“He was recruited in college,” Peter says flatly. “University of Chicago, which you both attended. They often do that, hit up college campuses to round up the best and the brightest. They look for certain things: few family ties, a patriotic bent, smart and ambitious but lacking focus… Any of that sound like your husband?”
I stare at him, my chest squeezing tighter and tighter. George’s mother died in a car accident during his last year of high school, and his father, a Marine, had been killed in Afghanistan when George was just a baby. His elderly uncle helped put him through college, but he died too, several years back, leaving only distant cousins to attend George’s funeral six months ago.
No. It couldn’t be true. I would’ve known.
“Only if he told you,” Peter says, and I realize I spoke my last thought out loud. “They teach them how to conceal their real job from everyone, even their own families. Didn’t you find it suspicious how Cobakis discovered his passion for journalism overnight? How one day he was a biology major, and then he was interning at magazines abroad?”
“No, I—” My chest is so tight I can barely take a breath. “That’s just college. You’re supposed to discover yourself, find your passion.”
“And he did: working for your government.” There’s no mercy in the Russian’s silver gaze. “They trained him, gave him the focus he was lacking. Taught him how to lie to you and everyone else. When he graduated, they got him a job at the paper, and he had an excuse to go to every hotspot in the world.”
I jump to my feet, unable to listen further. “You’re wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He stands up too, his large frame towering over me. “Don’t I? Think back, Sara. Think back to the man you married, to the life you really had together. Not the perfect one you showed to the world, but the one you led behind closed doors. Who was he, this husband of yours? How well did you really know him?”
My insides feel like lead as I take a step back, my head shaking in nonstop denial. “You’re wrong,” I repeat in a choked voice, and spinning around, I run out of the coffeeshop, heading blindly for my car.
It’s only when I stop at a red light near my house that I realize Peter Sokolov didn’t do anything to stop me.
He just stood there and watched me go.
Chapter 15
Peter
I watch through the binoculars as Sara enters her parents’ house; then I open my laptop and bring up the camera feed from inside the hallway.
Sara’s parents live in a small, neat house that could use a few upgrades but is otherwise warm and cozy. Even I can tell it’s a home, not just a place to live. For some bizarre reason, it reminds me of Tamila’s house in Daryevo, though this suburban American home is nothing like a mountain village hut.
Sara kisses both of her parents in the hallway, then follows them to the dining room. I switch to the camera feed there, zooming in on her face as she greets the other guests—an older couple and a tall, lean man in his mid-thirties.
It’s the Levinsons and their son Joe, the lawyer Sara’s parents want her to date.
Something ugly stirs inside me as Sara shakes the lawyer’s hand with a polite smile. I don’t want to see her with him; just the idea of it makes me want to plunge my blade between his ribs. Yesterday, when the bartender was smiling at her, I wanted to smash my fist into his grinning mug, and the violent urge is even stronger today.
I might not have claimed her yet, but she’s going to be mine.
Sara helps her parents bring out the appetizers and sits down next to the lawyer. I crank up the audio feed and listen as the two of them make small talk. For someone who just found out about her husband’s double life, the little doctor is remarkably composed, her smiling mask firmly in place. Nobody looking at her would know that before coming here, she hid in her closet for hours and emerged less than forty minutes ago with her eyes red and swollen.
Nobody would suspect she’s terrified because I want her.
It took everything I had to let her stay in that closet and cry on her own. She went in there to escape my cameras, and I let her have this time to herself. She would’ve been even more upset if I’d gone in and embraced her—if I’d tried to comfort her the way I wanted.
I need to give her more time to get used to the idea of us—and to trust I won’t hurt her.
The dinner lasts a couple of hours; then Sara helps her mother clear off the table and makes an excuse to leave. The lawyer asks for her phone number, and she gives it, but I can see it’s mostly out of politeness. Her cheeks are perfectly pale—there isn’t even a hint of the color that floods her face in my presence—and her body language speaks of indifference. Joe Levinson doesn’t excite her, and that’s a good thing.
It means he gets to go home alive.
I follow Sara at a distance as she drives to the clinic, and then I wait in my car until she emerges, entertaining myself by watching her through the cameras I installed inside the clinic. I know what I’m doing is stalker behavior at best, but I can’t stop myself.
I have to know where she is and what she’s doing.
I have to make sure she’s safe.
I could entrust the physical guard duty to Anton and my other guys—they already watch her when I can’t—but I want to be here in person. I want to see her with my own eyes. With each day that passes, my need for her intensifies, and now that I’ve held an actual conversation with her, my fascination is quickly morphing into an obsession.
I have to have her. Soon.
She comes out of the clinic some three hours later, and I follow her as she drives to a hotel. She probably thinks she’ll be safer there than at her house with all the cameras, but she’s wrong.
I wait until she checks into the hotel and goes up to her room, and then I get out of the car and go in.
Chapter 16
Sara
The clinic shift was particularly rough today. I had a fourteen-year-old patient who asked for morning-after pills because her brother raped her and another patient barely out of her teens who came in with her third miscarriage. I did what I could, but I know it’s not enough.
Nothing I do for those girls will ever be enough.
