Bone Deep (30 page)

“He listened to mine and he gave me you,” he told her.

He was within feet of her when she turned. Her hazel eyes were dark with pain. He had done that. Dmitry reached for her and she flinched.

“You shot me,” she said.

“You were going to kill her and I couldn’t let you,” he responded harshly.

“You hurt me,” she whispered.

“No more than I hurt myself.”

“I will not let you hurt me again,” she assured him.

He nodded. “I will not hurt you again.”

“Yes, you will. When it comes time for me to act, you will step in front of me and demand the pieces of me that bind us—you will try to force me away from doing what must be done. You will not break me, Dmitry Asinimov.”

Her voice rang out in the morning and it was him flinching then. “There is only a single battle I will ever fight with you again.”

Her gaze pierced his soul, rending him in two. But both halves remained hers.

He was Bone’s.

“And what battle is that, Dmitry?” she scoffed.

“Love,” he answered simply.
“Ljubovj–velichajshaja bitva.”

She went to her knees, a single tear tracking down her cheek. “Do not do this to me,” she pleaded. He had said the same words to her in Virginia. They hurt more here in this place of endings.

He came down before her, opening his heart and mind and soul to a killer who’d done nothing but save him time after time. “If I do not do this to you, I will walk alone my entire life. I cannot let you leave because you are my other half. You have become my food, my air, and my heartbeat. Without you, I am nothing.”

She pressed a single finger to his lips. “Do not say that.
I
am nothing more than a killer.”

He understood what the phrase meant to her. “But it is the truth.” He took her hand in his, placed it over his heart. “Every step in this life,
moye
, led me to you. Killer or not, you are mine. Do not leave me to walk the rest alone.”

“I am
shavur
.”

He shook his head, fear racing through his body. “I will never let you break, Bone.”

She did not say anything, her shoulders lifting and falling steadily though her pain. He lifted her face with his finger, amazed at the tracks on her cheeks. Dmitry swiped at the tears falling down her face. “Do not cry here in this place. They are not worth your tears or your pain.”

“But you are worth my tears. I cry for you, Dmitry Asinimov,” she protested.

He stared at her for long moments, thumb brushing her cheekbones, hand holding hers to his chest. “Forgive me.”

She stood then, watching him from those jade-splintered golden orbs and she pulled his head to her stomach. “I don’t know what forgiveness is.”

His heart stopped beating. “Forget what I’ve done.”

She sighed and sifted her fingers through his hair. “I cannot forget the things that form me.”

He had to try once more. “Love me.”

She smiled then and it was different from anything he’d ever seen on her face—it was joy. “I do not understand it, cannot comprehend the emotion, but I know this to be true—I will always love you.”

“How do I make this right?”

Her smile turned sad. He panicked but before he could speak she said, “There is nothing to make right, Dmitry. Just love me and I will be what I have always been meant to be.”

Her words gave him pause. They were exactly what Bullet had said to him. He nodded and stood.

“Mine,” he vowed. “You have always been mine.”

He stood and reached for her. She took a single step back.

“I must say this again—I am a killer, Dmitry. I cannot change that. I have taken many and I will take again. It is a path my feet were set on long before I met you. I still have things to do on my journey, things you may not agree with and things I may not discuss with you. I will not let you sway me.”

He nodded. It was all he could do. He understood but that did not mean he wouldn’t hawk her movements. He needed to protect her. It was who he was.

“We will struggle. It’s who we are. I know nothing about love except that I am warm with you. I know peace with you. That alone tells me the softer emotion is mine,” she admitted.

“There are things we need to talk about,” he said.

She raised a hand. “Not here.”

He accepted that.

“This is not the place to talk about anything but death and I’m weary of death today,” she told him.

Dmitry understood that too. So he took her hand and they walked through the ruins of Masada. She showed him her hiding places and they both stood on the edge of the ruin, holding each other to keep from falling.

And when the sun set and night grabbed the land, they slept beneath God’s twinkling eyes and knew a peace that was theirs alone.

