And I couldn’t. That would set everything in motion again, undoing the fragile stability we’d found. The best thing I could do—the only thing I could do—was to keep her at arm’s length. “This gang—Petrov’s gang, the ones who Seventeen works for. Can you find them with your hacking?”
“I can find anyone,” she muttered.
I nodded and drove on for a while, giving her space. At last, she turned back towards me, blinking away the last of her tears. “The university,” she said. “Their sociology department runs a criminology course and its network has a gateway into the NYPD database. Much easier than breaking in directly.” She looked me up and down. “But first, you need some new clothes. You’ll need to look like a student.”
We found a clothes store that Gabriella declared was suitable. I stared dumbly at the racks while Gabriella picked out cargo pants, sneakers, a t-shirt, a shirt and a jacket. We threw in a backpack to put my suit and shoes in.
“I feel stupid,” I muttered when I came out of the changing room.
“You’ll pass,” she told me. “If anyone asks, you’re a Russian grad student.”
We walked back to the car with me adjusting my pants every few steps. I couldn’t get used to not wearing a suit.
It wasn’t difficult to sneak into the sociology building. With her laptop under one arm and her jeans and sneakers, Gabriella looked like any other student. I still felt ridiculous, but I walked alongside her and tried to blend in.
“Don’t look so damn purposeful,” she said after a while. “Just...stroll.”
I looked down at my feet and tried my best. She was right: the students moved differently. They slouched around, takeout coffee cup in one hand, Macbook under the other arm, listening to music on their headphones. They moved as if they had all the time in the world.
This is the life she should have, I thought. A student, with friends and a whole world of possibilities. Not an empty existence in that apartment.
If we fixed things, if things could go back to the way things were...would she go back to that solitary life? Was that her future, when we parted? She deserved better. She deserved—
She deserved a man. That thought tore me in half, because I didn’t want to think of her alone. But I couldn’t bear the thought of her with someone else, either.
“So, what do we do?” I asked impatiently. The sooner we got the information we needed and got out of there, the better. I was way out of my element.
“Their network has WiFi so I can login from anywhere in this building, but I need a username and password.”
“How do we get those?”
“Well, I’ve never done it like this before. Normally I’d do it from my apartment: I’d find a criminology student on Facebook and befriend her and get her to install some game Yolanda had tinkered with on her laptop. The game would be malware—”
“What wear?” I didn’t understand any of this stuff. I didn’t trust technology—technology was the preserve of the government, the police. Messing with it was a good way to get caught. That, and I’d never had anyone to teach me.
Gabriella bit her lip, trying to find a way to explain it. “Malware is like...like the inside man on a bank job. That would let me take over her laptop and use the network as if I was her. But we don’t have time for all that, so we’ll have to do some social engineering.”
“Some what?” I was feeling steadily more and more stupid.
“We have to get someone’s password from them.”
Finally! Something I understood. A male student with a lip piercing and bleached blond hair was just walking past me. I checked no one was watching and then grabbed his shirt and dragged him towards the men’s room.
“Hey! Shit!” He flailed and kicked, so I lifted him off the ground and carried him.
“Um…” said Gabriella, sounding worried. She hurried after us.
I crashed through the door to the men’s room and slammed the guy up against the wall. “What is password?” I snarled.
“What?” he squeaked.
Gabriella burst in. “This wasn’t what I meant!”
“What is password?” I snarled again, putting my face right up to his.
“Your password for the network!” Gabriella said quickly. “And your username!”
“What?” The guy’s voice was going higher and higher. “Are you serious?”
I grabbed his hand. “I break his fingers,” I said, and gripped the first one.
“ARGH! SHIT! km425 and my password’s giraffechewing with ‘3s’ for the ‘e’s!”
“You tell anyone, I come in night with knife and slit your throat,” I told him.
He looked as if he was going to throw up, but he managed to nod. I let him go and he fell to the floor, scrambled to his feet and fled.
When I turned around, Gabriella was staring at me in horror. “What?” I asked, genuinely confused.
She shook her head and refused to meet my eyes.
“He’s okay,” I said defensively. “He’s not hurt.”
She shook her head again. “You can’t just….” She raised her hands helplessly in the air and indicated the whole scene in the men’s room. Then she lowered her hands and grabbed mine, squeezing the fingers that had wrapped so easily around the student’s knuckles.
I’d only done what I’d always done. Hurting people, scaring them— that was part of what I did. I hadn’t really thought about it—compared to the killing, it seemed like such a small thing.
But for the first time, I saw it through her eyes—through the eyes of a civilian. And suddenly it didn’t seem like such a small thing at all. We were even more different than I’d thought: it wasn’t just the killing, it was the whole way I interacted with people. I nodded, to show I understood, and she released my hands and turned away. But I stood there for a second before I followed. I’d just realized the gulf between us was even wider than I’d thought.
Gabriella led me to a quiet corner of the building, then fired up her laptop. I prepared to keep watch, but it only took her a few minutes to find what she needed.
“Petrov’s gang,” she said with satisfaction. “They operate out of a ship in the harbor.”