I’m so emotionally drained it takes all my energy to shower and brush my teeth with the little toothbrush the front desk gave me. Coming here for the night was an impulse decision, so I don’t even have a change of underwear with me. I’ll have to stop by my house tomorrow morning before going to work, but it’s better than being home and knowing that my deadly stalker might be watching me at that very moment.
Watching me and wanting me. Maybe even jacking off at the sight of my naked body.
It’s sick, but heat licks between my legs at the thought.
Exiting the shower, I wrap a towel around my chest and stare at myself in the mirror. Visine eye drops did a good job of removing the redness from my eyes, but my lids still look swollen from my crying jag earlier today, and my face is reddened from the hot shower. I also have a tension headache that makes me disinclined to think, which is just as well.
I did too much thinking earlier as is.
George as a spy. George leading a double life. It seems impossible, yet it would explain so much. The FBI agents’ protection that came out of nowhere. His long absences when he supposedly chased a story yet often came home without one. The moods that started shortly after our marriage six years earlier. Did something go wrong on one of his covert assignments?
Could his real job be the reason he changed so much in the years leading up to the accident?
My headache intensifies, and I realize I’m doing it again. I’m thinking about George, obsessing about the past I can’t change rather than focusing on the future that’s still within my control. I should be trying to figure out what to do about the killer who’s stalking me, but my mind simply refuses to go there.
I’ll think about him later, when I’ve had some sleep and my brain isn’t so fried.
Wrapping a second
towel around my dripping hair, I open the bathroom door, step out, and jump up with a startled scream.
Peter Sokolov is sitting on the bed, his hooded gaze trained on my face.
Chapter 17
Sara
“Don’t scream, Sara.” He rises fluidly to his feet. “No need to involve the other guests in this.”
I gasp for air, needles of adrenaline piercing my skin as he comes toward me, his large body moving with predatory ease.
“You… you followed me here.” My knees knock together as I instinctively back away, clutching the flimsy towel covering my body.
“Yes.” He stops a couple of feet from me, his gray eyes gleaming. “You shouldn’t have come here. Your alarm system at home poses at least a small challenge. Here, I can walk right in.”
“Why are you here?” My heart feels like it’s about to jump out of my throat. “What do you want?”
His lips twitch in dark amusement. “You’re a doctor who deals with the effects of this activity. You can probably guess what I want.”
Oh God. My skin feels both hot and icy, and my pulse jacks up even more. “Get out. I—I will scream, I swear.”
He tilts his head quizzically. “Will you? Why haven’t you done so yet?”
I take another step back, my gaze flicking to the room door for a fraction of a second. Would I make it before he catches me?
“Don’t try it, Sara. If you run, I will chase you.”
I continue backing away. “I told you, I’m not sleeping with you.”
“No? We’ll see about that.”
He comes toward me, and I back up more, my stomach twisting. I know what sexual assault does to women; I’ve seen the aftermath, the physical and emotional wreckage left behind. I don’t know if I can survive that on top of everything else.
I don’t know if I can survive it from him.
My trembling hand touches the door, but before I can twist the knob, his palms slap against the door on each side of me, caging me between his powerful arms.
“You can’t escape me, ptichka,” he says softly, gazing down at me. “Not now, and not ever. You might as well get used to that.”
He’s not touching me, but he’s so close I can feel the heat coming off his large body and see a couple more tiny scars on his symmetrical face. The imperfections add a deadly edge to his magnetism, intensifying its impact on my senses. My heartbeat is a panicked roar in my ears, yet my body tightens in a way that has nothing to do with fear. I should be screaming my head off, or at least trying to fight him, but I can’t move. I can’t do anything but stare at the lethally beautiful killer holding me captive.
“Come, Sara.” His hand slides down to lock around my wrist in a familiar iron shackle. “I won’t hurt you.”
I inhale shakily. “You won’t?” Maybe he’ll be gentle. Please, let him at least be gentle. I’ve experienced violence at his hands, and it terrifies me even more than the specter of rape.
“No. Now come.”
He pushes away from the door, but instead of leading me to the bed, he takes me to the chair in front of the vanity mirror.
“Sit.” He presses down on my shoulders, and I sink into the chair, trying to steady my ragged breathing. What is he doing? Why isn’t he just attacking me? My face in the mirror is deathly pale, my eyes wide as he steps behind me and pulls something from the inner pocket of his jacket.
It’s a small hairbrush wrapped in plastic—one of those cheap ones they sometimes give out in hotels and upscale airlines.
“This is all they had at the gift shop downstairs,” he says, removing the plastic wrap before meeting my gaze in the mirror. “I figured it’s better than nothing.”
Better than nothing for what? Some weird kinky game? My throat constricts, but before the panic can overtake me, he unwraps the towel on my head and drops it on the floor. His strong, sun-browned hands look huge next to my skull as he gathers my hair into a wet ponytail and begins working through the knots with the brush.
Shock steals all air from my lungs. My husband’s killer—the man who’s been stalking me—is brushing my hair.