“Your sister was our creator. I know you all believe it was Joseph and he
was
the mastermind but we were all actually cemented in our creation the morning Ninka died,” Bone said softly, breaking the silence of the bedroom.

They’d returned to Sydney and spent the last two days wrapped in each other. Forgiveness was requested and given with every sigh and moan and there’d been calm between them. She needed to tell him these things though—needed to give him what she had of his sister.

“When we watched her killed in front of us, it destroyed the last pieces that could have been more than death. Ninka was all that was good and sweet and light. When she died, we became the darkness. She gave us purpose for something besides just survival.” She took a deep breath.

Dmitry pulled her even closer into his body, her back flush with his front, her head on his arm and his other hand entwined with hers. He did not speak as if realizing she needed to say this.

“You cannot imagine the hell we endured. Children being groomed for nothing but killing. Oh, we had other lessons—how to act like a lady, how to eat properly, how to speak different languages, and how to dress. He made sure we knew how to kill and remain women. His theory was that a man would never suspect a pretty woman had been sent to kill him.

“Our lessons were hard and brutal. One day I’ll share those things with you, but not today. I want to harm others when I remember those things. We bonded over her death. Until then, we had done nothing more than use one another to survive. Ninka, as the weakest, was the fulcrum around which we pivoted. Every action we took was to survive but also to protect her. We were a unit but until her death we weren’t blooded.”

Dmitry sighed at her neck. “Stop,
moye
. We need not speak on these things.”

“But we do. If not for Ninka I wouldn’t have survived long enough to stand behind you in London, breathe you in and realize I was meant for more than dealing death. I would have broken as she did and been no more.”

“You are here with me now and that is enough,” he said, squeezing her tightly.

“I took your father because he was a contract but I was aware of whom he was and the horrible things he had done. I took your mother because she gave up Ninka to Joseph—handed her baby over to a madman. I do not regret taking them, Dmitry, but I do wish you hadn’t known that pain.”

Dmitry rose above her, pressing her back and kissing the skin he exposed. “This bed will not know death. Where we lay together as one will not be defiled with the past. Do you understand me?”

She nodded at the ferocity of his words.

“You haunted me from the moment I knew of your existence. You sank so deep inside me I couldn’t have prepared. All the way to my bones,
moye
. Bone deep. That’s how far you are inside me now and I will not let anything tear me from you.”

It was a whispered promise and her heart stilled as the amazing peace he always brought stroked her soul.

“You are mine, Asinimov. You will always be mine.” She gave her own promise and the moment stretched taut.

He smiled then, a slow curving of his luscious lips, accepting her avowal as truth.

And then her stomach growled.

Dmitry laughed and Bone allowed her own lips to curve at the sound.

“I guess I need to feed you more than cheese and crackers, eh?” he teased with a leering grin.

Bone sighed and got up, stretching.

“You are beautiful,
serdtse mojo,
” he told her with a smile.

“I know nothing of beauty other than what you make me feel,” she told him honestly.

They showered and dressed with an ease that spoke of years together rather than mere days.

The others were eating when she and Dmitry walked in. Bone wondered if everyone in the room knew what they’d been doing.

“Wooing went as expected, eh, Russian?” Adam called out.

Dmitry flipped him off and Bone smiled.

She didn’t understand teasing but like all of the other soft emotions, Dmitry would teach her.

Bullet nodded at her. “Bone.”

Arrow did the same. “Bone Breaker, it is good to see you looking healthy.”

“
Achot
,” Bone said in response—both greeting and warning. Dmitry was off limits. Her sisters nodded but they were quiet—almost too quiet. There was much to discuss.

Carmelita spooned a thick, heavy stew into bowls and placed the bowls in front of them.

“I saw Blade today in Sydney,” Rand said into the silence.

Arrow and Bullet stopped eating. Bone pinned the man with her gaze. “Are you tracking her?”

Rand shook his head. “But someone is.”

All eating stopped. “Have you seen that someone?”

Again he shook his head. “I haven’t but the signs are all there.”

The sisters looked at each other, expressions shut down. Bone drew within herself. After the delight of her days with Dmitry, to have the past revisit was abhorrent.

