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Anastasia Lenkov wants to live a normal life as a nurse after escaping her old, brutal life. But her past keeps catching up with her. She is on the run from the Russian mafia, because her father, the boss, will n...
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"Step on the fucking gas pedal, Thomas." I nearly growled. The engine howled as he did what I demanded.
For a few minutes we had been sitting in the black SUVs, driving through the streets. I sat in the back, Anastasia on my lap. She kept slipping in and out of consciousness. I tried to keep her awake, even if it might have been counterproductive.
Thomas drove, Raffaele sat in the passenger seat, and Iwan sat in the back with me in the other back seat. He had to wait in the car in front of the warehouse earlier, because he had to earn respect first to be fully included in everything.
He was mumbling Russian nonsense to himself all the time and according to the dictionary, which I have been reading for a few days, these were not exactly nice phrases, but rather the opposite.
I briefly wandered into my thoughts as I thought about all the luggage now being gone, including the diamond butterfly necklace I gave her some time ago. Seems like I'll have to buy her a new one.
The butterfly was the Ramirez family crest. It had become that since the day my sister put it in her paintings. She loved to paint.
I gently patted Anastasia's cheek as I watched her slip from consciousness into darkness.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Iwan glancing at her and swallowing hard, then bringing his hand up in front of his mouth. He looked pale.
"Stay awake, amore. I need you to stay awake. For me, all right?" I whispered as I brushed her hair out of her face, careful not to touch her wound. [translation: love]
After wiping the blood from the edge of her mouth with my thumbs, I continued, "You have to tell us what to do."
She is the nurse here.
Her eyelids fluttered open again and she looked at me for a moment, her eyes looking downright black in the dim light inside the car.
"The condition of an injured person can be better assessed when the person is awake and responsive." I spoke aloud as she looked at me, her eyelids threatening to fall shut again.
My hand continued to stroke her forehead as I talked, hoping that would keep her awake, "Remember? You said that to me back then, and now it's your turn. Stay awake."
A soft faint sound escaped her throat, "I-" She took a deep breath and tried to lift her arm that hung sleepily at her side. She winced.
I stared at her arm for a moment and gently reached to place it at her side. A piece of my white dress shirt was tied around her badly bleeding arm. I had torn off a piece of the sleeve of my white dress shirt as soon as we got into the cars and taken care of it to stop the bleeding. The once white material was now soaked with blood.
Her eyelids slowly fluttered shut and her head lolled to the side against my chest. Again my finger tapped nervously against her cheek, the blood on it appearing on my fingertips a moment later.
