by Callie Hart
“Get your ass back up on that counter,” he commands, shifting toward the door.
“I can’t. I think I’m just going toooooo…” I make a run for it. Waaaay too slow, though. Pasha’s twice the size of me, but he also drank twice the amount of whiskey I did, which means we’re both just as wasted as one another. Still, he gets there ahead of me, blocking the door.
“What was that about, Firefly? I thought you weren’t scared of me.”
“I’m not. I just…” I pout. Shrug. “I wanted to get some air?”
“It’s almost freezing out there. And you’re naked.”
“I wasn’t going to be out there for long.”
“Get onto that bed, Zara Llewellyn.”
“No!” I’m giggling like a fucking teenager as I try and shove past him.
“Get up on that bed!”
“NO!”
Pasha practically tackles me, grabbing hold of me around the waist, and for a stomach-churning moment I feel weightless. Then my stomach really is churning and I’m falling backward onto the mattress, shrieking at the top of my lungs.
“Shhh. Fuck, they’re gonna think I’m murdering you,” Pasha hisses.
“You are. HAALLLLLP!”
He’s on top of me, slapping his hand over my mouth a second later. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, we’re both naked and he’s on top of me, staring down at me, and I can’t stop myself from staring back. “God, you’re trouble,” he whispers.
I can’t reply. His hand’s still covering my mouth, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to say anything. Carefully, I pull my leg out from underneath him, and hook my leg around the back of his thigh. It takes a little more effort to wriggle the other one free, but I manage. Pasha sucks in a sharp breath as I push my hips up, letting him know what I want.
I’m still far from sober, but I’m a lot less drunk than I was a moment ago. The weight of him pressing down on me has brought me crashing back down to earth, and I need him more than I did before. I fucking have to have him.
He rocks back, repositioning himself, and then my eyes are rolling back in my head, and he’s inside me. I’m full, so fucking full of him, and the very last thing I want to do now is run away from him.
He’s panting, breathing hard as he removes his hand and slips his fingers inside my mouth, forcing my teeth apart. “I should fuck your mouth for that. I should fuck your ass. You frightened me, Firefly.” He rolls his hips, and I feel the full length of him sliding into me. He’s so big. So fucking hard. The upward pressure of his cock inside me at this angle is borderline too much to bear. I shift a fraction, curving myself against him, and…there…the intense pressure subsides, transforming itself into pleasure.
He rocks against me, still so fucking deep, his dick hard enough to make me hiss, and I begin to lose myself in the rhythm of him. His hands are everywhere, and so are mine. His back; his ass; his arms; the tops of his thighs: I adjust my hold on him, doing everything in my power to bring him even deeper, as if I can pull him inside myself. I can’t get enough. I’ll never be able to get enough…
His movements become more urgent, and I respond in kind. It’s not long before he’s pressing his forehead down onto my shoulder, cursing at the top of his lungs, and I’m screaming out his name, clinging onto him like I’m worried he might disappear into thin air as I come.
He doesn’t; he remains unsurprisingly corporeal as he falls sideways, shifting his weight and holding me to his chest as he spins until he’s on his back, and I’m sprawled out across his chest.
“Zara?” he whispers, his hushed voice disturbing the silken silence.
“Yeah?”
“That nearly fucking killed me. That…that nearly fucking destroyed me.” He sounds breathless, like he’s still trying to recover from the sex. I can hear the steady, even thrum of his heart below my ear, though, so I know it’s not that. I know what he means perfectly well. He’s referring to the fact that I tried to run from him.
With infinite care, I press my lips to his chest, closing my eyes. “I’m sorry. Don’t worry. I’ll never do that again.”
And I won’t.
Seventeen
ZARA
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
Just as Pasha predicted, the door to Shelta’s Airstream is flung wide open to the elements when we wake, and the woman herself is nowhere to be found. She managed to start up the van and leave without drawing any attention to herself, so when she made her exit no one can tell. All anyone knows is that the Rivin camp’s fortune teller has disappeared, and very few people seem bothered by the fact.