“You know who she is,” Adam threw out.

Bullet leaned back in her chair and glanced at Bone. “It is not my story to tell.”

“You were there, standing guard,” Bone bit out. “It is as much your story as it is ours.”

“No. I didn’t tend her. The story is yours, Arrow’s, and Blade’s. If it is to be told, one of you will do it.”

Arrow’s eyes were closed and a single tear tracked down her cheek.

Bone would not cry. The scalding hot drop on her cheek belied her intentions. Perhaps if she purged this, it would ease the blister in her soul.

“We were ten years old when Blade was taken from us to the big house. She would be gone for days at a time and she would return sad. We did not know why until one night when the rains were upon us and she ran to our quarters and got us out of bed. The girl was bleeding, she kept murmuring. So we followed her and she took us into the forest, to a building we had never seen.”

Bone drew in a deep breath. She was there with the rain and lightning and thunder.

“She took us inside and into a darkness so complete I wanted to scream. I thought I was until I realized the sounds weren’t coming from me.”

Arrow sighed. “They were coming from
her,
the girl.”

Bone swallowed hard but Arrow didn’t make a move to continue so she picked the story back up.

“She was screaming, her pain reaching across the room to us and there was Blade demanding we help her. Twelve years old and we had no idea what was going on. ‘Feel her stomach,’ Blade insisted and so I did. It was…”

“The girl screaming in the dark was pregnant and her pain was coming from the fact that she was in the middle of birth. Her hands were so small and she was tiny but her belly was huge,” Arrow said, her voice reminding Bone of her need to kill.

It rose, choking her until Dmitry grabbed her hand and held it in his.

“Blade demanded I help her but I didn’t know what to do. I had no knowledge, only a memory from when my mother worked as a midwife. I could smell her blood and other fluids but the blood called to the demon inside me,” Bone admitted. “She kept screaming. Arrow told her to be quiet and just like that the girl shut up. Her wails ceased and we were left with the eeriest silence. We could not see and there was no light.”

Bone would have thought her dealings with Nameless would have eased this somewhat but once again she was there, in that room, in that darkness. Dmitry squeezed her hand. He’d become her new anchor.

“Arrow took her head and held her. I felt my way to her legs. She was wet with blood and I remember her voice, so pure, so sweet. ‘I need to push,’ she told us. So I told her to push and she did—over and over and over, time after time until she said she couldn’t push any more. “You will die, child, if you do not push,” Arrow said to her. So she pushed some more and I pulled and then there was a child, so tiny, like a baby doll falling into my hands. I had never held a baby doll before.

“She yelled again that she needed to push so Arrow told her to push. The first baby wasn’t crying though—it was silent. It didn’t move, and it wasn’t breathing. I had—,” she almost could not contain the pain that overwhelmed her then. Finally, the past eased its hold on her throat and she continued. “I had broken its neck pulling it from her.”

“Goddamn it, Bone. Do not—”

She squeezed Dmitry’s hand but did not look at him. She had to finish. “I took my T-shirt off and wrapped the baby in it and put it on the floor. The girl kept pushing and then there was another baby and this one,” her voice broke. “This one cried and I wiped its face because it was gasping for breath. Arrow took her shirt off and I wrapped the second child in hers. The girl went silent.”

Nobody said anything for a long time. She didn’t look at her sisters. She didn’t look at the men. Her mind was wrapped in the horror of that night.

“’I am dying,’ the girl whispered and Blade was there then, telling her to hold on. The girl said nothing for a while and the baby continued to cry. I picked it up, held it against my chest, it was cold and needed my warmth. I sang Ninka’s lullaby and eventually the baby quieted. Then the girl demanded we save the first child. But it was dead. I remember thinking I was just as Joseph said I’d be—nothing more than a killer.

“I told her the child was gone and she cried, loud, harsh sobs and I knew then, this was her punishment. I asked who the father was and she said simply, ‘Joseph is the father of us all.’ She was
shavur
. I gave the baby I hadn’t killed to Blade and then I ran to where Grant was and begged his help. It was the first and only time Grant never questioned us. He knew we had someone to save.”