I stood and slapped him on the shoulder. “That’s more than enough. Thank you, Vadim.”
I nodded to Gabriella, indicating that she should leave first. She stood up, breasts bouncing in a way that made my breath catch and—
A pool of shadow cast by her body had hidden her groin from view...but now, as she rose, I saw the small triangle of dark, glossy hair at the juncture of her thighs, little jewels of water clinging to it. God, she was beautiful.
She thanked Vadim over her shoulder. Then she was opening the door, the sweet peach of her ass towards me—God, almost brushing my erect cock as she stepped back to swing the door wide. I swallowed, hypnotized by her.
And then she was gone and the door was swinging closed behind her. I stepped forward to leave but Vadim’s voice stopped me on the threshold. “I meant it, Alexei. She’s special. Don’t let her get away.”
The words reverberated through me as I hurried after her. They seemed to echo louder with every step I took down the hallway, my long strides eating up the distance between us. I couldn’t take my eyes off the sight of her swaying ass in front of me, the heat inside me building faster and faster, reaching boiling point. Just as she reached the changing room door, I caught her. She stepped back, as before, to swing open the door...and this time I was so close that she backed right into me: her back against my chest, the shaft of my cock momentarily between the cheeks of her ass. She yelped in surprise.
I grabbed her arm and spun her around, pushing her back against the dripping tiled wall.
Gabriella
Suddenly, he was right up against me, my ass squashed against the slippery tiles and my breasts pillowed against his chest. I couldn’t move.
I didn’t want to.
The tension had been building and building inside me ever since we met. Inside him, too—I was sure of that, now. And all of that energy was thrumming and pulsing in both of us, drawing us together. My nipples rasped against his pecs and I groaned at the contact, the sensitive buds tightening until they were hard as pebbles.
Both of us were dripping with sweat and water, slippery as eels, and our bodies were super-heated. Every touch of hot, wet flesh was scalding and divine, sending tremors of pleasure radiating through me. I felt as if my body had been sleeping for years and was suddenly awake for the first time. I drew in long, shuddering breaths, the air so hot it nearly burned my throat. I felt as if I was drowning in warmth, enveloped in it and filled with it.
I gave myself up to it.
I could feel his cock hard between us, throbbing and ready, the head of it hard against my stomach. I went weak at the feel of it, at the thought of that length and thickness inside me.
His hands were on my hips, powerful fingers digging into the soft flesh, holding me pinned there. It was dark in the hallway, and quiet. God, we could just do it, right here! The realization made me feel as though I was teetering on the edge of a cliff, looking down into the darkness. Was that what he wanted? Was it what I wanted? Jesus, he’s a killer! I was already immersed in a world I barely understood. And I barely knew him and—
At that instant, he shifted slightly and I felt the hard muscles of his thighs press against me. All my qualms evaporated in that instant, God, he was so powerful...all he’d have to do was to insert a knee between my legs and I’d be helplessly spread for him. Helpless...and willing. I thought of his hard, muscled ass and the way it dimpled as he walked. Of how it would look as he thrust into me, driving up into me—
I closed my eyes and tilted my head up for his kiss.
Alexei
I moved in to kiss her, drawn inexorably in by those soft, satin lips. Every beat of my heart seemed to shake both of us, we were so tightly pressed together. Every breath she took made her chest swell and those exquisite breasts push against me a little harder. This was it. I could take her, make her mine. She moved a little and I twisted, following her lips as I closed the distance between us. I was so close I could feel her breath on me. Her silky hair was brushing my shoulder and, down between us, I could feel the soft hair of her groin against my thigh.
I closed my eyes.
Our lips touched.
And I froze.
Every cell in my body was screaming at me to do it—to push her legs apart, slide up into her and fuck her until she screamed my name. To pinch and lick her nipples until she thrashed and bucked from pleasure and pain, to bring her to climax after climax and then spin her around, shove her face-first against the wall and do it all over again from behind.
But she was so innocent. She came from a completely different world. The only reason I’d even met her was because I was sent to kill her. If I started something between us—where would it end? What could I possibly offer her? I wasn’t going to take her on dates or buy her presents—I didn’t understand any of that stuff. I understood killing and fucking.
I’d never worried about losing a woman before. All I’d ever known was one-night stands. But with Gabriella...once I’d had her, I’d want to keep her. Forever. And that was impossible.
I tore myself away from her and stalked across the hallway. There was a small alcove there with a shower for after you’d been in the steam bath, and I cranked the ancient metal lever all the way to the left for ice-cold. The water crashed down on my shoulders, like being tossed head-first into an arctic lake. I stifled a gasp, gritting my teeth and bearing it. Punishment was what I deserved for losing control like that.
Across the hallway, Gabriella was opening her eyes and looking around in bewilderment. When she saw me in the shower, her eyes grew wide with confusion...and then hurt.
I’d hurt the person I most wanted to protect.
I let the water sluice away the sweat and then purge the heat from my body. I became ice and then granite and then freezing, unyielding iron. I’d hurt her because I was weak. I wouldn’t be weak again.
