Dante didn’t dare look away, even to check to see if they were drawing attention. “Up.”
Casimir rose slowly. He was a few inches shorter than Dante and built leaner. Much like Dante himself, he was dressed in a nondescript pair of jeans and a plain black T-shirt. Nothing to mark him out of place the way an expensive suit would. Nothing to draw attention to him at all… Except for the fact he was attempting to murder Rose in the parking lot of a fucking Walgreens.
If Dante shot him here, there would be questions. The Russians didn’t give a fuck about that because they would catch the next flight out of California and never return to this area. They didn’t need local connections to smooth things over or money to grease palms. Dante did. More than that, he only had connections in LA. They wouldn’t extend to this little town in Northern California.
They had to make this go away, but they needed to do it quietly. He spared Rose a glance as she struggled to her feet. “Your head?”
She touched it gingerly and winced. “I’m fine.”
She sure as fuck wasn’t fine, but he wouldn’t be able to tell the extent of the damage until they were alone and he could check her over. “The SUV, Rose. Now.”
“Okay.” She nodded slowly and started limping in that direction. Fucking limping.
Dante grabbed Casimir by his throat and drove him back several steps to slam him against a nearby box van. “You have bad luck, friend. You should have stayed in Russia, but now you’re destined for an unmarked grave on foreign soil.”
The man’s lips curled, just a little, and something feral lit up his gray eyes. “Nyet, I do not think so, Dante Verducci.” His gaze flicked over Dante’s shoulder and even though he damn well knew better, he twisted to look.
A black sedan flew down the main street, going far too fast, and slammed on their brakes in the middle of the street. He caught sight of a large dark-haired white man behind the wheel, and then Casimir punched him in the stomach and Dante had to focus on the danger closest to him. The Russian moved too fucking quickly, slamming into him and bearing them both to the ground. The gun went flying beneath a nearby car. Damn it.
Dante tried to flip them, but for being a relatively small guy, Casimir managed to keep him pinned. And then he started punching, methodically wailing on Dante’s face and head. Dante got his arms up as best he could, but his head rang. The stranger in the car had better be one of Rose’s many relatives because if it was another Russian Romanov, they were in deep shit.
He was in deep shit regardless.
Between one punch and the next…the blows stopped. He slowly lowered his arms to see Rose standing behind Casimir, looking like an avenging angel with her dark hair whipping around her face and a gun in her hands. Where the fuck had she found that?
She snarled something in Russian, and Casimir responded in kind. Through it all, his expression never changed from the vaguely bored one he’d worn since Dante first saw him. Another man stepped up next to Rose, a gun held down by his side. He, Dante recognized from his files on Rose’s legion of family members. Grady MacNamara. Her cousin by way of her mother’s sister, Sloan.
Casimir rose slowly and stepped off Dante. He glanced down, eyes holding no emotion whatsoever, before turning his attention back to Rose. “A delay. This changes nothing.”
“Mozhet byt, mozhet I net.” She shrugged. “You won’t be around to worry about it either way.”
“Rose.” Grady’s deep voice cut through the tension. “You can’t shoot him.”
“He’s a threat.”
“We are in the middle of a public parking lot with no fewer than three cameras catching at least part of this. You shoot him, things get messy.”
Her finger hovered on the trigger, and Casimir tensed, the tiniest reaction. Finally, she cursed and took a step back. “Get out of here before I change my mind.”
Dante held his breath as the Russian considered her, him, and then Grady. Finally, he shrugged. “Now or later. Makes no difference to me. This only ends one way.” He turned and walked away without another word.
Dante started to get up, but Rose turned the gun on him. “Nyet. Stay where you are.”
The betrayal seared through him with more violence than the actual bullets she shot him with three months ago. She’d told him over and over again that she wanted him dead. Of course, the last four days wouldn’t change anything, not for her.
But she didn’t shoot him.
She passed the gun to her cousin and took the zip tie he produced from somewhere. Grady kept his gun carefully pointed near Dante’s head as Rose knelt next to him. She grabbed his hands and fastened the zip tie around them in a practiced move.