Kissing My Killer (25 page)

I spent the journey back casting little sidelong glances at Alexei, trying to get my head around the idea of this gorgeous, muscled beast of a man wanted
me...
and that he hadn’t run a mile when he discovered the depths of my fucked-upness, and the reason for it.

But where did we go from here? We were still on the run, we still had a very dangerous man to find...when were we supposed to fit in
us?

I figured we should start by talking. I’d sit down with him, back at the motel, and we’d spend some time actually getting to know each other. I knew almost nothing about him aside from his distrust of technology and his ruthless efficiency when it came to things like food. I didn’t know what he did for fun. Did he even
have
fun?

That started a faint, twisting unease in my stomach. I started to think about how different we were. He was still planning to go back to the Bratva and take up his old job again if we got this whole mess straightened out. He believed that killing was all he was good for, that he couldn’t change.

I had to convince him that he could.

One thing at a time.
We’d go back to the motel and we’d talk. That’d be a start. And just to ensure it went well, I’d put the red sweater he liked back on. Even if the talking went nowhere, the sweater was sure to keep things positive. I remembered how he’d looked at me in it that morning, as if he’d wanted to leap right across the breakfast table and ravish me. And now that there was nothing holding him back…I gripped the edge of my seat and pressed my thighs together.

***

Back in our motel room, I checked the time and saw that we’d need to grab some lunch soon. But there was time for a talk first...and time for Alexei to pounce on me. Cheeks flushed in anticipation, I found the red sweater and held it up in the air in front of me, checking to see if it was too crumpled to wear.

A hole appeared in the sweater. A neat, circular hole right in the center. I felt my hair move as something shot past my head.

I lowered the sweater and saw the hole in the window, then turned and saw the hole in the wall behind me. And then Alexei was diving on me and knocking me to the floor as more bullets ripped through the room.

Alexei

In the army, they drill you on things a thousand times over...and then they do it all again. It’s not just sadism or breaking you down; it’s to ensure that, when something happens for real, the reaction is so ingrained that you do it without even thinking about it. I’d come under fire, real and simulated, so many times that the feeling of my chest hitting the ground had come to feel like an echo of the shot. I should have just dived for cover.

But when that first shot rang out, I just stood there and stared at Gabriella. She looked back at me, holding her sweater with the hole in it. Lifting it up had probably saved her life—the gunman had had to guess where her head had been. I knew that and I knew he’d fire again, but still I didn’t move. I was like a machine with jammed gears—all my army reflexes were clashing with my need to protect her.

I’d never had to worry about someone else, before. Not like
this.
Everything was different, since the junkyard. She wasn’t a fellow soldier and she wasn’t just a VIP, like when I’d sometimes been one of Luka’s bodyguards. I’d fallen for her completely and it was only now that I realized how vulnerable that made both of us.

I finally unfroze and dived on her, knocking her to the floor behind the bed, just as a second shot rang out. I pressed her to the floor, patting her body to check for wounds.

“I’m okay,” she said breathlessly.

But I kept checking her. Sometimes people are in shock, they don’t know they’ve been hit and then they bleed out—

“I’m
okay,”
she said again. I stared at her, still hunkered down over her. I’d never felt such pounding, all-consuming fear. I’d never felt so connected to anyone before. She was a part of me, now, and one I had to protect.

More shots slammed into the wall above us...and then they stopped. The gunman was probably across the street with a rifle, sights locked on the bed. He’d stopped firing in the hope we’d come out. As soon as one of us put our heads out—

“Stay down,” I told Gabriella.

She nodded, her eyes huge with fear. “What do we do?”

Normally, it would be smart to wait it out. As long as we stayed behind the bed, we were safe. Someone had probably already called the cops and we could have just waited for them to arrive. But in our case, the cops would pull me in for questioning, maybe even implicate me or both of us in Lev’s death. I couldn’t protect Gabriella in jail.

“We have to get out of here,” I told her. I looked around. The foot of the bed was beyond the window—if we stayed low until we reached it, the gunman wouldn’t be able to see us.

Hopefully.

I rolled off of her and lay on my belly, then motioned for her to do the same. “We’re going to crawl out, okay? Belly-crawl, like this.” I demonstrated. “Don’t get up. Don’t go any higher.”

She nodded. She’d gone deathly pale.

I couldn’t be sure I was right about how much of the room the gunman could see. If I was wrong, would he shoot me the second I crawled out from behind the bed? Or was he a professional—would he wait for me to report the coast was clear, then shoot Gabriella as she followed and finally shoot me too?

That’s what I would have done, if it had been me. I felt sick at the thought. So much had changed!

