My finger tightened a little more on the trigger. All I had to do was move one finger. It shouldn’t be this difficult.
Um… she said in my mind. We were back in the coffee shop and her wrist was so slender, so fragile in my hand.
I could smell her: strawberry soap and warm femininity. I heard a tiny, silken sound, right at the edge of perception, and realized it was the sound of her hair as she frantically shook her head.
I opened my eyes.
She’d started crying while my eyes were closed. Her cheeks were gleaming with tears and those big hazel eyes were scrunched up and brimming. I watched her cry and it was as if someone was crushing my heart in their fist.
The arm holding the gun suddenly dropped and I spun to face away from her. “Chyort voz'mi!” I yelled. Damn it! I called myself zalupa and dolbo yeb and a few other names beside as I cradled the gun in both hands, hoping that I could work myself up to it.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t kill her.
I turned back to her and sat down on the floor with absolutely no idea what to do next.
Gabriella
He sat down heavily, his muscled body sending a shockwave through the floor. I didn’t dare to move. Should I look at him? Not look at him? Which would be more likely to spur him to violence?
Everything I’d ever read or seen on the news about hostages and gunmen was blurring into one in my head, but none of it made sense. Those people were all crazy guys who picked up a gun and started shooting because something went wrong in their lives, or because there was something wrong with them. This guy was different. He’d marched into my apartment utterly efficient and without hesitation and he’d clearly been ready to kill me...until, suddenly, he couldn’t.
He wasn’t a crazed killer driven by emotion. He was a professional and emotion was the only thing keeping me alive.
He was sitting with his knees up and the gun dangling between them, staring at the floor. The sheer size of him would have been intimidating even without the gun.
I had one leg bent under me and it was starting to cramp really badly. I had to move it. I did it as slowly as I could—
He didn’t lift his head, but he raised his eyes to look at me. God, he was gorgeous. Those gray eyes were beautiful but, when they were filled with doubt and conflict as they were now, they were achingly sad. How could a man so strong, so physically brutal, have that much emotion inside him?
And why did I feel such an instinctual yearning to try to help him with the pain?
I slowly finished moving my leg. That left me sitting in the same position he was—on my ass on the floor, knees up, facing him. For a long moment we just sat there, barely breathing.
What the fuck am I going to do?
I tentatively leaned forward and put my hand on his ankle, just trying to make some sort of connection.
And that’s when he grabbed me.
Alexei
Her fingers closed on my ankle and that snapped me back to alertness. All those hardwired instincts kicked in, the ones that had been forged in the mud and the rain with my commanding officer screaming in my ear. I reacted.
I grabbed her wrist and heaved and she flew through the air like a doll. She landed on the floor on her back, the air knocked out of her, and I was already on top of her. One hand was on her upper chest, pinning her down. The other held the gun, the barrel pressed to her forehead.
I was almost as shocked as she was. I’d done it on instinct, without conscious thought. But suddenly I was there, the gun cocked and ready—
Do it! Do it now!
Her eyes stared up at me beseechingly. I couldn’t do it. But I couldn’t let her go, either. The consequences of not killing her started to sink in. I had no idea what to do.
And as my mind spun, the rest of me was left to react in its own way. I started to become aware of things. Things like the scent of her, again, every breath I took drinking in more of her.
Things like the way her body felt under mine, so soft and warm. I was basically lying on top of her. One of my legs was outside hers, but the other was between them, our groins pressed together.
I glanced down at my hand. I’d just pinned her down, the way I would a man. But that meant my fingers were brushing her collarbone and the heel of my hand—
The heel of my hand was on the upper slope of her breast.
I could feel the warm softness through the thin fabric of her nightshirt. I remembered that she wasn’t wearing a bra.
I looked down and saw that the nightshirt had ridden up when I’d thrown her. On one side, it was rucked up around her upper thighs. On the other, it was high enough that I could see her black briefs and even the skin just above them.
I could feel myself getting hard. My body’s caveman reaction, a gorgeous woman powerless and spread beneath me….
No! Jesus, no! I wasn’t going to take her by force! The idea sickened me. But that didn’t change the effect she was having on me. I was rock hard, now. I knew she must be able to feel the bulge in my pants because it was throbbing against her thigh. And the head of my cock was right up against the front panel of her panties.
Gabriella
Every breath I took made my breast rise and fall against his hand.
Jesus, he’s going to—
No he’s not.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t form a coherent thought. I just stared up into those icy gray eyes as they decided my fate. The gun was utterly motionless, the end of the barrel pressed right up against my forehead, holding me there like a butterfly stuck with a pin.
I was terrified and that was normal.
But…
No.
As I looked up at him, at those eyes—
No.
The way his chest bulged as he controlled me, the hardness of his body against mine—
No! This was wrong, utterly, utterly wrong.
It wasn’t that I wanted him to do something. Not like this. It was the fact that just being this close to him, in this position, was affecting me. I was getting—
No! No, I’m not!