I looked at her, sitting there with her laptop—so small, so fragile. I hadn’t dealt with Petrov’s men, but I knew their kind. Not civilized men, like Vadim and even Artur, but foot soldiers. Thugs. The thought of men like that, around a girl as beautiful as Gabriella, made my guts twist. What had happened in the men’s room had reminded me I was a monster, but it had also shown me how unprepared she was for dealing with people like me. She was innocent...and defenseless.
I couldn’t leave her behind—by now, word might have got around of my treachery and there might even be a price on our heads. She’d be an easy target, sitting on her own in a car. I had to keep her close.
But I could at least make sure she could hurt the bastards, if anything went wrong. “Does this place have a gym?” I asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“There’s something I need to teach you.”
Gabriella
It was evening, by now, and the gym building was open but mostly deserted. The hallways were empty and echoing and I found myself walking closer to Alexei, fighting the rising panic. I could smell floor polish and nothing looked familiar and—
“You okay?” Alexei asked.
“Yep,” I lied.
We slipped into an empty yoga studio. Alexei pulled a wad of mats from a pile and threw them on the floor, pushing them with his feet until they formed a thick pad. He stepped onto it and gestured for me to do the same.
“What is this?” I asked.
He looked down at his feet as if embarrassed. When he met my eyes again, he said, “I want to teach you how to hurt someone.”
“You mean like self-defense?”
“No. Not like self-defense.” He stepped closer. Close enough that I had to look up at him. “Self-defense is for getting away...so that you can run. Like with a guy in an alley.
”
I swallowed. Fear was starting to churn in my belly. “But?”
He was reluctant to answer. “But with the people we have to deal with, you may not have any place to run. You may have to hurt them badly enough that they can’t hurt you.”
I shook my head. “I can’t do that. I’m…” I looked down at myself: not just much shorter than him but smaller in every dimension. “I’m...me.”
“You can do more than you think.” He squared up to me. “Most men will try to grab you. To pull you close.” He paused again. “They’ll want to—” He looked into my eyes and I could see he didn’t want to say it. It wasn’t just that he didn’t want to upset me—I could tell he detested the idea so much that he didn’t even want to give it voice.
“I understand,” I said, hoping I sounded braver than I felt.
“They’ll expect you to pull away. But you will pull them towards you. And then choke them.”
I felt my eyes go wide. “Choke them?!”
“I will show you.” He lifted those big hands towards me, then froze. “Gabriella...you know I would never hurt you?”
That hadn’t even crossed my mind. I hadn’t tensed, when I’d seen those hands coming—in fact, just the action of him reaching for me had made my whole body come alive with anticipation. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me...but hearing him say it was a thousand times more powerful than I would have dreamed. “I know that,” I managed.
He put his hands on my shoulders. I tried to ignore their warmth, tried to resist the urge to snuggle into them.
“Grab me around the neck with both hands,” he told me. “You’re going to pull my head down, hard.”
I hesitantly reached around that massive body and grabbed the back of his neck with both hands. He was so warm, so strong under my fingers, with a dusting of fuzzy hair I wanted to caress. I tried to pull his head down, but it was like trying to coax a bull to move. This is ridiculous!
“Step back suddenly as you do it,” he ordered. “Pull me with you. And bring your knee up hard, knee me in the chest. Then I’ll have to bend.”
I stepped back uncertainly, the gym mat squishy under my feet. I brought up my knee and, just as he’d said, he had to bend at the waist to cushion the impact. His upper body swung down, the top of his head brushing—
I felt his breath, hot against my stomach through the thin cotton of my blouse. “You want the top of my head to be on your right...breast.”
I nodded. I didn’t miss the little hesitation. I pulled his head down until it was in the right position and tried to ignore how it felt.
“Now bring up your right arm. Put your wrist against my windpipe.”
I brought it up and nestled it there, careful not to push too hard.
“No. Turn your wrist sideways. Use the bone.”
Feeling uncomfortable, I turned my wrist and felt the hard edge of it push up against his soft, gristly windpipe.
“Now push me down with other hand. And hold on because I’ll fight. Keep going until I go limp.”
I mimed doing it, my squeamishness increasing.
He got me to do it several times before he said, “Good. Now do it for real.”
I looked up at him and grinned, delighted. Alexei made a joke!
I should have known better. I looked at his stony face for several seconds and my grin crumbled. “Not really for real, though?”
“You have to know what it feels like.”
“But not really...not until you pass out!”
“If you’re not used to it, you might stop too soon.”
“What if I stop too late?! I could kill you!”
He thought about it. “Then don’t stop too late.” He moved back and prepared to come at me again.
I put my hands up to stop him. “Wait. I’m not sure about this.” I looked around. The gym and even the corridors around us were completely deserted, now. If anything went wrong, there’d be no one to help.
He shook his head. “You have to. You need to be able to do this. It might be the only thing that saves your life.”
“Wait—”
He pinned me with a look, letting me see just a fraction of that cold menace he used on other people. It was like someone running a freezing steel pipe between my shoulder blades. Despite everything I knew about him, everything we’d shared together, I got scared. Just as he wanted.
