Taras shook his head.
“Rex,” he managed. “You must save him.”
“He’s already dead, Taras,” Diana said, tears pushing out the sides of her face as she looked down at him and over her shoulder again.
Taras shook his head, honey-brown hair brushing against the grass.
“There is a suitcase.” The blood in his mouth was too much, and he had to turn his head to let it dribble out through his lips. “It’s in the trunk of the car. You must take it. It will explain.”
“About Rex?”
Taras shook his head again. The pain seared up his neck and into his head, a fog pressing over his mind.
“No but… yes,” Taras said. “You will see. It—” he coughed. “—it has everything. It is old… my father’s. But we must know our past… to know our future.”
“We can change the future, Taras,” Weick said. “You’re not going to die here.”
She tried to lift him up, put him over her shoulders, but his body collapsed in like he was made of ash, silver bits of smolder caving in to his center. He let out a cry of pain, more blood escaping from his mouth as she tried to take him down the mountain but slipped, sending them both tumbling down, a mess of blood, mud and assurance that this was the end.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the house burning. And suddenly, it was the manor burning. It was everything he’d built and destroyed, searing in front of his eyes. But this fire would not release his ghosts—this one would release the next stage of the Readers' plan.
All of that revenge, all of his anger at the Readers, would go unappeased.
He grabbed at Weick’s forearm, her skin so warm under the cool suffrage of his fingers.
“You must kill that man,” Taras said. “Kill her too.”
“Who?”
“All of them. Kill them all, Weick,” Taras spat, blood flying out from his mouth and spattering across her arm. “But start with me.”
He moved his fingers down her forearm to her wrist, moving her hand to his throat.
“Sever the connection.”
Clamping his hand down on hers, not allowing her to budge from under his grip, Taras laid his head down. The grass and mud under his body that seemed to be dropping a degree of temperature every second. The blue sky overhead, touching everything with clear sunlight. The heat of the nearby fire trying to capture what little warmth he had left.
Weick brought a dagger to him with her other hand, still holding her palm against his throat. The tip of the blade was against his temple, trembling in her grip.
“Would you like me to insult you to make this easier?” he murmured.
Weick gave a broken laugh.
“You will always be the American bitch,” Taras said, closing his eyes. “But thank you… Weick. Thank you for killing my father. Do not fear the karakurt.”
Chapter 14
Diana Weick
Dawson City, Yukon
Diana plunged the dagger into his head. The grip around her hand loosened. His body went still, red seeping out from underneath and onto the grass, slowly draining down the mountainside to the backyard of the safe house that was in flames.
She leaned over Taras’s body for a moment, resting her forehead down on his torso, his blood smeared onto her face. Blubbering into his clothes. She hadn’t cried like this over Ratanake. With Wesley and Rex, it had been an overwhelming anger. But Taras. This one was painful in so many different ways. He’d been trying to change. He’d been trying to be better, to play for the right side. No matter how subjective that was. And he was young. Too young for all of this, brought up in it and a product of his environment. Death didn’t wipe away the things he had done or the struggles he’d put her through, but that pull of pity was there again, yanking at the bottom of her stomach like a hand clutched around her insides.
“Diana.” A voice from behind her, Amber’s deep London accent. “He’s getting away.”
She sprung to her feet, grabbing the silenced pistol from Taras’s cold hands, and took off. Amber ran alongside her.
“Did Hoagland make it?”
They circled around the fiery building, glass and wood flown nearly a hundred feet from where it once stood. The few neighboring cabins were stirring with people, looking out their windows, scrutinizing what the hell was going on in their usual isolated valley.
“Stubborn old bastard,” Amber muttered, huffing and pumping his arms, pointing to the path by the lake where Zabójca was running.
He’d left David behind. Despite the shot that he’d taken at Diana from behind, she was sure that if they left him for much longer he would bleed out as Taras had.
“I got him in just on time,” Amber said. “The girl too.”
And just as he said so, an old pudgy man with very short gray hair in nothing more than loose boxer shorts came into view. He was sitting on the front lawn of the safe house, his legs spread out in front of him and a woman sitting next to him, leaning her head against his shoulder.
“Get under cover!” Diana screamed at them, and they both jumped. “Now!”
Zabójca still had the GS-777. The two on the lawn were in shock, but there was no time for panic. One turn from the terrorist up ahead, and they would all be dead.
Their shoes kicked up stones as they skidded along the edge of the lake, following Zabójca around the water until he began to move back up into the mountains. There was a high-pitched humming behind them. At first, Diana thought that maybe David wasn’t as hurt as she thought and had managed to pick up another gun to bear down on them. But it wasn’t David—just another familiar enemy.
The combat drone, the UCAV, flew over their hands, the water rippling from its speed and force. Zabójca’s escape plan, the assurance factor.
Amber turned over his shoulder and Diana did the same, Hoagland and the woman behind them, leaning on each other
