“Why risk it?” I say after a moment, the words coming out twisted with rage.
“You know the answer,” Andrei says. “It’s all for her. It’s always been for her.
I look at Dakota as my blood turns cold.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Dakota
“Damian? What is it?”
He stands with the phone in his hand, completely and unashamedly naked, the phone looking like some twisted war-horn in the shadows of the night as he grips it tightly.
He growls and squeezes the phone like he wants to crush it in his paw.
The beast is out, oh, God, but not for that this time.
The monster inside of him flares in his eyes and for a second I see the same man who killed Dobry, the cold killer, the primal hitman.
“D-Damian,” I whisper.
“They’re here,” he snarls, snapping into quick movements as he paces across the room. “Get dressed. We need to get out of here. No arguments now, Popstar. Just do what I say when I say it. Understood?”
Here he is, clothed in semidarkness, each muscle rippling in the light and his entire being made taut with the need to protect me, protect our unborn child and Sparky and our future.
He’s not the murderer from my dreams.
He’ll kill, fine.
But to protect our family like the savage he is.
Suddenly this plush hotel suite – the scent of our lovemaking still lacing the air – has become a cave, and out there in the cave mouth, the outside, where a thousand dangers lurk. All I can do is cling to my cave-mate and hope he’s strong enough, fierce enough.
“Dakota?” he snaps. “Come on. Stay with me. Just calm down.”
“In the hotel,” I say, hardly recognizing the voice. “Jesus, Damian. Okay—this is bad. This is really bad. I thought you said they’d never do this.”
“They never have,” he murmurs. “But they said, he said—”
“What, Damian? Tell me. I deserve to know.”
My heart is thumping so hard it hurts. His eyes seem somehow even paler then normal, like cold ghost eyes gazing at me.
“He said all of this is for you,” Damian says. “Whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.”
“For me?”
Damian makes to say something, but deeper in the hotel suite Sparky lets out a high-pitched terrible yapping noise, and something wooden breaks loudly.
Like a door being kicked in and a little piebald Dachshund being grabbed.
“Sparky,” I yell, leaping to my feet in the bathrobe and flying across the room.
“Dakota, wait,” Damian yells behind me.
But I’m already running.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Damian
The bathrobe flutters behind her as she rounds the door, a flurry of night-shaded fabric in the night.
The barking, the wood shattering, the men’s footsteps …
I drift into the darkness of my mind, the state that Felix often talked about.
“The nothing land,” he told me once, his cigar tip glowing yellow in the night and his eyes fixated on the expanding darkness of the forest. “You go there, son, and nothing’s real. Not you, anybody else, anything else. You become a tool. A man’s got to act sometimes without thinking. It’s waking the beast up. Remember that.”
He was Uncle Felix and I always listened damn close when he told me something.
I learned it. I cultivated it.
I move on autopilot as I jog into the hallway, head bowed, sprinting full-tilt toward the sound of Sparky and my Popstar with her voice raised.
“Let me go, you bastard, you freaking—”
They see a naked seven foot tall man carved out of pure goddamn muscle – muscle that’s taken countless hours of hard work and grit and bone-deep steel – sprinting around the corner like a jungle cat.
They see something out of the Stone Age as I spin across the room.
One man – tattooed, Bratva – has Dakota by the arm, his other hand occupied with his gun. The other – Bratva, tattooed – is trying to wrangle Sparky into his arms, his gun wedged awkwardly against the pup as though any second he could drop it—or set it off.
“What the fuck?” one man growls in Russian.
“Ah,” the other grunts when I throw a vase at his head, moving so quickly he can’t even track the blur of my motion.
Already I’m airborne, leaping toward the other man as he tries to raise his gun. Sparky growls and springs onto the man’s forearm, a roar lacing the air, the gun clattering to the ground as good old Sparky latches on.
My fist connects with his throat and he sucks in a shivering gasp, his whole body flying backward against the display cabinet with the force of the blow. He coughs and then collapses, and all the shattered glass in the cabinet showers on him as it begins to fall.
“Sparky,” I snap. “Here, boy.”
I pace away, nodding at him to do the same. He pads over to my feet as the cabinet crushes the man, trapping him.
“Ah, oh, God …”
“Shut up or I’ll let him eat your face,” I snarl. “I mean it. One word. One fucking noise. You die. Understand? Nod. Don’t speak.”
He stares, the fight draining from his face.
Then he nods.
Because he understands that he’s in the room with a fucking animal now.
I turn and see that my Popstar has just closed the door to the hallway. She jogs over to Sparky and leans down, scooping him up.
My chest expands, but I fight it all done.
Fight. Kill. Protect.
That’s all I am now.
“Damian, what do we do?” she whimpers.
“Go back to the bedroom. Get some clothes. We’re leaving.”
Something in my voice stops her questions, her fears, from surfacing. She stares at me for a moment and then her eyes settle, and she nods. Because she knows, too, that Damian isn’t here anymore.
I’m just a naked man with two guns taken from the Bratva and I’ve been trained to kill my whole life.
She goes, and I raise the guns and stalk toward the door. I nudge it open and peer up and down the hallway.
