Kissing My Killer (8 page)

The new guy cocked his gun.

I closed my eyes.

There was a quick, low sound that vibrated in my eardrums. I’d heard that sound in movies, the sound of a silenced shot. I waited for the pain, but it didn’t come.

I opened my eyes to see the new guy slumping to the ground. Then I saw the big guy lowering his smoking gun. He was staring at it as if he’d never seen it before. He lifted his eyes to me and, just for a second, he looked helpless. Seconds passed.

“What have I done?” he asked.

I didn’t have any words. I just shook my head.

Suddenly, he was running at me. He grabbed my upper arms and lifted me right off the floor and slammed me into the wall. “
What did you make me do?!”
he yelled. His eyes were wild.

I shook my head again, trying not to look at the body.

He pressed in closer, his abs hard against my stomach, his thighs forcing mine back against the wall. He grabbed my wrists and forced them up and out, pinning them beside my head. “This is your fault!” he yelled. “Why did you have to do this? Why did you have to steal from us?”

I felt my eyes widen. “
Steal?
I didn’t steal from him! We don’t steal!”

“You try to empty bank accounts!”

“No! I was looking for evidence!”

He frowned at that. “You’re CIA?”

“No! I’m—” I was sobbing as I said it. It sounded so fucking stupid, saying it out loud. “I’m a...vigilante. I hack to get evidence against human traffickers!”

He frowned even deeper, then shook his head. “We don’t do that.”

“Yes! You do! Nikolai does!”

He thumped the wall beside my head, hard enough that I flinched. “You
stupid—”
He put his face right up to mine. “I work for Nikolai and Nikolai works for the Malakovs!” he told me. “They sell guns, not women!”

The size of him was terrifying, but, weirdly, I didn’t fear violence from him the same way I’d feared it from the other guy. It didn’t feel as if he wanted to hurt me. So I didn’t back down. “Then Nikolai is doing some backroom deal,” I panted, “because he’s connected with a guy called Carl and he
is
a trafficker—one of the biggest.”

He shook his head. But I stared right back at him. There were tears streaming down my cheeks but I lifted my chin defiantly. My whole life had changed, tonight, and I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen, but I knew I was right about this.

He studied me, watching for any hint of a lie. I stared right back at him. After a few seconds, I saw in his eyes the first faint traces of doubt—doubt about the story he’d been told. He shook his head again, but he released my wrists and stepped back, cursing under his breath in Russian.

I figured he needed a moment, so I kept quiet and glanced around the apartment. That was a mistake, because I finally got a good look at the dead body.

Most of one side of his head was missing.

I turned and ran for the bathroom, reaching the toilet just in time. When I’d rinsed my mouth and come back into the living area, the big guy had just finished dragging the body out of sight behind the couch. I didn’t know if he’d done it for my benefit, but I was insanely grateful either way.

“What happens now?” I asked when my stomach had settled enough to speak.

He looked at me with great sadness. “They kill us both.”

Alexei

I felt...lost. As if someone had pulled not just the floor but the whole world out from under me and I was falling through an endless black void.

I’d had the army, friends who felt like brothers, men I’d die to protect. My life had had structure and I was good at what I did. When I left the army, I’d been lost.

Nikolai had found me. He had work for a guy like me, he said. Work I already knew how to do. And so I found new brothers. A new family.

And now all that had been ripped away. After this, I wouldn’t just be out of the Bratva, I’d be their target.

I looked at the trail of blood that led behind the couch and nausea rose up inside me. Lev had been an asshole but I hadn’t wanted
this.

But he’d been going to kill her.

I looked at the girl. She was white-faced and shaking and looked as if she might throw up again at any moment. And even in that state, she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on.

I knew I’d been wrong, when I’d had that momentary fantasy of the two of us together. I’d forgotten what I was—a monster. I didn’t deserve her.

But right now, she needed me. Or she wouldn’t last the night.

Staying close to her, but being unable to be with her, unable to make her mine...that would be pure torture. But to see in the headlines in a few days that her body had been found in a river or a garbage dump...that was unthinkable.

I’d done so much wrong in my life. I needed to just do this one thing right.

“I can help you escape,” I said. “But we have to go right now.” I looked at my phone. No call from Nikolai yet, but it would come. Or he’d call Lev’s phone and wonder why he didn’t answer.

She just stared at me. She was locking up, trying to blank it all out. I’d seen it before, when civilians see something like this. It’s the brain trying to protect itself. It usually works in our favor, because it means witnesses can’t give good testimony. But right now, it was going to get us killed.

I forced myself to move slowly and gently. I put my hands on her shoulders and said, “We must go.
Now.”

