Page 96 of One Last Stand
Axel lifted his hand. “Not arguing. I talked with Flynn yesterday, and she says it’s still an ongoing investigation. So yeah, maybe you want to call Dawson and see if he’ll camp out here too.”
“Not a bad idea.”
Tille looked at Moose. “We’re fine.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’m not.” Andoops,maybe he shouldn’t have said that in front of Axel, but, “Every night I wake up with the nightmare of you inside that house, Tillie. Burning to death. If you hadn’t smelled the gas and gotten out of the house, you might have been.”
He walked over to her. Took her hands. “I just . . . I’m just trying to keep life from crumbling beneath us.”
Then he pulled her to himself, wrapping his arms around her, holding her. Wanting to never let her go.
“I’ll be packing,” Axel said. “That’s your ten-minute warning.” He left them in the kitchen.
Tillie raised her head, met Moose’s gaze. “It’s going to be okay, Moose. I can take care of myself, and Hazel, and we will be here waiting when you get back.”
Waiting for their tomorrow to start.
And maybe that was the problem. Every time he took a step, the world slid out from under him. How could he ask Tillie to marry him when he didn’t know what kind of future he could give them?
“As long as you promise to come back.”
He kissed her, slow and long and giving her every promise he could make.
Except the one he wanted.
And ten minutes later, he walked out the door with Axel, praying he wasn’t making the worst mistake of his life.
* * *
London opened her eyes, stared at the creamy plastered ceiling, light filtering in through a small window too high for her to see out of, too small for her to climb through.
Aw,they’d brought her to Castle Petrus.
The twelfth-century fortress in the mountain on the edge of the Austrian-Italian border in the high Dolomite Alps, near Tyrol, Italy. Built into the mountain and seated on a narrow outcropping, it was accessible only via a tunnel through the rock. The castle itself sat one hundred and twenty-three meters from the valley floor, a sheer drop from the high window in her room, and it clung to a cave that contained passageways for escape.
But from the outside, impregnable.
Especially since she was still wearing her dress. Torn, the skirt ripped, the sequins torn off in areas, at least the sleeves were intact.
And she was barefoot, so that was uber fun.
The smells of the castle—aged wattle and daub, wood fires from ancient days, and even the scent of the high firred mountains around her—filtered through the thick walls.
She lay on the wooden floor of the room, the door closed, just the strip of light to ward off the chill, just her heartbeat as company. Her neck throbbed where Tomas had dosed her—and?—
Shep.
She sat up, her pulse in her throat.Please, don’t let Tomas have. . .
She closed her eyes. Reached inside. Steeled herself. Because she knew—just knew—that having Shep involved would only get him killed.
Please, God.
The door opened and she climbed to her feet as a brute of a man stood at the door. Six-foot-gigantic, he had the girth of a Brahman bull and held a taser. “Davai.”
“Let’s go” in Russian, so . . . back to the Petrov Bratva, apparently.
She pressed back her hair, then pulled it out of the unraveled French knot, shook it out, and stepped into the persona of the only one who could save her.