CHAPTER 14
CHRISTIAN ‘VICIOUS’ VOLKOV.
The wound stings like a bitch.
My hand is applying pressure to it as much as I can but we both know none of that is going to stop the bleeding.
What stings worse than the wound? The snowing. The sleet. The five foot woman who’s stubbornly refused my help with her leg injured pretty badly.
I trudge through the ankle deep snow, stopping against a pine tree under the pretense of taking a breath when she and I know, I’m waiting for her.
It’s almost sunrise.
We’ve been trekking for almost two hours with no rest.
Rest means risking getting found.
Rest means running into wild animals that might just be hanging around the corner for the next prey.
Rest means getting hypothermia and with the dress, the Sunshine Blonde is wearing, I’m surprised frostbite hasn’t caught up with her yet.
And maybe I’m being an ass but her catching frostbite means less weight, less responsibility and karma serving her back for some of that ‘I don’t need your jacket or your help, I’m fine’.
The fur coat is keeping her upper body warm but her lower body?
She’s definitely freezing. She’s not fine.
By the time she reaches up to me, her mop of sunshine blonde hair is a mess. Snow, branches, cobwebs. I didn’t know cobwebs existed in this hell of a place but apparently, she found them.
Her small hand clutches the tree, her short breaths look like her panting from where I’m standing, she winces when she lifts her injured foot from the snow to look at her wound.
The wound on her ankle has advanced to swelling in her right leg.
“Need help?”
“You asked me that ten minutes ago and what did I say?”
“You were fine.”
“Then I’m telling you ten minutes later, precisely right now that I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine to me, Little Nurse.”
“A man who fails to take a nurse’s advice on not bleeding himself to death shouldn’t be the one pointing fingers at who’s fine and who isn’t. How far is your safe house?”
Probably a mile. Can’t trace it because Maximo’s already gone away from it by now.
She raises her brow, “Is there even a safe house?”
I almost chuckle. Other women, I would have left them to die but this one? She straight up challenges me and that in itself is conflicting.
“You are welcome to walk the other way if you think I’m walking us around a damn ice forest for the fun of it.”
“You could be delaying our deaths under the guise there’s a mysterious safe house in the middle of nowhere.”
“There’s no delaying death. When it comes, you know it, you feel it inside you.”
I’d felt it a couple of times. Only, it refused to take me along.
“How do you know there’s a safe house? Just answer me this and I’ll be quiet. I’ll walk for another four hours if need be.”
“We are on Demetri’s property, the accident happened on his property. Maximo and Jett are supposed to be in the safe house, if they haven’t left yet anyway.”
“Wait, you are telling me you have a safe house on the property of the man who almost killed us?”
Demetri didn’t try to kill us. Might want to though, but I entertain her all the same.
“Yes. Don’t we all?”
“No. No, we do not all have safe houses in the middle of the property of some deranged Russian psycho with guns.
That’s like saying you have a house built near the white house.”
The thing with this woman, she panics when she’s troubled. Talks a lot too.
“You are tired.”
“I’m going insane too in case you haven’t noticed. You are driving me insane by acting like we are in Disney land and not here where nature is against us, our bodies are against us and I think I heard a wolf howl a few minutes ago so let’s add animals ripping us apart to the list of the things killing us today while we are at it!”
I tramp through the snow in her direction, the sound of snow getting crushed echoes in the air.
I tower over her.
Five feet of nothing and she’s been dragging us down the whole trip.
Five feet of nothing and she’s been throwing every thought that comes across her mind to me without thinking twice.
Five feet of nothing and I’m ensuring she makes it to the safe house whether or not I make it.
She’s just that. A five-foot woman glancing at me with blue bedroom eyes that want to decimate me into a churned burnt crisp.
“No one’s dying.”
“I don’t think that’s your choice to ma…“
“Say it with me, no one is dying when I’m here.”
“No one is dying,” she repeats and punches me in the gut.
My hand reaches out to her cheek. To caress her? To wipe tears that don’t affect me in any way?
No.
I touch her tangled hair, feeling its texture and that texture would feel right fisted around my knuckles as I watched taking her from behind.
I’m losing it.
I’m losing too much blood that the majority of it is directing itself to my cock and leaving my brain with nothing but a few scruples.
“Hop on my back, Alexia. Now.”
It’s an order.
Not this mellow back and forth chit-chats we’ve been having.
This time I’m serious.
She’s wasting time, I’ve got no time to lose.
She blinks twice, she licks her lips. Submissive and sexier than before she breathes out, “Okay.”
One word.
A breathless okay and I cuss inwardly for having brought her to Russia.
Because now?
That safe house will be me and her.
Sunshine and my darkness.
Her sassiness and my seriousness.
Her unfiltered words and my impatience for them.
That combination in itself is worse than Demetri figuring out I’m on his property.
Frankly speaking, I’d much rather duel to the deaths with Demetri Sokolov than be shacked up in one room with Alexia Green for more than a day.