She looked up at me, debating. I don’t know why, but she must have decided to trust me, because she gave a single, quick nod.

Gabriella

I walked through to the bedroom. My legs felt numb, as if they belonged to someone else. I mechanically picked out some clothes and put them on—jeans, a tank top and a sweater—but it was like dressing a doll.
This can’t be real. None of this is real.
The Russian Mafia couldn’t really be after me. There couldn’t be a body in the next room. And I couldn’t be leaving—I couldn’t
leave!
That meant going outside.

I started stuffing things into bags. Books. Computer equipment. I was going to need boxes or crates or something—

I heard a movement behind me and turned to see him standing in the doorway. “What are you doing?” he asked cautiously.

“Packing.”

He shook his head. “We have to run,” he said. “No time. No room. One bag.”

“
One?
What about—” I indicated all my stuff.

“Leave it.”

“Leave it?!” I glanced around in horror. It wasn’t just about possessions, it was about...this was my
nest,
this was my one safe place. If I really had to leave it, I had to be able to recreate it someplace else.

“We must go,” he told me.

I grabbed an armful of clothes and sneakers, my laptop and, as an afterthought, the portable hard drive that stores a backup of all my files. Nikolai
was
doing something with Carl, whether this guy believed it or not. I wasn’t leaving that evidence behind. I threw in some toiletries from the bathroom and zipped the bag shut. That was it—my entire future life was in one bag.

“Ready?” he asked.

I blinked at him. Even without my...
issues,
just dropping everything you own and walking out would be a wrench for anyone, right? But he seemed to genuinely not get it. As if—

As if he didn’t have anything in his life. As if he didn’t have a home, just a place where he lived.

I nodded, grabbed my coat and we headed towards the door.
What the hell am I doing?
I was putting my trust in a guy who’d been sent to kill me.

But he was also the one who’d saved me.

As soon as I tried to step into the hallway, I knew we were going to have a problem. I tried to take deep breaths, but I could feel the panic starting to build. It got worse as we walked towards the elevators and worse still as we descended. I could feel the outside world, dark and huge and utterly unknown, opening up around us.

We walked through the lobby with him leading the way. Past the doors of the coffee shop, the furthest I’d been in over a month. He opened the door to the street and freezing air rushed in. And I stopped.

When he realized I wasn’t with him, he turned and looked back at me. “What?” He looked towards the street, then back at me. “We have to go.”

It’s difficult to describe The Dread, as I call it. But I’ll try.

First my legs locked up. The joints seemed to physically seize, aching and shrieking, as if my bones would snap if I tried to walk any further. The fear started to vibrate through me as if I was a bell being struck over and over again. My whole body started to shake and my guts began to churn and twist. And the further I shuffled forward, the faster the fear increased, until it was doubling with every millimeter, until I physically couldn’t go any further

He frowned and walked back to me. “What?” he asked again.

My mouth was almost too dry to speak and I had to fight for air to make the words. “I’m
afraid,”
I whispered. And I prayed that he’d understand that I didn’t mean
afraid
in any normal sense of the word.

He did. I don’t know how, given everything that we were going through, but he got it. I saw that flash of clear blue in his eyes, that shard of humanity and warmth. “What do I do?” he asked.

I stared at the door, which seemed to be a thousand miles away and getting further with each second. “
I don’t know,”
I said, and started to cry. “
I don’t know.”

I knew it was useless. I knew anything he said to me, any rationalization he tried wouldn’t work. I knew that, whatever his crimes, it was me who had caused all this. It was me who was going to get us both killed because I’d wanted to hurt the men hurting women and I’d been stupid enough to get caught...and now it was my fault again because I was such a fucking,
fucking
fuck up that I couldn’t leave my building.

If you’ve never cried out of pure fear—most adults haven’t—you don’t know what it’s like. I couldn’t see. I was crying and I couldn’t even wipe the tears away because I was frozen with terror. I felt myself retreating inward and downward, as always happened when things reached their peak. I let out a broken wail of loss—

A voice spoke in my ear, a voice made of granite and steel, but with a warmth I hadn’t heard before. “My name is Alexei. What is yours?”

I answered in a voice that wasn’t my own. “
Gab—Gabriella.”

A huge arm slid across my back and another slid behind my knees. “Close your eyes, Gabriella.”

I closed them. And then I was being hoisted off my feet and carried, cradled in his arms. He rocked me towards him so that my head lolled against his chest.

It shouldn’t have worked. I should have been terrified of him. But, instead, I flung my arms around his neck.

I felt us moving, his huge slow strides rocking me like a boat. I knew from the cold air that we were outside and that we must be walking down the street. But I just squeezed my eyes tight shut and focused on the warm, strong bulk of him.