I took a deep breath...and crawled out, bracing myself for the impact. None came. I took a second to look around the room. Everything was still and quiet. A few feathers were drifting around—one of the shots must have clipped a pillow.

I glanced at the door and realized it was on the same wall as the window. We’d be dead the instant we went out that way. The only other door led to the tiny bathroom and I knew the window in there was too small to climb through. But it was better than staying in the bedroom.

I belly-crawled across the carpet and then beckoned for Gabriella. She crawled across exactly as I’d shown her and I helped her to her feet in the bathroom, slamming the door behind us. The room was so small that the two of us took up most of the floor space. Both of us looked at the window: I’d been right: much too small.

The cops would be on their way. Three minutes at most and we’d be under arrest.

“Who is it?” asked Gabriella. “The Bratva?”

I shook my head, still looking around the room. “He’s using a rifle and he almost got you with the first shot. I think it’s Seventeen.”

“How the hell did he find us?!”

“Think about it later. We have to get out of here.”

I turned in a full circle. The window was too small to get through. One wall lead back into our room and the other was solid cinder-block. But the fourth wall, the one with the sink and the mirror...I frowned and tried to picture the layout of the room, and how the next room must join to it. I realized the bathrooms touched, back-to-back.

“The next room’s bathroom is behind here,” I said. I rapped on the wall—just a thin, cheap partition. I could hear sirens in the distance.
Shit!

“Great, but how do we—”

My eyes searched the room for something to use as a hammer, but there was nothing.
We’re going to get caught.
I had a vision of me dragged off in handcuffs and Gabriella left alone as cars full of Bratva thugs pulled up—

Fuck that.

I jumped up onto the toilet and slammed my foot down on the sink as hard as I could. One kick and it drooped. Two and it hung limply from the wall, water spraying from a broken pipe. I jumped down, wrapped my arms around it and
heaved.
The thing came loose, a hunk of porcelain and metal that weighed twenty pounds.

“Move back,” I said.

Gabriella flattened herself against the door.

I smashed the sink against the partition wall. Water, plaster and dust filled the air and the plasterboard caved inward. I pulled back and slammed the sink into the wall again, almost throwing it. This time, I smashed a hole right through. A third hit and the hole was big enough to climb through. I tossed the sink down, grabbed Gabriella’s hand and helped her through the hole, then climbed through after her.

The sirens were getting closer. We ran through the room—thankfully unoccupied—and over to the door. I stood against it, panting. If the gunman still had his rifle’s scope zoomed in, watching our window, he wouldn’t see us leave. If he’d guessed what we’d done and had pulled his view back, he’d shoot us as soon as we opened the door.

“Walk,” I said. “Don’t run.”

She nodded and squeezed my hand.

I took a deep breath and opened the door, tensing in anticipation of the shot. I forced myself to walk into the open air and Gabriella followed right behind me. One step. Two steps.

No shots rang out.

We walked to the corner of the building and then, as soon as we were out of sight, ran for our car. By the time we were in it, the cops were pulling up at the front of the motel. We made it out of the street maybe three seconds before they shut it down.

I drove a couple of blocks away and then turned into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts. We both slumped in our seats and stared at each other, hearts pounding. Then we grabbed each other and hugged tight.

Gabriella checked the clock on her phone and then showed me. It was 1:36pm. “I checked the time just before I held up that sweater,” she told me. “It was exactly 1:30.”

It had been less than six minutes since the first shot.

We did an inventory. The bags with our clothes in them were still in the motel room and so lost for good. Luckily, Gabriella had left her laptop bag in the car after the junkyard, so we had that. And she had her phone and some cash in her jeans. I had the two handguns I’d taken to the junkyard but was running low on ammunition.

“How did he find us?” Gabriella asked. This time, we had time to think about it.

“Did you go online?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Sure. I talked to some friends.”

“But you didn’t tell them where we were?”

“No! Of course not. And anyway, I trust those two.”

“Did you hack Nikolai again? Could he have traced you that way?”

“No. I didn’t go near his computer.” And then she frowned at her laptop.

“What?”

“I just had a horrible thought.”

Gabriella

I prayed I was wrong. But I got Alexei to drive us to the nearest electrical store and there I bought a new laptop, which took a good chunk of our remaining cash. We found a coffee shop that had WiFi and set up in a quiet corner: a hazelnut latte for me, a black Americano for Alexei, a couple of sandwiches and the new laptop, all crammed onto a table. I got online and opened up the private chatroom the Sisters of Invidia used.

lilywhite> What happened to you?

yolanda> Everything okay? What happened with your Russian?

diamondjack> I just got shot at but I’m okay. We’re together+had sex. Listen, they tracked us down to that motel even though I didn’t go near Nikolai’s computer again.