But it didn’t matter how many times I denied it. My body was reacting and my brain had no say in it. It was pheromones or hormones or something. The feel of him, the sight of him, even the clean, masculine scent of him...it was sending hot currents swirling down through my body, joining together to make a dark vortex between my thighs. And his hard cock was right there, pressed against me. A few thin layers of cloth were all that separated him from...me.
It wasn’t the situation. It was him, in spite of the situation. I knew I wouldn’t have reacted like this with any other man.
He shifted his weight infinitesimally and I felt the head of his cock trace along the lips of my sex. I drew in a shuddering breath.
I wanted to scream. I wanted him to shoot me and get it over with.
But part of me just wanted him to lean down and kiss me.
We stared into each other’s eyes, our breathing in sync and getting faster and faster—
There was a knock at the door.
Gabriella
He rolled off of me and sprang to his feet. I couldn’t believe how fast he was, for such a big guy. I saw now how he’d caught me so easily in the hallway.
I lay there panting as he crept across the room, keeping the gun pointing at me the whole time. He put his eye to the door’s spy hole for a second, then crept back to me. He leaned down and put his lips to my ear and, for the first time in what seemed like hours, he spoke.
“Get rid of him,” he said, his accent turning each syllable into a rough-edged slab of steel, “Or I’ll have to kill him.”
I nodded dumbly. He allowed me to get up and walked with me to the door. Then he showed me how he wanted me to stand when I opened it—pressed right up against the edge of it.
I slowly opened the door. He stepped back, hiding behind it and watching through the spy hole. He put his hand on the small of my back, reminding me he was there. The heat of his touch throbbed thr
ough my nightshirt.
Standing in the hallway was my neighbor, Mr. Lazzari His white hair was poking out from under a Yankees hat—he must have been watching a game on TV. “You okay? I heard a scream.”
I just stared at him for a second. Rescue was right there.
But the man with his hand on my back would kill him. Maybe, maybe he’d then show me mercy—if that’s what had held him back so far. Maybe, if someone heard the shot and called the cops, I’d live. But Mr. Lazzari would still be dead. He had about sixteen grandchildren and he’d never hurt a person his whole life.
“I switched channels on the TV,” I said. I was shocked at how level my voice sounded. “And I forgot I had the volume cranked way up, and there was a movie on and...wow! I nearly hit the ceiling.” I forced a grin onto my face.
“Oh.” He peered into the apartment behind me, but there was nothing to see, nothing knocked over or out of place. “You sure?”
The hand on my back felt as if it was burning through my nightshirt to touch my skin. “Uh-huh.”
He nodded, a little embarrassed, and backed away. I swung the door slowly closed, turning as I did it. The man stepped forward from behind the door. And then we were staring at each other, our faces no more than a foot apart.
Alexei
God, she was beautiful. Standing there in her apartment, close enough that we could lean forward and kiss, we could have been a couple of lovers. Me in my suit, just home from work and my gorgeous girlfriend greeting me at the door—
And then I felt the weight of the gun in my hand.
I’d screwed up everything and now my life was unraveling. I couldn’t kill her but, if I didn’t, they’d kill me. Disloyalty isn’t accepted in the Bratva. And then they’d send someone to kill her, too.
One mistake. If I’d walked into that coffee shop two minutes earlier or later….
What the fuck am I going to do?
She must have seen my expression because she said, “You could just leave. I never saw you. I won’t tell anyone, I won’t go to the cops.”
I shook my head.
She looked around the apartment. “You can take anything you want. Please!”
I shook my head again.
Her voice was rising in fear. “I won’t go near Nikolai again. I’ll delete everything I got. You can watch me do it!”
I sighed. I suddenly felt very tired—tired of the whole system I was part of. “It doesn’t work that way,” I told her.
“Tell me! Tell me what I need to do!”
I just shook my head. There was nothing she could do.
She’d started to cry again. “You can’t just kill me! Please!”
“I don’t want to!” I snapped. “But if I don’t—”
There was another knock at the door. I checked the spy hole.
It was Lev.
I slowly opened the door. Lev had his hand under his jacket, ready to pull out his gun, but he relaxed when he saw it was me. He pushed past me. “What the fuck is going on?” Then he saw the girl. “Who the fuck is this? His girlfriend?”
I closed the door behind him. I thought about saying yes, but lying was pointless—unless I could produce a body, he’d figure it out. “She’s the hacker,” I said.
“Her?!” He looked her up and down in disbelief.
“Why did you come in?” I asked. Every muscle in my body was groaning and aching with tension. I’d never been so tightly wound in my life.
“Do you know how long you’ve been in here? And Nikolai called me, asking if it was done yet.” He looked at the girl again. “Why haven’t you done it yet?”
The girl and I exchanged a desperate look.
Lev saw. “Oh. You fucked her?” He looked at the girl’s long, bare legs.
“No!” I snapped.
“You want to? Is that it? You want to fuck her before you do it?”
“No!”
“It’s okay. Jesus, if that’s what you want, just do it so we can get out of here.” He looked at her legs again, then at the peaks her breasts made in the nightshirt. “We can both do her. Let’s take her in the bedroom.”
