Chimera (The Korsak Brothers #1)(84)

I took the chest shot. It was the easiest. With broad bands of muscle that rippled even through the covering of a thick black sweater, he was built like a bull, and when he fell, he shook the floor as heavily as one. Swiveling, I jammed my shoulder against the door to slam it shut. There was a resounding crash as someone hit the other side face-first. Yanking it back open, I straddled the fallen body and swung my foot into the shaking chin in a hard kick. And that was it for number two. Pavel had always been Sevastian’s shadow. Sevastian went first and Pavel mopped up what was left, which usually wasn’t a whole hell of a lot.

An arm came across my throat like an iron bar and my thoughts of Pavel vanished instantly. The crushing pain managed to cut through the layer of numbness that sheathed me. “I knew you’d f*ck up one day, Korsak,” came the gravelly voice in my ear. The accent was still thick after fifteen years out of Moscow and he slipped into the Russian that came more easily to him. “Segodnya etot den.” Today’s that day.

I could feel his blood, hot and plentiful, soaking the back of my shirt. I should’ve known one bullet wouldn’t take the son of a bitch down. I started to bring my gun up to try for an awkward shot, but his other massive hand fastened around mine. The bones in my wrist creaked to the point of breaking as it was bent backward in an unforgiving grip. Before I could shift weight to try and throw him off, a knee hit the back of my thighbone and buckled my leg instantly. Sevastian had once been in the Russian army, and what he’d learned there trumped anything I’d picked up in my few working years. The fall was over before I knew I was going down. Sandwiched between the floor and a hulking mountain of flesh, my lungs expelled every molecule of air, leaving me wheezing desperately.

Ripping the gun from my hand, he flung it across the room. With his arm still around my neck he tightened the pressure until yellow and black spots washed across my vision. With all that air forced out and now with no way in, if I didn’t do something within the next few seconds, Michael would be on his own. He might be the fastest healer around, but I didn’t think that would save him from a bullet in the heart or brain. He was a boy, not a vampire. He wasn’t going to rise from the dead, and Sevastian wasn’t one to leave witnesses any other way.

Feebly I raised my hand up and behind me to scrape uselessly against his face. He chuffed a laugh stinking with the copper of blood against the back of my neck. The bastard’s lungs were filling up. Without medical help he’d be dead in fifteen minutes. It didn’t matter; I’d be dead in five . . . and that was a blue-sky estimate, a best-case scenario. If he let me asphyxiate, it would be minutes. If he snapped my neck, it would be seconds.

My hand continued its path up his jawline, the motions as fragile as those of a newborn child. “You’re barely struggling,” he said in a clotted whisper, switching back to English for my benefit. He knew my Russian wasn’t as fluent as his, and he wanted me to understand every word. “It’s so much more satisfying when you struggle. I want to feel you flop under me like a fish out of water. I want to feel every twitch as brain cell by brain cell you die, traitor.” A hard prodding at my hip told me what I’d always suspected. Death was the ultimate hard-on for Sevastian. Twisted and sickly perverse as he was, neither women nor men held much attraction for him. Killing was all. He lived it, breathed it, and if he could somehow make death itself tangible, he would probably f*ck it.

The choking hold on my neck eased slightly as he cajoled, “Stay awake, Stefan. Stay and try just a little harder. Perhaps then I won’t rip that boy limb from limb when I find him.”

I barely heard the words. The roaring in my head had followed the curtain of spreading black before my eyes. My only concern was my traveling hand. Sevastian ignored its progress even as it touched his ear. He’d always had well-shaped ears, I thought dimly as my capacity for coherence began to unravel. It was peculiar to see: his bullet-shaped head, Neanderthal brows, soulless and cloudy eyes combined with a delicate seashell curve of ear that any woman would’ve been proud of. Whether Sevastian was proud of them, I didn’t know. It was, as they say, moot.

I ripped the left one from his head.

There was a scream that managed to rip through the haze surrounding me and the weight rolled off my back. Weakly pushing up to my knees, I sucked in air that seemed as thick as syrup. It rebelled in my throat, refusing to push past and inflate my lungs. I could feel the sensation of woven wool under my hands, but I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything. With a last-ditch monumental effort I struggled to expand my chest and pull in air. It worked; a teaspoon of oxygen managed to trickle down into my lungs. That short, choppy breath was followed by two more and then by a brutal kick in my ribs. I was thrown what felt like several feet and landed hard on my hip and shoulder. Fragments of light and color were returning to my sight and I spotted the glittering chrome of my gun barely out of reach. Lunging, I snatched it from the floor, rolled to my side, and fired.

And missed.

If this had been the movies, I would’ve hit him right between the eyes, and that would’ve been that. Conquering hero prevails. Popcorn and a cold one for everybody. But this wasn’t a movie. This was crappy real life, and I missed the son of a bitch. He was moving faster than any lung-shot man had a right to move, and I still had the vision of a ninety-year-old glaucoma victim. Ideal circumstances it did not make.

Sevastian had lost his gun as well when I’d shot him in the chest. With one blood-covered hand clamped to the side of his head, he was using the other to reach for his own weapon on the floor when my bullet passed him by a good six inches. I fired again. This time I did hit him . . . in the shoulder, but the wrong shoulder. The blow knocked him nearly sideways, but that only lined his gun up on me all the faster and he was already firing. Right up until the moment he dropped, boneless as a jellyfish, I thought I was dead. I knew I was; I knew it for an irrefutable fact. I could all but feel the bullet in my throat instead of in the floor that had claimed it; yet here I was alive, whole. And I owed none of that to myself.