Kissing My Killer (21 page)

“No, I meant—when you….” Shit, she had tears in her eyes. She stared at me beseechingly.

I became aware of something right on the fringes of my memory, a ghostly fragment that wouldn’t get any clearer no matter how hard I concentrated on it.

I gently shook my head, not understanding.

She turned from me and stormed down the street to our motel room, slamming the door as soon as she got inside. When I got there, I realized she had the only key. I lifted my hand to knock, then let it fall again. Better that I give her some time to cool off.

What the hell had I done wrong? I sat down with my back against the door and reflected that I’d never, ever understand women.

Gabriella

lilywhite > He did WHAT?

diamondjack > He apologized...for falling in love with me

yolanda > OMG!

lilywhite > *squee!*

diamondjack > But now he’s denying everything. It’s like it didn’t happen. He’s gone back to strong and brooding.

I’d avoided contacting the others until now. I didn’t want to draw them into it and I’d had no idea what to say. But I couldn’t keep everything bottled up any longer.

yolanda > Where are you now?

diamondjack > crummy motel. A *new* crummy motel. I’m so sick of crummy motels.

lilywhite > I want to know how Nikolai knew where you lived

I’d been wondering that myself.

yolanda > You took all the normal precautions, right?

diamondjack > duh.

yolanda > Then how the hell did he find you?

lilywhite > No clue. But diamondjack knows her stuff. Nikolai couldn’t have traced her on his own. Don’t go near his computer again until we figure it out.

diamondjack > I won’t.

yolanda > So what now?

diamondjack > I searched for this “Seventeen” guy - Slava Federoff - but there’s nothing useful online.

lilywhite > So your Russian’s going to have to beat his location out of someone?

diamondjack > He’s not *my* Russian. At least, not as of this morning :(

yolanda > So what now?

She sounded so helpless. Both of them did. They were doing their best, but this whole thing was way outside any of our scope of experience. We dealt with virtual threats, names on a computer screen, not actual violence.

diamondjack > Let him heal and then track down Seventeen and try to put this whole thing straight.

yolanda > I meant you and him.

I stared at the screen for a while.

diamondjack > I have no idea. Look, I have to go. Need to think.

lilywhite > Yell if you need us. Or if you need to get out of the country. I can get you passports.

I blinked at that. She was good with government databases but actual, physical passports? I wondered how much I didn’t know about lilywhite.

diamondjack > OK thanks.

I cut the connection, lay back on the bed and thought. After my breakthrough in the car, when I’d overcome the Dread for a little while and saved Alexei, I thought I’d made some sort of huge forward leap. And then, when Alexei declared his feelings for me...God, I hadn’t been ready for
how much
that would affect me. All of the feelings that had been building inside me had swelled up...but then I’d had to wait, because he was still in too much of a stupor.

I’d spent three long days and nights nursing him, the anticipation growing and growing. He’d slept most of the time, waking only to drink the mugs of soup I brought him. That morning, when I’d finally stopped the morphine and he’d fully awoken, I’d imagined us talking and kissing. I’d imagined all sorts of things...except what actually happened. I’d never dreamt that he’d just deny saying he was in love with me.

He’d been in a drug-induced haze when he said it. Maybe he remembered saying it and was regretting it, or maybe he plain didn’t remember. Either way, he clearly didn’t feel that way about me
now.
I’d been ecstatic all that morning, following him around in a lovesick haze...and then it had all been ripped away from me.

I was sick of this whole thing. Sick of running, sick of dirty clothes and living in motels, sick of being afraid for my life.

There was a knock at the door.

I knew I couldn’t just leave him out there. We had to work together until we resolved this thing, however awkward it was. Well, at least I knew where I stood, now.

I opened the door. He stood there staring at me, eyes sad and confused.

I stepped out of the way so that he could come in, but he stayed out on the step. “Come with me,” he said.

“Where?”

“A quiet place I know. I’ve been thinking. There’s something else I need to teach you.”

The last thing I wanted, right then, was more time alone together. I would have happily just sat in the motel for a few days watching TV while his wound healed. But we had to work together.

“Fine,” I told him in an
okay-but-I-don’t-have-to-like-it
voice. I grabbed my coat and laptop bag and stalked out to the parking lot. He went inside the room, grabbed something from his own bag and followed.

This time, there weren’t any cars around with wireless control systems so Alexei got to demonstrate his method: an elbow through the side window, a kick to the steering column to break open the plastic casing and then a jerk of the wires to tear them loose. Two wires touched together, a few sparks and the engine was running. It
was
quicker than my method. In the real world, simple brutality won out over subtlety and technology every time.

I climbed in beside him and sat in sullen silence for the whole journey. Alexei glanced at me a few times as if wondering whether to say something, but eventually just sighed and gave up. I pushed myself down in my seat and tried not to think about how big the sky was. Big and gloomy—storm clouds were rolling in and we were heading in that direction.