I strode out of the shower and hauled open the door to the changing room. “Take a shower if you want to,” I told her. “I’ll meet you outside.”
Gabriella
When I emerged, fully dressed, into the hallway with the reception desk, Alexei was waiting for me. His suit was immaculate, his face set like stone. There was no sign of the Alexei who’d pushed me up against the wall, who’d finally confirmed how he felt about me.
I’d taken a shower, flinching when I discovered how cold he’d set it and turning the lever to warm. Why had he suddenly pulled away from me? Why had he felt the need to punish himself? Maybe because he’d been tempted by me...and then remembered how damaged I was?
That hurt more than anything. If he’d merely not been interested in me, it would have been what I’d expected. But to have all that tension and then for him to change his mind at the last minute because he’d remembered my freak outs—it made my stomach twist into a hard knot.
This place hadn’t been too bad. Maybe it was the gloom and the heat, but it had been almost comforting—womb-like. I’d even been shocked by how I’d reacted to the nudity. I’d been embarrassed, sure, but the feeling of Alexei’s eyes on me and the sight of him naked had overridden all that. Even Vadim looking at me hadn’t been as bad as I’d expected, because he wasn’t at all leery or pushy, just appreciative. I’d actually walked out of the steam bath with a new-found confidence.
Right up until Alexei pushed me away.
It hurt...and I realized I wanted answers. If it was because of me, because of this thing I carried around in my head, I wanted to know. So, when he started to turn away to head out to the street, I stood my ground.
After a couple of steps, he realized I wasn’t with him. He turned back, maybe expecting to see me freaking out again. But I was just standing there defiantly.
He tried to stare me out.
I crossed my arms.
He cursed in Russian under his breath and walked back to me. “We have to go,” he said, his voice neutral.
“Why?” I asked.
“We need to find that gang,” he hissed, one eye on th
e receptionist. He reached for my wrist.
I pulled away from him. “You know goddamn well what I meant!” I snapped. My voice was loud in the quiet hallway. The receptionist, to her credit, kept her eyes on her desk. “Why did you do that?”
I studied his face desperately, trying to glimpse some clue. At first, all I got was that icy gray in his eyes, the cold-hearted killer. But as I kept staring, I finally saw a hair-thin crack in the mask, a tiny hint of blue. And as I felt my own gaze soften, his softened in return, until it was as if a dam had burst: he was still locked down and in control, but I could now see the humanity inside him.
“Let me buy you something to eat,” he said at last.
“Eat?” I echoed.
“And…”—he wrestled with the next word, as if it was an alien concept—”...talk.”
I nodded and followed him out to the car.
The panic started up again when we began to drive—that feeling of getting further and further from any place of safety. But Little Odessa didn’t seem to bother me as much as the area around my apartment had. The streets there had been familiar—American brands and signs, American voices around me—and yet I’d been lost and exposed. It was that combination: a place that should be safe and familiar and yet wasn’t—that seemed to be most triggering to me.
A shopping mall, for example. I gave a physical shudder at the thought.
But Little Odessa was so alien, with its weird little businesses and restaurant menus in Russian, that it didn’t trigger me anywhere near as much.
That, and the fact that I had my own personal safe place sitting next to me. Even now that he’d pushed me away, the fact that Alexei was with me made the panic bearable.
We stopped just a few streets away from the steam bath, at a cafe. He led me inside and I saw that everyone was sitting at long, communal bench tables. Men and women, some in suits, many in uniforms. It was four in the afternoon, a weird time to be eating, but the place was pretty much full.
“Two jobs,” said Alexei. “They eat here, then go to the other one. Or they work shifts and eat here and then sleep.”
I sat down across from him, between a man in a fluorescent crossing guard uniform and a man in janitor’s coveralls. It was the first time I’d thought of Little Odessa as an actual community, not just a place where the Bratva were based.
“Don’t we need to order?” I asked.
He shook his head and pointed to a chalkboard on the wall. The words were in Cyrillic. “One menu. No choice.” He looked as if he approved of that concept.
“You live around here?” I asked sullenly. I still hadn’t forgiven him.
“I don’t live anywhere,” he said. “Russia. New York. An apartment or motel. I go where they tell me.”
“But you must have a home. Where do you keep your...stuff?” I thought of my own apartment, every cupboard bulging with things I’d acquired over the years.
He rubbed the back of his neck as if embarrassed. “I have bag,” he said. “It’s still in the car, across the street from your apartment.”
“A bag? Your entire life is in a bag?”
He put both hands flat on the table. “I don’t have a life,” he said simply. He looked me right in the eye and I knew it was true.
A woman in an apron who must have been at least eighty hurried past our table and swept up the two five dollar bills that Alexei offered. I was still trying to process what Alexei had just said. To buy time, I asked, “What do we get for five dollars each?”
“Fed.” He reached out and took my hand in both of his and, immediately, the heat of him spiraled up my arm, blossoming in my chest. “Gabriella…” He sighed. “This is what I am. All my things in a bag. Going where they tell me”—he lowered his voice—”killing who they tell me.”