It’s silent, too damn silent.
After all the noise we just made, the whole place should be alive with activity.
I shut the door, and then drag the heavy marble corner table and lean it against it, my arms straining and sweat sliding down my skin. I cross paths with the men.
I notice that one is still unconscious from the blow with the vase, but the one beneath the cabinet is just pretending to be unconscious, his body too stiff, his breathing irregular.
He’s waiting.
I pass him by, purposefully getting close enough for him to lunge.
He springs at me and I wheel around, spinning and then bringing the whole force of the momentum down on his head, crushing him against the floor with my fist.
He cries out and then grows dead-quiet, stiffening for a moment before he finally starts to breathe again, deep in violent dreams.
“You try to take my woman?” I growl, rising up. “My family?”
Dakota comes rushing back in, her hair in a no-bullshit bun, wearing the sweatpants and T-shirt I ordered for her. Even now, I can’t help but indulge in the way the T-shirt clings to her breasts, still suck-me-now round and juicy even in her bra. Her nipples are needy as fuck and still stick through.
“Damian,” she says, glaring. Her arms are wrapped around a bundle of clothes, my clothes. “Are you serious right now?”
“What?” I smirk.
She nods insistently and I look down at my massive rock hard cock.
“Okay, bad timing,” I chuckle grimly.
Fuck, I need to stay cold, detached, and joking around isn’t part of that.
“Hand me the clothes,” I snap.
She flinches.
“Okay, rude,” she sasses.
“Not now, Popstar,” I say, smirking despite myself.
“This is c
razy,” she whispers, our hands touching briefly as she hands me the clothes. She clutches my fingers for a moment. “Really freaking crazy. Promise me we’re in this together?”
“Always,” I snarl. “Everything I do, everything I am, it’s for you, Dakota. Don’t you get it? That’s the other half of me owning you. You own me, too. It’s me and you against the whole world, so fuck any asshole that was mean to you in high school, fuck the bastards whoever tried to take advantage of you, fuck those pricks who couldn’t see how curvy and attractive you are—fuck them and fuck the Bratva and fuck it all, alright, except for me, you, Sparky, and our children. Understand? That’s an order, you dirty little sex-goddess.”
I bare my teeth and step away because the beast in me is so loud now I could easily fuck her right here, in front of Sparky and the Bratva men, my lust taking over until I’d railroad her against the wall, pommeling her pink pussy until it was all red and creamy and well-used from my indulgence.
And then turn her over and fuck those tits until she’s good and slippery down there for me, and just smash her and watch her bounce sexily for me.
I shake my head and turn away.
“You’re an animal,” she whispers behind me.
“I know,” I grunt.
“I can’t even understand how you’re thinking about that right now.”
“You want to be glad I am,” I growl, pulling on my briefs quickly … which is difficult with my in-the-way cock to contend with. I push it aside and wedge it down my thigh. “When one primal part of a man wakes up, it doesn’t come alone. Every part of him becomes more primal. Do you understand, Popstar?”
I pull on the shirt and button it with swift fingers, slowing my breathing, focusing my instincts.
“I don’t think so,” she says.
“It means that you should be happy that I could bend you over here and fuck you ragged and not give a damn what noises you made as long as I got to fire my hot seed into your cunt. You should be glad, Dakota, because it means I’ll also hammer in the face of anybody who tries to hurt you. It means I’ll crush their throats and do all the fucked-up things men are meant to do to protect their women. You hear me?”
“Y-yes, Damian,” she whispers. “You sound sort of scary right now.”
“Scary? Me?”
I cock a smirk, but I feel it come out forced. I’m too distanced by the need to be alert.
“So, what’s the plan?” she asks. “Do you want me to take a gun?”
“Have you ever used a firearm before?”
“No, but how hard can it be?” she snaps.
I laugh grimly. “Harder than you’d think.”
“Well, how much harder?”
“Harder like you could end up panicking because of the recoil and accidentally killing Sparky, that sort of harder,” I snap. “No, all I want from you is to keep yourself, my baby, and my dog safe, understand? That’s your role.”
“I can do that,” she says, nodding fiercely. “I won’t let anything happen to them—to us.”
“Okay, just stay close to me. Grab Sparky and try to keep him quiet.”
She kneels down and whispers to him, and my chest tries to expand again, at the sweetness in her soft murmurings of encouragement. Sparky calms and gives into his trust of her, lying in her arms in a tight ball so that he can be carried. She stands and realizes I’m watching her, offering me a cute sort of half-smile.
“Getting a good look?” she murmurs.
“Always,” I growl.
“Now what?” Dakota asks.
“You stay close to me. We head for the fire escape. I kill anybody who gets in our way.”
“More killing?”
I grab her hips and shove her against me, letting her feel how rock hard I still am through my pants. I glare into her eyes as she leans away, keeping Sparky out of the embrace. I grab that round sweet ass of hers and use it as a fleshy handle to push her closer against me, grinding the tightness in my throbbing dick right against her.
“Or I let the beast out in other ways. So what is it, Dakota, more killing or more fucking?”