With the van gone, however, and a fresh foot of snow on the ground, there’s no chance Pasha and I will be hiking back to the parking lot. I’m taken aback when he leads me around the side of Patrin’s Winnebago and he throws back a crackling, frozen tarp, revealing a Ski-Doo underneath, though.
“What?” Pasha’s mouth skews to one side in a surprisingly boyish expression. “It’s just like riding a motorcycle. You just sit on the back and hold on to me.”
I scan the snowy, featureless glen, my eyes unable to pick out a single rise or dip to the landscape against the backdrop of all that white. “You’re going to drive us off a cliff.”
He gives me a scandalized look. “What the fuck do you take me for? We’ve been coming here every winter my entire life. I know this valley like the back of my hand. And besides, there’s a fire trail on the other side of that rise. It’s five miles longer than the route we hiked in on, but it’ll be a breeze on this thing.”
I’m still riddled with doubt as Pasha fires up the Ski-Doo, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I either ride on the back of this deathtrap, or I sit out the rest of the winter here, waiting for the snow to ease or for all of it to miraculously melt overnight.
Pasha looks like some kind of rock star as he climbs onto the Ski-Doo and reaches his hand out to help me on behind him. His leather jacket’s still back in the Mustang, but holy hell, he does not need it. The tattoos that climb up his forearms and sneak out from underneath the collar of the same torn sweater he wore yesterday are enough on their own. But it’s the sharp, daring, amused glint in his pale green eyes that screams, ‘I am a bad, bad boy.’
“Chicken?” he asks.
“Child?” I retort. But it’s me that pokes my tongue out at him like a five-year-old as I clamber onto the back of the Ski-Doo, purposefully refusing to accept his proffered help. He laughs softly, the smoke from his breath skating on the frosty morning air.
“So damn stubborn,” he mutters to himself. I playfully dig my knuckle into the small of his back, and he yelps, twisting around until he can see me over his shoulder. “I could make you stay here with Patrin,” he informs me. His smile fades, and his eyes become distant, as if he’s just realized something. “In all seriousness, this is probably the safest place for you. Lazlo would never dare come here. Patrin and the boys would fucking skin him alive.”
Nope. No fucking way. I wrap my arms around Pasha’s waist, holding onto him firmly. “You’re insane. Start the engine on this thing before I freak the fuck out.”
“Zara—”
“Pasha, no. I’m coming back to Spokane. I’m gonna be there to help find Sarah. And I’m going to find out who Lazlo is, once and for all. I’m going to find out how he’s connected to me, and I’m gonna make sure he’s punished for what he did to Corey. Don’t even bother trying to talk to me out of it again. You’ll be wasting your breath.”
He’s frustrated, I can tell. The muscles in his shoulders are tensed, harder than granite, but he keeps any further objections or suggestions in check. With flared nostrils, he huffs down his nose, his eyes alive with worry as he turns the key in the Ski-Doo’s ignition and the engine roars to live, rumbling like an earthquake beneath me.
“Why do you guys spend each winter here?” I speak the words into his ear, so he can hear me over the ruckus.
He smiles, and fuck me if I don’t have to curb t
he temptation to climb around and straddle him so I can pull the fullness of his bottom lip onto my mouth and suck on it. “We’re very tortured souls,” he says, laughing. “We like to make things unnecessarily difficult for ourselves.”
“Seriously? You don’t have a reason for spending such horrible, freezing weeks here, when you could be sunning yourselves on a beach in Southern California?”
Pasha kicks the Ski-Doo into gear and slides back into his seat, turning to face forward again. “We come out here because it’s hard, and doing things that are hard makes us strong. Not everything in life is supposed to be easy, Firefly.”
Three minutes on the Ski-Doo and I trust Pasha implicitly. He isn’t reckless like most guys would be, wanting to show off in front of the girl they like. Instead, he picks the safest line, and is incredibly careful as he navigates the terrain.
It’s still early, and the sun hasn’t fully risen over the tops of the trees yet. The morning is the color of pale crushed pearls and cotton candy—the faintest suggestion of color, shimmering in the east, laid bare against a broad swathe of cool, wintery, washed-out sky. Buried under a thick layer of snow, the landscape reminds me of a frosted, high-end wedding cake.
