She shook her hair, soft, warm waves of it swishing across his chest. “No, how can I be cold with you at my back? You’re like a furnace. And it’s sort of…exciting to look out over the city through a window like this and know that no one can see me.”
“Except me,” he growled in her ear.
It was true. They were lightly reflected against the window, the merest ghosts of themselves. She was like a slim line against his breadth, pale skin glowing against his darker tones.
In the window, she smiled, eyes on his. “Except you,” she agreed warmly. Then her gaze shifted to the scene outside.
The snow was still relatively light, just small icy flakes so light the wind sometimes blew them up. Every once in a while the snow fell in soft drifts. Drake had no idea what the weather forecast was, which was just one more sign of how out of synch his life was at the moment. He always knew the weather forecast. It was an integral part of him, to know what the weather would be, what the Dow Jones was doing, to be one of the first to know of any shifts in the geopolitical situation, to know where his men were at all times. To be taken by surprise by snow was unheard of.
Many a time his life had depended on whether it would rain or snow.
Grace’s eyes were tracking the light drifts. “So beautiful,” she murmured.
“Hmm.” He’d buried his face in her hair, nose next to the soft skin behind her ear. Why look outside when he could watch her in the dark glass? It was just snow, for fuck’s sake. He’d once nearly died from exposure in a snowstorm when he was still living on the streets. Snow was cold and wet.
Better to be warm and dry.
She shook his arm a little. “Look, Drake. Look out.” He reluctantly dragged his ghost eyes from her ghost eyes to focus on the scene outside.
She held her hands out, as if to encompass the entire scene. “I want to paint it, just like this. All silver and midnight black, the buildings gleaming mysteriously in the darkness. Look down, Drake. See the fog rising? It makes the buildings look like islands in the sky, doesn’t it? I’ll paint it with the contrast between the billowing fog and the slanting snow with a monochrome palette. You’ll love it, I promise.”
Drake froze.
For a second, something terrifying happened. All those hours over the past year simply staring at her paintings caused a shift in his perception. For a second, he saw the scene through her eyes. Not merely snow, which he hated and considered a nuisance at best, even life-threatening at times. He’d seen past his hatred of snow to the landscape beyond.
It was magical, this landscape, seen through her eyes. A rich fantasyland of silvery darkness. Her eyes were tracking the snow and he followed her gaze in the reflection of the dark glass. She was imprinting what she was seeing, and sometime in the future—maybe tomorrow or next month or next year—a masterpiece would form beneath her clever hands and he would look at it forever. Only this time, he would look at it and remember the exact instant she got the inspiration.
By some mysterious alchemy, she was changing him. Opening his heart to the beauty of the world. It was frightening and he wasn’t altogether certain he liked the thought, but there it was.
He was looking at the black and silver shapes, the misty fog, the slanting snow and finding them fascinating instead of calculating how much the bad weather would impact his business.
The world was vastly more mysterious and beautiful than even he knew.
For the past fifteen years, he’d lived in locked-down conditions in his homes, traveling only under the tightest security he could devise, from car to plane to hotel and back. His life was work and sleep, with little in between; he lived in sterile and controlled surroundings. His world had narrowed to walls, whether of a hotel room or a car or a plane didn’t make any difference. The outside world had become an abstraction, a mere construct to include in his calculations.
She met his eyes again in the glass, a small smile on her lips, as if she understood what she’d done to him.
She’d fucking changed him, that’s what she’d done.
This woman had reached down inside him, with her art and her beauty and her kindness, and pulled him inside out. He didn’t much like it, but he couldn’t deny it. He was changing, feeling the ground beneath him shifting in a terrifying and exhilarating dance.
His hands moved fast and in a moment she was naked.
“Lean forward,” he said, his voice suddenly guttural. “Brace yourself against the window.”
Startled, Grace watched him in the window as she leaned forward. He felt her narrow rib cage arch as she placed both hands on the pane. He put a foot between hers and forced her to open her legs, fitting himself more snugly against her.
He’d been erect the whole time, but now she could feel him surging against her, his cock swelling as he pulled her tightly against him.
He couldn’t wait one second more. She was in his head. He had to be in her body.
He watched her carefully in the window. She was pressed against the pane. Her breasts would be cold, but he was keeping her warm from behind. And his cock would warm her up.
He undid his loose cargo pants, grabbed a condom from a side pocket, then kicked them away when they fell to the floor. He whipped his sweater up and off, eyes never leaving hers in the reflection.
“Open your legs more, Grace,” he whispered.
She obeyed immediately, kicking his excitement up, making his blood flow hot and thick through his veins.
It was going to be rough.
Oh God. It was going to be rough.
Grace watched her lover’s face in the dark window, the image more ghostly than if it were a mirror, as if he were insubstantial. Yet Drake wasn’t insubstantial at all. He was male power and male muscle, treading this earth more heavily than most.
