him a quick prompting shake. “Don’t go down,” was all he said.

I’ll do my best, kiddo, I thought silently. And then I hit the door and the ground running. Michael shadowed my every step. People were all over, running or starting their cars to careen over curbs. It would be nice to think we blended in with them, but the guys inside had spotted us quickly enough despite our cosmetic changes. I didn’t have any reason to believe we’d be any better off exposed in the bright noon sun. We bolted between parked cars, their colors streaking in my peripheral vision like those of a bad abstract painting. Within a few steps I had to shove one hero wannabe with a hunting knife out of my way. He landed on the hood of a shiny Ford T-Bird and slid across the ice-slick wax job to drop out of sight on the other side. I kept going without missing a step. His good luck was our bad luck; we were halfway home when disaster struck. The sound of the gun firing came as I was already falling. A searing pain tracked across my side as the world rolled from beneath my feet. And then, despite my silent promise to Michael . . .

I went down.

Thrown backward, I landed on the asphalt as the back of my head kissed the metal of a car door. Spots blossomed red and black across my field of vision, but I could still see the figure that slithered out from under the car opposite me. Cold black eyes measured me with sterile detachment. Jericho rose to his feet with a fluid grace that belied the brutal car accident of the previous day. There wasn’t a mark on the man, not a goddamn scratch. I’d seen the blood on him; yet now he stood, whole and unwounded. It was disorienting, as if this were allaB movie and we were suffering a serious hitch in the continuity. Keeping a sleek semiautomatic pistol centered on my abdomen, he observed with a dispassionate charm, “Naughty. Naughty. It’s not wise to take what doesn’t belong to you.” His scrutiny didn’t flicker for a second from me as he raised his voice slightly. “Move, Michael, and I give him a scalpel-free lobotomy. That may or may not matter to you, but the two bullets that follow will be yours. One in each knee. You know from class that shattered kneecaps never heal quite the same.”

And why not? Michael didn’t need to walk to be able to kill. A kid in a wheelchair—who would possibly suspect him when the president of Timbuktu dropped dead of a heart attack while shaking his hand?

Head and ears ringing, I slid blurry eyes toward Michael. He’d seemed unafraid when trapped in the restroom, as cool and calm under pressure as any soldier. But that stoicism had fled. I knew he feared Jericho. As far as I could tell, that was the only thing he did fear, but dread of Jericho wasn’t the emotion I was seeing now. “You’re hurt.” His face was as translucent as wax paper. “You’re bleeding.”

“Misha.” The 9mm was still in my hand that rested on abrasive concrete. It would take more than a bullet in the ribs to make me turn loose of that. A cop didn’t give up his gun and neither did I. Often enough it was all that stood between you and a headstone, for both the law-abiding and the somewhat less so. I was still in the game; I still had a chance to save my brother . . . no matter how small an opportunity it might be. “Misha, ubegat. Nemedlenno.” Run. Now.

Michael might have had language classes out his well-educated ass, but I was hoping Jericho was too preoccupied with playing the baneful God of Genetics to pick up your average Slavic dialect. Once again luck deserted me.

“He takes one step, preyatel, and I blow his foot to a thousand splinters of bone.” He held out his free hand to his side, waiting with arrogant assurance for Michael to take it. It was then I noticed it was artificial, an artistic prosthetic detailed down to the fingernails and perfectly matched skin color. It explained how he was willing to let Michael clasp it; it wasn’t flesh. It wasn’t vulnerable. “I don’t believe you want that,” he continued deliberately. “I can use a temporarily damaged piece of goods, but I’m not at all sure you can.”

He didn’t know. He had no idea that Michael was my brother. How could that be? Years had passed, but the man had to guess that the family of even a much altered, long-renamed Lukas would still be looking for him. He couldn’t think that we’d just give up—even if one of us had.

Anatoly might have moved on, but I never had. In all the time that had passed, I hadn’t stopped trying to take care of my brother. That hadn’t changed. From then until this very moment, it hadn’t changed. “Misha, it’s okay.” My lips curled in encouragement as the blood spread on my shirt. “Now keep your promise.”

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