How long did it take for us to hike in to the camp the other day? I don’t remember, I didn’t watch the clock, marking every laborious, breathless minute that passed, so I can only guess that it took around three hours. Our progress on the Ski-Doo is much more impressive.
Pasha locates the fire trail immediately, and we’re speeding down a gentle slope, heading back toward the parking lot in no time. The world whips by in a blur and I'm almost hypnotized, lulled by the rhythm of the Ski-Doo's engines. The dull thump of the hangover I earned myself after drinking all of that whiskey last night eases as we descend down the valley and the fresh air floods my lungs. It feels like we're inside a snow globe, two tiny figures surrounded by a perfect, brilliant, pristine winter dream.
By the time we reach the parking lot forty minutes later, I've managed to convince myself that this is all just part of a fairy-tale, and I'm outside of myself, outside of my real life. The sight of the road cutting through the national park brings me back to reality with a thump.
Soon, Pasha’s killing the Ski-Doo's engine and tossing me the keys to the Mustang. I'm frozen down to my bones as Pasha unhooks a sliding ramp from the back of a flatbed truck and makes quick work of gunning the Ski-Doo up onto the back of the vehicle, fastening the sled down with straps and securing it tightly. When he jumps down from the back of the truck, Pasha gathers up a handful of snow, compressing it into a ball and tosses it at me. Lucky for him, he misses.
“Get in the car. Turn the heater on. You're going blue,” he says. I wait for him out of solidarity. Frankly, I don't have to wait long. Five minutes and he's done. He quickly rubs his hands up and down the tops of my arms as he pushes me toward the Mustang, and I allow myself a moment to enjoy the small show of affection. It's so normal, a guy trying to make sure that his girl is kept warm.
In this brief, short moment, we really could be anybody, some couple driven stir crazy from being cooped up inside by the weather, braving the cold to stretch their legs. I reach the car first and insist on opening my door myself. Then I toss the keys to Pasha on the other side of the vehicle.
An hour later, and we're halfway back to Spokane when Pasha realizes that the Mustang is running on fumes. We haven't eaten breakfast, didn't want to wake Shireen and the kids up to bother them for coffee either, and my stomach is snarling quite ferociously. Patting myself down, making sure I have my wallet on me when Pasha pulls into the first gas station we come across, I climb out of the car, too, and I head inside to pick up supplies.
Inside the gas station, a news report is playing over tinny speakers. Behind the counter, a tall, reedy looking man with a hooked nose watches me suspiciously as I walk down the aisles searching for something that looks vaguely half edible.
“Patients of Saint Peter’s of Mercy Hospital ran in fear from the armed assailants, as the fire fight took to the building’s stairwells. At least one police officer was killed at the scene, while a number of others were injured.”
In the end I settle for a bag of chips, two coffees, two croissants from a warmer by the coffee machine, and at the last minute, when I head to the counter, I grab a couple of apples from the bowl next to the lottery tickets.
“In a rare public statement from the DEA, Agent Lowell addressed the people of Seattle this afternoon, appealing them to come forward if they have any information that might assist in the apprehension of the two gunmen. ‘These people aren’t just criminals. They’re a threat to our way of life. If we can’t even work to ensure that our hospitals are safe, then it won’t be long before the streets of Washington descend into outright warfare. Right now, we believe the woman the two gunmen took from the hospital is a doctor, and could be in danger. If anyone sees Sloane Romera, please call—”
“Breakfast of champions, right?”
I look up from the stack of food I’ve just set down on the counter to find the hooked-nose guy leering at me.
Gross. He looks shifty as fuck.
I reach into my pocket for my wallet, looking down at the newspaper stand, half-interested in finding out more about the hospital shooting on the radio, and I almost gasp out loud when I see the front cover of the paper sitting on a rack to my right. Not just one newspaper, but four newspapers, different publications, all local to the Spokane area, and then a national paper on the end too, all of which bear the same photo of the same little boy. A little boy I know very well indeed.