“You’re an animal,” she moans, unable to hide the lust in her voice, or in the way her eyes twitch wider and wider for me, the horny wet goddess.
“If I touched you right now, you’d be hot and drenched, wouldn’t you?”
“Damian …”
“I know, I know,” I growl, letting her go and turning away, angry now at the motherfuckers trying to become between me and more of her tight hot cunt, where my dick belongs. “Alright, stay close. Or have you got a problem with the idea that I might have to put down some bastard who’s trying to hurt my family?”
“No,” she says, looking at me squarely, my brave Popstar. “If anybody tries to hurt our family, send them straight to hell.”
We stare at each other like we’re two jungle cats, ready to brave the dangers of this savage land and face it all together.
We stare like an animal recognizing another animal. I stare like she’s my damn soulmate because she is if such a thing exists.
She’s mine. She’s everything.
And then the door crashes open.
He’s holding a knife.
And he’s running right at her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Dakota
I scream and leap at Sparky.
The little piebald’s teeth growl at the man’s legs, his sausage-dog legs tensing as though he’s going to take the attacker down.
I grab him and dance clumsily back into the hallway, my body aching with all the running and tensing. But adrenalin pumps through me, making everything else quiet.
The man rounds the corner and then there are more footsteps and more men. They sprint into the room so that it’s like a wave of them, most of them wearing brown or black leather jackets, with tattoos at their necks and wrists and knuckles. Knives glint everywhere, and the man who stalks toward me grips a shiny silver knuckle-duster in one hand and a gun in the other.
“Come here,” the man says with a heavy Russian accent.
His eyes are hard and unflinching beneath his bald head.
His teeth grit and he collapses violently onto one knee. I flinch and leap back, and then see that Damian is screaming at me, that he just fired a bullet into the man’s leg.
I see it but hardly hear it. Panic is making the sound seem muted, and faraway, as if I’m drifting apart from my body.
I focus hard. I need to think about the dog wriggling in my arms.
“Lock the door,” Damian roars. “Go. Now.”
The Russian grimaces and raises his gun, and then roars out when his fingers are blown away from his hand, the gun clattering on the floor.
I spin and run, hardly thinking, not feeling a thing.
I run on panic mode like an animal, my only concern to get Sparky somewhere safe. I’m dimly aware of footsteps behind me and more screaming and roaring and fighting noises, but if I turn back Sparky will leap from my arms.
He’ll get crushed under a foot or shot with a misplaced bullet or thrown out of the window or anything.
“Come on, boy,” I breathe, my voice sounding oddly calm.
I kick open the bedroom door and bash it closed behind me with my hip, and then spin and quickly let Sparky go. I lock the door and grab Sparky, but my hands meet with the air as he leaps back, eyeing me knowingly.
You’re keeping me from helping my dad, his intelligent eyes say.
“Sparky,” I whisper, moving toward him slowly, leaning down and ignoring the burn in my legs from the sex and the running. “Come on, boy. It’s okay.”
I move to grab him, but at the last moment, he wriggles out of my grasp and leaps onto the bed. He runs across and then springs up onto his hind legs, waving his forelegs at me.
He collapses into a play bow and then springs up again.
“Sparky, please just come here,” I say.
I glance at the locked door, but it hasn’t made a noise since we came in here.
The noises are further along the corridor.
Grunts and screams and Russian men roaring at each other, words I don’t understand.
My body tightens with fear as I start to realize that Sparky’s right.
What are we doing?
We’re in here hiding when we should be out there helping Damian.
I move toward the door.
And then I hear his words, growling in my mind, a beast just for me.
Keep yourself, my baby, and my dog safe, understand? That’s your role.
“Okay,” I say, turning back toward Sparky. “Boy, come here—”
A knock comes from the door. I turn, biting my lip.
“Yes?” I say, trying to make my voice calm.
“It’s me,” Damian growls. “Open up. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
Sirens touch the air, getting closer, which means they must be almost outside if I can hear them all the way up here.
I walk to the door and open it with a shaky hand, letting Damian walk in … with a man’s head clutched in his bear paw. He grips him by the back of the head and drags him into the room.
The man is tall and blonde, with a pencil-thin mustache over his upper lip. He’s well-built and muscular like most of the Bratva, but next to Damian’s savage muscle, he looks too bloated, like a wannabe tough guy.
Whereas Damian is an actual tough guy.
“Dakota,” the man says, wincing at the pain of Damian clutching his skull. “It is nice to see you.”
“Where are the others?” I gasp, looking at the open door.
“They won’t be bothering us,” Damian snarls.
“Are they—”
“They’re all alive,” Damian says. “But some of them might die from their injuries if they don’t get help soon. Which I’m sure they will get on their way to prison. You fucked up, Andrei. You hit a place people care about. And you owe this woman an explanation. Why do this to her?”
I stand up straighter, bunching my fists, my soul singing that Damian would think of me at a time like this. Sparky crouches ready to spring at my side, softly growling at the man.
“Yes,” I snap, fierceness entering my voice.
Her Hitman: An Instalove Possessive Older Man Younger Woman Romance Page 12
