Page 191 of Red Rooster

He wasn’t polished and gleaming, dressed in velvets and high-gloss boots, and Sasha could actually smell him now, for the first time. But there was no mistaking…

“Val?” he asked, and to his great shame, tears filled his eyes.

The prince who’d first visited Sasha when he was eight, who’d told him how to kill Rasputin, and save Nikita, smiled at him now, so tenderly. He reached to touch Sasha’s face, cupped his cheek, swept his thumb across it. The warmth and solidity of him was a shock. “Hello, sweetheart.”

“Are you – are you really here?” As if the touch wasn’t enough proof.

“Yes, I really am. Let’s get those awful things off, shall we?” He produced a key. “Your Nikita’s here, and he’s mad as a wet cat.”

“Nikita’s here?”

The first cuff came undone with a little click. “Yes, can’t you hear all the shooting?”

~*~

Val knelt down in front of a pale-haired boy, face melting into sweetness, and they talked about…something, as Val undid his cuffs.

Rooster didn’t really see any of that. His eyes went straight to Red, who sat crouched against the wall, wrists cuffed together. She looked toward the door, and in the second before she recognized him, the sheer terror on her face made him want to stomp back out into the main lab, drag lab coats out from under tables, and put bullets in them.

He watched her see him, really see him, and she scrambled to her feet and ran to him. She couldn’t put her arms around him, but that didn’t matter. He caught her and tucked her into his chest, enfolded her into his own arms, big enough for both of them.

He didn’t say anything, because he couldn’t. He pressed his face down into her red hair and felt the warmth of her breath in the hollow of his throat, listened to the way it hitched and caught.

“You came,” she whispered. “Youcame.”

“Yeah,” he choked out.

When he lifted his head, he saw that Val had got the boy up on his feet, though he was wobbly. Val had an arm looped around his waist. The boy’s hair was glued to his forehead with sweat, and the dark circles beneath his eyes stood out prominently against too-pale skin. He looked sick.

Val studied him with clear concern. “Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t look it. Where’s Talbot?”

“Prob – probably in his office,” he boy said, and his teeth were chattering.

Val growled – actuallygrowled, like an animal. After the blood-drinking, it still managed to surprise Rooster, that catlike sound.

“Here.” He steered the shaking boy toward Rooster and Red. “Make sure he doesn’t fall down. I want awordbefore we leave.”

“What the hell?” But all he could do was catch the boy by the shoulder and pull he and Red along with him as Val charged out of the room and toward a door marked with the name Dr. Edmund Talbot on a gold placard.

“Watch him,” Rooster said, entrusting the sickly kid to Red, who laid a comforting, if insubstantial hand on his shoulder, and scanned the lab around them. It was eerily quiet. Everyone had either fled, or was hiding. How there weren’t more guards coming at them, Rooster had no idea. His hand tightened on his gun.

A sound brought his attention back to the door: Val kicking it in. There was a splintering crack, as if a brace had been broken, and the door flew inward to reveal Jake standing just inside, gun at the ready.

A gunshot.

Val shuddered as the bullet hit home.

Rooster lunged forward, bringing his gun up.

But Val, somehow, though Rooster could see the gory exit wound in his back, didn’t fall. Instead, helaughed. “Lovely try, Major,” he said.

Jake tried to move, to get off another shot, but Val was impossibly fast. He batted the gun away with one hand, and gripped Jake’s jaw with the other.

“But you missed the important part.” Val’s hand tightened, knuckles going white, and there was a crack of bone breaking.