‘Five-year-old Boy's Mutilated Body Found On The Banks of the Spokane River.
‘Russian Mob Boss's Second Child Found Murdered. Child Killer Still At Large.’
‘Little Boy’s Mutilated Body Found and Identified Late Last Night. Police Calling The Murder ‘ An Act of True Evil.’
My eyes skip over the big block letters on each of the newspapers, but I can't seem to really take the information in. Lazlo admitted he'd done it. He confessed that he'd killed Corey. But this…seeing it in black and white print, plastered all over the front of the news has just made it painfully real for me.
I've been pushing myself forward, only thinking about Sarah, only doing what’s necessary to make sure she’s returned to us safely. What I have not done is given myself permission to really think about what happened to Corey Petrov. He was found on the banks of the Spokane River. Does that mean he drowned? Did Lazlo hold the little boy under the water, struggling, fighting for his life until he just stopped moving? Or was Corey already dead before he even went into the water? The headline says his body was mutilated...
My hands are shaking like crazy as I try and pull a twenty dollar bill out of my purse. I can't seem to steady them long enough to pay the cashier. “Parents of these kids ought to be more careful,” the man says, nodding toward the papers. “Everyone keeps going on about how no one had to lock their doors back in the day. Kids used to be able to play out on the street until it went dark, and nothing bad never happened to nobody. Times have changed though, haven't they? People don't think twice before they steal or break something. Seems there are far more psychos out there now, killing kids and raping women, than there ever used to be. People should know better than to let their kids out of their sight for even a second. You ask me, it serves ’em right for being so careless.”
Would the guy be so brazen if he knew the man he was accusing of carelessness was Yuri Petrov? Who knows. Would he change his tune if he knew the little boy had been taken from inside a locked house? Corey hadn't been left on his own, abandoned by his parents, as I'd first suspected when I received his 911 call. He'd been left at home in the care of his brother. It wasn't as if he'd been out wandering the streets alone after dark.
My head starts to spin, and I suddenly realize that I haven't taken a breath in the last thirty seconds. I snatch the twenty dollar bill out of my purse, thrusting the money at the teller, an
d I gather the food and coffees, hurrying for the door. “Hey, don't you want your change?” the cashier calls after me. I don't answer him. I don't even look back.
Across the forecourt, Pasha sees the look on my face and heads me off, reaching me halfway between the store and the Mustang, his expression darkening by the second. “What is it? What's wrong?”
I shake my head, handing him a coffee. “Nothing. God, nothing. It's fine,” I say, shaking my head. “It's just…we have to find Sarah.”
Pasha doesn’t push. He gives me a minute to compose myself, sitting silently in the car as he drives, while I stare down at my hands, trying not to think about the fact that, right at this moment, Corey’s body is laying on a cold metal slab in a mortuary somewhere on the south side of the city. Eventually, I explain the newspaper headlines to Pasha, and he curses through his teeth, his face a mask of fury.
He doesn't take me home. Instead he skirts the city, taking a series of switchback roads up into the mountains that overlook the sprawling expanse of ciy streets below. We drive through forest, tall, snow-capped trees looming on either side of the road, until the tarmac ends abruptly around a sharp corner in front of a modest looking white single-story building with a two-car garage to the right-hand side.
There's nothing particularly remarkable about the building. It's the view beyond it that's astonishing. Perched on the edge of a cliff face, the house looks out over the entire city. Three hundred feet below us and a good ten miles away, two hundred thousand people are going about their daily lives, completely oblivious to the fact that they are being observed from this high, secluded vantage point. It all feels so unreachable from here. Untouchable. Really, it’s magnificent.
When he notices the look on my face, Pasha tries to hide the fact that he's pleased. He fails epically. “It’s even better inside,” he tells me. “The view from the balcony is insane.”
I'm honestly a little taken aback when Pasha slides a key into the Yale lock on the front door and opens it unceremoniously. There's no security keypad, no secret panel in the wall that pops out and scans his hand. I just assumed Pasha would be super security conscious, and the fact that he's relying on a simple Yale lock that even I could pick to keep his property safe is surprising to me.