The girl was looking at me with huge, terrified eyes. I could feel everything sliding out of control. “No! Shut up!” I snapped.
But Lev didn’t care what I wanted, anymore. He put his hands on her shoulders and spun her to face the bedroom. “Come on. I’ll hold her. You can go first.”
“Don’t touch her!” I roared.
Everything stopped.
Lev blinked at me. “What...the fuck?”
I shook my head. “Just...go back to the car. I’ll deal with this.”
“You’ll deal with it? Like you’ve dealt with it so far?” Lev shook his head. “What the fuck has got into you?”
“Wait in the car!”
“Christ!” He pushed the girl forward, away from him, and she went stumbling. “I’ll fucking do it.” He pulled out his gun.
“She could be useful,” I said desperately. “She could work for us. Hack our enemies!”
Lev snorted. “Nikolai was crystal fucking clear. Kill the hacker. He wants us to destroy her computer, too.”
And he raised his gun to fire.
Gabriella
I was staring down the barrel of a gun again, but this guy was different.
I’d known it as soon as I saw him, as soon as he’d leered at me. Meeting the second guy threw the first guy into sharp relief. He was smaller and slighter next to my huge guy. He was angry and jumpy where my guy was cold and controlled...and yet burning hot underneath. And this guy was leering at me with a crude, frat boy’s lust where my guy....my guy seemed to want me on a much deeper, more powerful level...but was wrestling with himself, holding himself back.
I caught myself. When did he become “my” guy?
I looked over to where he was standing, my eyes wide and pleading.
The new guy cocked his gun.
I closed my eyes.
There was a quick, low sound that vibrated in my eardrums. I’d heard that sound in movies, the sound of a silenced shot. I waited for the pain, but it didn’t come.
I opened my eyes to see the new guy slumping to the ground. Then I saw the big guy lowering his smoking gun. He was staring at it as if he’d never seen it before. He lifted his eyes to me and, just for a second, he looked helpless. Seconds passed.
“What have I done?” he asked.
I didn’t have any words. I just shook my head.
Suddenly, he was running at me. He grabbed my upper arms and lifted me right off the floor and slammed me into the wall. “What did you make me do?!” he yelled. His eyes were wild.
I shook my head again, trying not to look at the body.
He pressed in closer, his abs hard against my stomach, his thighs forcing mine back against the wall. He grabbed my wrists and forced them up and out, pinning them beside my head. “This is your fault!” he yelled. “Why did you have to do this? Why did you have to steal from us?”
I felt my eyes widen. “Steal? I didn’t steal from him! We don’t steal!”
“You try to empty bank accounts!”
“No! I was looking for evidence!”
He frowned at that. “You’re CIA?”
“No! I’m—” I was sobbing as I said it. It sounded so fucking stupid, saying it out loud. “I’m a...vigilante. I hack to get evidence against human traffickers!”
He frowned even deeper, then shook his head. “We don’t do that.”
“Yes! You do! Nikolai does!”
He thumped the wall beside my head, hard enough that I flinched. “You stupid—” He put his face right up to mine. “I work for Nikolai and Nikolai works for the Malakovs!” he told me. “They sell guns, not women!”
The size of him was terrifying, but, weirdly, I didn’t fear violence from him the same way I’d feared it from the other guy. It didn’t feel as if he wanted to hurt me. So I didn’t back down. “Then Nikolai is doing some backroom deal,” I panted, “because he’s c
onnected with a guy called Carl and he is a trafficker—one of the biggest.”
He shook his head. But I stared right back at him. There were tears streaming down my cheeks but I lifted my chin defiantly. My whole life had changed, tonight, and I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen, but I knew I was right about this.
He studied me, watching for any hint of a lie. I stared right back at him. After a few seconds, I saw in his eyes the first faint traces of doubt—doubt about the story he’d been told. He shook his head again, but he released my wrists and stepped back, cursing under his breath in Russian.
I figured he needed a moment, so I kept quiet and glanced around the apartment. That was a mistake, because I finally got a good look at the dead body.
Most of one side of his head was missing.
I turned and ran for the bathroom, reaching the toilet just in time. When I’d rinsed my mouth and come back into the living area, the big guy had just finished dragging the body out of sight behind the couch. I didn’t know if he’d done it for my benefit, but I was insanely grateful either way.
“What happens now?” I asked when my stomach had settled enough to speak.
He looked at me with great sadness. “They kill us both.”
Alexei
I felt...lost. As if someone had pulled not just the floor but the whole world out from under me and I was falling through an endless black void.
I’d had the army, friends who felt like brothers, men I’d die to protect. My life had had structure and I was good at what I did. When I left the army, I’d been lost.
Nikolai had found me. He had work for a guy like me, he said. Work I already knew how to do. And so I found new brothers. A new family.
And now all that had been ripped away. After this, I wouldn’t just be out of the Bratva, I’d be their target.
Kissing My Killer Page 4