I felt myself tense up again at that word killing, just as I had in the steam bath. “Go on,” I muttered.
“This is not a life you should be part of,” he told me. “You’re a...civilian.”
“I’m a hacker.”
He sighed again. “You sit at home and”—he mimed typing. “You are...safe.”
“Not that safe. They sent you to kill me.”
He looked at me seriously. “I didn’t mean you were safe. I meant you are safe. Safe to be around.” He paused. “I am not. Not safe to be around and not good to be around.”
“Who decides that? You? You saved my life!”
“I tried to kill you. I nearly did.”
I grabbed his hands with my free hand and squeezed. “But you didn’t. You’ve protected me ever since. That first night, you sat in a chair all night just watching over me!”
He looked ashamed for a moment. Then, staring down at the table, he said, “I am trying to protect you. That is why I should not have done...what I did at the steam bath. I am”—he stopped as if to taste the unfamiliar word before he said it—”sorry.”
“That’s why you pulled away, because you were trying to protect me?” I leaned forward. “And you think that’s why I was hurt...because you nearly kissed me? Alexei, I was hurt because you stopped!”
He stared at me with such an intense look of lust, I thought he was about to haul me over the table and fuck me right there. But before he could speak, soup plates were set in front of us.
“Borst,” said Alexei, by way of explanation. It seemed to be a purple-red soup. Neither of us knew what to say, so we both started to eat.
It was several spoonfuls before I’d worked out a speech. “Alexei...you used to be that man. The Bratva made you into him, but you’re free of them, now.”
He shook his head.
“What? What does shaking your head mean?” I was starting to get frustrated with his icy-cold, you-don’t-understand-my-problems thing. “You’re still that man? The Bratva didn’t make you that man? Or you’re not free of them?”
He looked at me with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen in my life. “All three.”
We finished the soup—which was delicious—before he spoke again.
“I was...what I am...long before the Bratva found me. I was in the army. Killing was the only thing I was ever good at.”
“But you can change—”
“Maybe I don’t want to!”
He sounded defensive, more than angry, but the force in his voice was still enough to make me flinch. “B—But...You’ve left the Bratva, now. Aren’t you exiled or disavowed or whatever the fuck they call it?”
He leaned in towards me and his voice grew softer. “Because of what I did, they want me dead. But if you are right about Nikolai, if we expose him, if they forgive me….”
My jaw dropped open. “You’d go back to them?”
He shrugged. “They are my family.”
And everything reversed in my head. I’d been thinking of him as a reformed criminal, a gangster who’d seen the error of his ways and turned on his employers. But that wasn’t it at all: he wanted to prove his loyalty by exposing a bigger traitor, and was praying they’d take him back.
We weren’t on the run together. I was on the run and I’d towed him along with me. I’d forced him to choose between me and his family and he’d picked me. But if he could set things right, he’d go back to being a killer for hire in a heartbeat. He’d go back to the Bratva and I’d never see him again.
I felt sick. I suddenly understood why he’d pulled away and now I wished I’d never asked. If it had been my fault, that almost would have been easier.
The soup plates were whisked away and two fresh plates were set in front of us. Each one held four bony, meaty things wrapped in white that I didn’t recognize at all. “What are those?” I asked hoarsely.
“Pig’s knuckles,” he said.
Which gave me the excuse I needed to run for the door. When he caught up with me outside, dry-heaving into the gutter, I blamed the food. It was only when we were back in the car that I said, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For messing up your life.” I shook my head
. “This whole time, I’ve been thinking about me—leaving my apartment, being chased...but it’s you. It’s you who’s had their whole life ripped away.”
He started to shake his head.
“If you’d burst in and I’d been a guy, you’d have shot me, right? You’d have shot me and carried right on with your life.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. I could see him wanting to say no.
“You spared me because I was a woman,” I said.
He finally looked right at me. “I spared you because you’re...you.”
Which might just be the nicest thing anyone had said to me in my entire life. I felt my eyes filling with tears and looked away, out of the side window.
I never should have tried to get him to talk. From now on, I had to accept things as they were—a partnership of necessity. Most likely, the Bratva would catch up with us and we’d die together. But if by some miracle we did figure out what Nikolai was doing and expose him...my protector would disappear back to his old life and I’d be alone again.
“Drive,” I said. It sounded rude, but my voice was cracking and I could only manage one word.
He drove.
Alexei
She was staring out of the window and I knew she was silently crying. I just didn’t know what to say to fix things, or if that was even possible.
I felt like a rhinoceros, trying to figure out the mechanism of a Swiss watch by nudging it with my horn.
All I knew for sure was that, whichever way this ended, I couldn’t have her. Either we’d both wind up dead or I’d go back to my old life—I couldn’t see any other way out. I didn’t know any life except killing.
I risked a sideways glance at her. God, even like this, red-eyed and tear-stained, she was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen in my life. I’d never had to comfort a crying woman—never been deeply enough into a relationship to be in that situation. But even I knew I was supposed to take her in my arms and hold her close.
Kissing My Killer Page 9