Anything He Wants: The Betrayal(11)
He waved a hand through the air, rolling his eyes. “Words mean little, you should know this. Your usefulness, as well as my patience, has run out. I no longer need your drama.” Lucas regarded her coldly, then made a shooing motion with his hand. “You can go away now.”
Wow. I watched the scene, uncertain anymore what to think. As much as I’d detested the woman when I’d met her in France, my heart went out to her now…which was silly, given the fact that she’d done so much to hurt us. But at that moment, I had trouble believing that the woman would do such a thing.
Anya drew herself upright in a facsimile of her previous pose but the devastation in her eyes was terrible; the backbone of steel and attitude that sustained her was gone, broken by his words. A single tear worked its way down an ivory cheek. “I give you everything,” she whispered brokenly in a thick accent. The fingers where she gripped the ornate cross around her neck were pale and trembling. “I become anything you need, do things that shame me and my family, all for your love. Now you tell me it was a lie?”
I remembered Ethan telling me that Anya was a simple country girl when Jeremiah hired her to help with Russian translations. Looking at her now, I didn’t see the haughty, condescending beauty at the party, but a young girl thrown into a world against which she had no defenses. The way she clung to the necklace, a symbol of the religion to which she obviously still clung, made my heart ache for her. Is this where I’m headed?
“We Hamilton men corrupt anything we touch.” Lucas gave Anya a pitying look. He spared me a glance before continuing. “You were caught in the crosshairs and that was unfortunate.”
“This is not how it was supposed to happen,” she whispered. “He said this was what you wanted, that…”
She trailed off, but in the dead silence her words carried through the room. “Who said?” Lucas and Jeremiah both replied, echoing one another.
At that moment, several things happened simultaneously. The lights all went out in the large room, casting odd shadows from the muted light streaming in through the window. I had time to realize the glass lining the back of the room, which had stayed opaque for the last several days, no longer hid its view of the ocean behind the house, then it struck. There was a small pop and Anya toppled forward onto the ground, a stunned look on her face. Then I was suddenly grabbed and flung sideways into the kitchen, pressed behind the tall marbled-topped island by a heavy body. Something whistled past my head, the air singing with its closeness. I gave a startled shriek as a jar of flour on the counter behind me exploded.
The room erupted into motion as people scrambled for cover. Guards dove toward the kitchen or the entryway foyer, piling through the narrow passage. There was another pop and a young guard tripped, falling motionless to the ground. He was dragged through the doorway by his comrades, disappearing from my view.
“What’s going on?” I asked, heart threatening to tear from my chest.
“Sniper.”
Oh God. I trembled against Jeremiah, who pulled me tightly against his body. I heard a loud thock inside the island and jumped, but no bullet exited on our side. Beside us one guard broke from his position by the door and headed toward us. Another pop sounded and he spun around, landing gracelessly on his back half inside our cover spot. Surprise and fear flashed briefly in his eyes before his face went slack, and the sickening realization I’d just watched somebody die was almost too much to bear.
“Breathe,” Jeremiah ordered, and I let out the air I hadn’t realized I’d kept trapped. He nudged sideways and checked for a pulse in the guard’s neck, then grabbed the small ear microphone. “Ethan, report.”
“Somebody sabotaged the electrical system, including the backup generators.” Ethan’s voice was tinny and faint but I was close enough to Jeremiah to hear. “We’re working to sort that now. What’s the situation in there?”
“A sniper has us pinned in the kitchen,” Jeremiah bit out. “We need that glass back as cover to get out.”
There was a pause, then, “Roger that. Randy says ETA on the power is two minutes.”
Jeremiah cursed, dropping the comm onto his lap. “Two minutes,” he repeated, and I nodded. “Might as well be forever.”
“Visiting with you is always such a pleasure, brother.”
Lucas’s voice was light and Jeremiah’s head whipped around to glare, but the scarred man wasn’t even looking at us. All his attention was on Anya, still lying prone in the middle of the floor, clutching her bleeding belly and moaning softly. Lucas had somehow managed to overturn the thick coffee table and one chair as cover, but neither afforded him much protection. Anya reached one arm toward him, sobbing softly as her other hand clutched the gunshot wound in her belly.