His touch is gentle but sure, lacking any trace of hesitation. It’s as if he’s done this a dozen times before. He runs the brush through the ends first, getting them smooth and tangle-free; then he systematically moves up until the small brush can run through the entire length of my hair without snagging. And throughout the process, there’s no pain—just the opposite, in fact. The plastic bristles massage my skull with every stroke, and prickles of pleasure run down my spine whenever his warm fingers brush against the sensitive skin of my nape.
Fear or not, it’s the most sensuous experience of my life.
A strange sense of unreality seizes me as I sit there, watching him brush my hair in the mirror. In each of our prior encounters, I’d been so focused on the danger he poses I didn’t pay attention to less important things, like his clothes. So now, for the first time, I notice that he’s wearing a distressed gray leather jacket over a black thermal shirt and a pair of dark jeans paired with black boots. The clothes are casual, something any man might wear during early spring in Illinois, but there’s no mistaking my tormentor for a regular guy on the street.
Peter Sokolov is nothing less than a force of nature, ruthless and completely unstoppable.
He brushes my hair for several long minutes while I sit as still as I can, not daring to twitch a muscle lest I do something to make him stop. Each stroke of the brush feels like a caress, each touch of his rough hands soothing and thrilling at the same time. More importantly, while he’s brushing my hair, he’s not doing other things to me—things I’m dreading.
All too soon, however, he puts the brush down on the vanity table, and his eyes catch mine in the mirror. “Up,” he orders, his hands curling around my bare shoulders and propelling me to my feet.
Swallowing thickly, I turn around to face him when he releases me, but he’s already stepped away and is removing his jacket.
My heart sinking, I watch as he hangs the jacket on the chair and reaches for the bottom of his long-sleeved thermal shirt. In one smooth move, he pulls the shirt off over his head, and my breath hitches in my throat as he hangs it over the jacket.
His shoulders are wide, his arms roped with thick, clearly defined layers of muscle. More muscle covers his lean, V-shaped torso, and his flat, ridged abdomen lacks even a hint of fat. Like his hands, his chest and shoulders are tanned, as if he’s spent a lot of time in the sun, and his left arm is almost completely covered by tattoos that extend from the top of his shoulder to his wrist. Amidst a dusting of dark hair on his chest, I see several more faded scars, and I catch myself staring at the sexy trail of hair that starts at his navel and disappears into the waistband of his low-slung jeans.
He reaches for the jeans next, unzipping the fly, and I force myself to look away. Despite his primal male beauty, a layer of cold sweat covers my body, and my pulse is sickeningly fast. He might be a gorgeous beast, but that’s all he is: a beast, a cold-hearted monster. It doesn’t matter that under different circumstances, I would’ve been wildly attracted to him. I don’t want what’s about to happen. It would devastate me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see him step out of his boots and push his jeans down his legs, revealing a pair of navy briefs stretched over a thick, long bulge, and powerful legs dusted with dark hair. He bends to remove the jeans completely, and my terror reaches a new peak.
Forgetting his warnings, I bolt for the door.
This time, I don’t even get near my goal. He catches me two feet from the door, one strong arm looping around my ribcage and lifting me off my feet while his other hand slaps over my mouth, muffling my instinctive scream.
I claw at his forearms, my feet kicking at his shins as he carries me to the bed, but it’s useless. All I achieve is having the towel unwrap in the back. His arm around my ribcage keeps it from falling to the floor, but my back, buttocks, and the right side of my body are completely expo
sed. I can feel his bare chest rubbing against my back, smell the clean male musk of his skin, and the unwanted intimacy intensifies my panic, making me struggle even harder.
“Fuck,” he growls as my heel connects with his knee, and I feel a small flare of triumph.
It doesn’t last long. A second later, he falls backward on the bed, dragging me with him, and before I can react, he rolls over, pinning me underneath him. I end up facedown on the blanket, my hands scratching uselessly at the soft surface and my legs weighed down by his heavily muscled calves. With his palm over my mouth, I can’t do anything except make muffled noises, and tears of panic burn my eyes as I feel the hard log of his erection against the curve of my ass. Only his briefs separate us now, and I double my struggles despite the futility of it all.
It takes a couple of minutes for me to wear myself out—and to realize he’s not moving.
He’s restraining me, but he’s making no attempts to take me.
“Are you done now?” he murmurs when I go limp, my muscles shaking from exertion and my lungs screaming for air. “Or do you want to wrestle some more? I can do this all night long.”
I believe him. He’s so much bigger than me that all he has to do is lie on top, and I can neither hurt him nor get away. The effort expended on his part is minimal, while I’m using all my strength with zero success.
“Will you behave if I remove my hand?” His lips hover just above my ear, his breath heating my skin.
My shoulders bunch up to protect my neck from those encroaching lips, and he lets out an audible sigh. “All right, I guess I’ll gag you and get my handcuffs.”
I make a muffled noise behind his palm, and he chuckles. “No? Will you behave then?”
I manage a small nod. Defeat is an acrid burn in my throat, but I don’t want to be gagged and cuffed.
“Good girl.” He shifts off me and removes his hand from my mouth, enabling me to drag air into my oxygen-starved lungs. “Now that you got that out of your system, how about we go to sleep? I know you have a long day tomorrow, and so do I.”
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