And then he came at me, big hands reaching, clawing, huge and powerful and male, ready to tear—
—tear—
—tear my clothes off and—
I reacted. I grabbed him around the back of the neck, stepped back and brought my knee up hard, feeling him oof as it drove into his stomach. The edge of my wrist came up and dug into the gristly tube of his windpipe and, this time, I pushed his head down until I felt his windpipe give. He started to struggle and thrash, his big arms swinging at me, and I had to dodge out of the way as I held on. It was an eerily intimate sensation, holding him pinned like that. He thrashed and thrashed and the nausea rose inside me, but it still felt unbelievable that a huge beast like him could be felled by someone like me. It’s okay. He’s just pretending, to make me feel good. He’s not really—
His body went suddenly heavy. Really heavy. His arms stopped swinging and he keeled forward, almost knocking me over. I panicked and rocked him the other way, trying to let him down gently, but he was way too big for me to control. He slumped to the pile of mats, his head bouncing off of it—he probably would have cracked his skull, if we’d been on concrete.
“Alexei?” My voice was shrill with disbelief. He wasn’t faking. “Alexei?”
He just lay there, huge and warm and silent. My one safe place: gone. Shit! Was his chest moving? It was difficult to tell. I put my ear to his mouth and, after a few seconds, I thought I could detect breath, but it was weak and raspy.
I shook him. “Alexei!”
He opened his eyes, licked his lips and coughed, then rubbed at his neck. Then he said something in Russian.
“What?”
“I said good. Well done.”
I couldn’t help it—I threw my arms around his neck and hugged him tight, pressing myself as hard as I could against him. Then, as soon as I could bear to let him go, I sat down next to him and punched him in the arm. “Jesus! You scared the hell out of me.”
He sat up, looking a little unsteady. “Now you know. Now you can do it. Make a man pass out...or even keep going and kill him.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know if I could.”
He nodded as if he had absolute faith in me. “Yes you could. You just don’t want to believe that you could.”
I swallowed and looked away, not meeting his eyes. I knew he was right. I was becoming more like him. I just hoped that he was being over-cautious, that the ship wouldn’t be as dangerous as he feared.
It wasn’t. It was much, much worse.
Alexei
Things started to go wrong almost immediately.
By the time we reached the docks, the sun had fully set, and the place was a treacherous obstacle course: coiled ropes, chains hanging diagonally from boats at neck level, pools of water and spilled oil. It was the sort of place where an outsider was at a disadvantage: if we had to run, we’d either have to slow right down or trip over something—either way, Petrov’s gang would catch us easily.
We had the name of the ship, but finding it amongst all the dark shapes took a full half hour. Eventually, Gabriella spotted it: an aging cargo ship painted in cheap gray paint. I parked as close as I could, reversing the car in so that we could drive out fast, but there was still far too much dark, cluttered dockside to navigate for my liking.
We didn’t have a choice, though. Word spreads fast in the underworld. By morning, word of my rebellion against Nikolai would have made it around all the Russian gangs in New York and that would make things a thousand times more difficult. I just had to hope word hadn’t already reached Petrov.
There were only two guys standing watch on the deck o
f the ship. That was bad, because Petrov’s gang weren’t stupid: there must be more than that. We just couldn’t see them, yet.
I checked the gun in my holster one last time—I’d put my suit back on, which felt fantastic after those stupid student clothes, like coming home. I got out and motioned for Gabriella to do the same, approaching the ship slowly and openly, hands where they could be seen. We’d almost reached the gangplank when a voice rang out from behind me.
“Alexei Borinskov. What brings you all the way out here?”
I spun around, but found myself looking straight into a narrow, sun-bright circle of light. A man—Petrov, I guessed—was standing on top of a shipping container and he had us pinned in the beam. I knew it wouldn’t be just a torch. It would be a tactical light attached to the top of a gun. He had us right in his sights and I couldn’t see a thing.
I tried to brazen it out. “I just want to talk business.”
There was a metallic click off to my left as someone cocked a gun. Another click off to my right. They had us surrounded. They must have seen us as soon as we’d entered the docks.
“Word is,” said Petrov, “you went soft on some girl and turned on Nikolai. Disloyalty, Alexei, is never good. I’m sure Nikolai would be very grateful if I cleaned up his mess for him.”
Shit. “That’s not what happened,” I said, trying to sound angry.
“Then what did?” The circle of light moved to Gabriella and she flinched, throwing up her hands to shield her eyes. “She’s alive, isn’t she?”
Suddenly, I knew exactly what I had to do. They’d heard rumors, but they weren’t sure—if they were, they would have shot us by now. They knew me by reputation—everyone did.
All I had to do was become that Alexei again. The one who’d walked into Gabriella’s apartment. As soon as I thought it, I could feel my old ways coming back to me. It felt right, even though I knew it was wrong. It felt as good and familiar as when I’d put my suit back on.
I grabbed Gabriella by the waist and hauled her up against me, her ass to my groin. And then, as she squirmed in shock against me, I ran my hands up her body and over her breasts. God, the feel of them in my hands at last, even through her blouse. I could feel myself getting hard, despite the situation.
Kissing My Killer Page 10