We drove way out of town and pulled up outside a junkyard. Not an active place, with machines crushing cars and eco-friendly recycling going on. More like a place cars went to die. They were piled up into mounds three stories tall. Almost every car had had its headlights removed, giving them the appearance of empty-eyed skulls. The tires were gone, too, and the glass had been removed or broken. The paint had peeled off and all that was left were the rusting metal bones, sometimes with a few shreds of rotting upholstery. An alien place—too alien, thankfully, to trigger me too much, especially with Alexei there. Since the night of the vet’s, I’d been a little better, as long as we stayed away from big places with lots of people in them.

“No one here on weekends,” Alexei told me, getting out. “No problem with noise.”

“Noise?”

He showed me what he’d brought with him from the motel—a small, stubby black handgun.

I put my hands up defensively. “No. No way. I don’t want to shoot guns.”

“You need to. It’ll give you a better chance, if they find us. I usually carry this here”—he pointed to his ankle—“as my spare. I want you to have it. But you need to know how to use it.”

We were interrupted by a long roll of thunder. The clouds were close and getting closer.

“I’m not a gun person! I can’t!”

“You couldn’t choke a man, a few days ago.”

“I don’t know if I could now!”

“You already have, remember? You did it to me. You’ll be able to do it again, if you need to.” He hefted the gun, weighing it in his hand. “Same with this.”

I sighed and gingerly took the gun. “You’re not going to ask me to shoot you, are you?”

Despite everything that had gone wrong between us that made a smile twitch the corners of his mouth for a second.

He took a takeout menu from his pocket and jammed it under the hood of an old junker so that it hung down over the radiator. Then he walked back to me and the lesson began.

He showed me how to load a magazine and how to chamber the first round. He showed me where the safety catch was and how to take it off. He taught me how to hold the gun in a two-handed grip, and how to aim down the sights.

“Now try it,” he said.

I wrapped my finger around the trigger and s-q-u-e-e-z-e-d. It was like trying to burst a balloon with a pin: I tensed up more and more, my eyes half-closing, bracing myself for the explosion….

There was a bang and the gun kicked up into the air. I have no idea where the bullet went, but nowhere near the car. My ears rang and my wrists ached.

“Good,” said Alexei.

“Liar.”

“You’re over the fear, now. Try again.”

My second shot was no better than the first. My third was even worse. I was too tense, too
afraid.

Then Alexei stepped up behind me. His chest pressed against my shoulder blades and his arms wrapped around me. He covered my hands with his much bigger ones and my anger at him just evaporated. He hunkered down so that he could put his mouth to my ear, the stubble on his cheek brushing me ever so gently in a way that made me catch my breath. I was suddenly aware of how quiet it was in the junkyard: there were no birds here, no trees to rustle. It was as if we were the only living things in the world.

He spoke to me in that accent like crashing rocks and the vibrations shot straight down to my groin. It didn’t matter that he’d hurt me. My body responded to that sound like a goddamn tuning fork. “Relax into it,” he said, and I had to fight the instinct to relax into
him.
“Do you trust me?”

I thought about it. I wanted to say
no
and yell at him. But I told the truth. “Yes.”

“It won’t hurt you.
Know
that, inside.”

I needed something else to concentrate on or I was going to go nuts, having him pressed so close against me. So I focused on what he was saying. I
believed
that the gun wouldn’t hurt me and, for the first time, it felt a little less scary.

He put his hands on my shoulders, his thumbs tracing down the sides of my neck, and it was all I could do not to tilt my head to the side and push my cheek against his hand. “Pull your head down towards your shoulders,” he told me. I did. Then he skimmed his hands down the length of my arms, his size letting him reach easily. “You should be firm here, but not tense.”

I relaxed my arms a little. I felt him look down at my feet and then he moved against me, pushing me to adjust my stance. A breeze had gotten up, blowing my hair into his face and—

I suddenly felt his cock against the back of my thigh. He was rock hard under his pants. When he spoke again, I could hear the tension in his voice.

“Don’t think about pulling the trigger. Think about your target. See the bullet in your head, going right through it.”

My whole body was aching with anticipation. He seemed to completely encase me from behind, wrapped around me. All I had to do was turn around….

I took a long, shuddering breath...and squeezed the trigger.

A hole appeared in the dead center of the takeout menu. I didn’t even register the kick and the bang until afterwards.

I lowered the gun and turned to him, but he didn’t step back in time. As I turned, my breast brushed his arm.

I looked up into his eyes and the cold, distant gaze I’d been seeing all day was gone. The fire was back, those hot flashes of blue beyond the ice.

“You—” I started.

And then he grabbed me.