She could feel him hot and heavy at her back, his hands holding her tightly. He opened her legs with his and fitted himself against her.
Each time they made love, there was this startled moment when she realized just how big he was, long and thick and as hard as steel. In the beginning he had been so careful with her, entering her slowly, by degrees.
Lately, though, he let his excitement get the better of him, understanding that her arousal grew each time they made love.
His control was paper-thin now. Grace knew this moment was coming, but now that it was here, fear tempered her excitement. Up until now, though he’d brought her to orgasm over and over again, Drake had been in utter control of himself.
Now the reflection in the window showed a man straining for control. The cords in his strong neck stood out, his jaw was tight with tension, muscles bunching along the jawline.
His power struck her anew. Though he didn’t tower over her, his shoulders were almost twice the width of hers. Looking down at his hand cupping her, she saw the taut, thick, sinewy muscles of his forearm, wildly erotic against her belly. He slid his hand further, fingers stroking her labia, his hand rocking back and forth in a silent request for better access.
Of course. She didn’t even think twice, merely widened her legs further. Whatever Drake wanted, she’d give him.
He fit himself to her, big, blunt, hot. She braced herself because that first entry was always slightly painful, no matter how aroused she was.
He was watching her face carefully in the dark glass. He must have seen her slight wince. He didn’t move forward as she expected he would. He merely waited, poised at the mouth of her sheath, breathing so heavily against her that she could see her hair sway in the dark pane.
His jaw muscles worked. “Not yet,” he muttered, watching her eyes. “Press up against the window.”
Grace could barely understand his guttural tones. “What?”
“Lean against the window. Now.”
His voice was low, utter male command. She obeyed instinctively.
She sharply drew in a breath as the entire front of her body met the cold window, hands splayed, breasts, hips, legs meeting the icy pane. He crowded right b
ehind her, like a huge hairy man-furnace. The two extremes of temperature somehow excited her, her nipples puckering with the cold.
Shockingly, he reached down and opened her with his fingers, nudging her forward with his hips. His fingers had exposed her clitoris, which was pressed against the freezing window. She registered the chill against her sensitive flesh in exactly the same second as he entered her, his penis a huge, hot column heating her up from the inside out. Her entire body went into overdrive.
She gave a cry as he started moving, hot and hard inside her, pressing her against the freezing window, a raging furnace at her back and inside her. His movements were hard, almost harsh, on the edge of being painful but…not.
She lifted her eyes to look at their reflection, his face grim as he moved in and out of her, the thrusts fast and hard. Their eyes met and she was shocked at her expression, eyes unfocused, mouth open, throat arching back against him. The very picture of a woman in sexual ecstasy, reduced to her animal nature.
A keening sound filled the room and it took her seconds to recognize it as her own voice. It was unlike any sound she’d ever heard herself make, an animal cry. She wasn’t even feeling the cold of the window any more, her entire body was suffused with heat, she was burning up alive.
With a thrust that drove her to her toes, Drake grunted and started coming, swelling even larger, his thrusts irregular and fast as his breath huffed in and out. It felt like he wanted to punch her right through the window. She looked down at the shops and people and cars, the busy street of a great metropolis.
Grace came with a cry, every hair on her body standing up, shaking with pleasure. Suddenly, her senses expanded. As she looked down, it was as if the window had disappeared and she had become one with the people she could see hurrying along the streets, one with the snow drifting down from the sky, one with the energy of the city, pulsing in her fingertips.
She was no longer Grace Larsen, separate and alone and somehow always apart. In one electric pulse, she became one with everything around her, as her body convulsed and shook.
Across the seventy-five feet of a Manhattan street and slightly to the north, giving him an oblique shot, Rutskoi watched the two figures through his thermal scope.
Drake and the woman. It could only be them. One slender, the other not much taller but much broader.
Naked.
Fucking.
He watched the fiery red-and-blue bodies writhing in the small circle of his scope, completely unmoved.
Rutskoi liked sex just as much as the next man, maybe more. He’d blown half his first paycheck as a newly minted lieutenant on whores in Grozny, celebrating staying alive for one whole month by staying drunk and with his dick in a prostitute for days at a time. But on the job, it all went away. He felt nothing on the job—not lust, nor hunger nor thirst nor exhaustion. All he felt now was the deep sniper’s calm, a oneness with the ground and the rifle and the scope.
The woman was now flattened against the window by the weight of Drake’s body and Rutskoi’s finger tightened slightly. Christ, she was in his sights. Right there, in the crosshairs.
A 4-kilogram pull on the trigger, double the pull on a beer can, and his .50 caliber bullet would travel at 2500 kilometers per hour toward the red and green and yellow outlines shimmering through the thermal imager.
But he had no way of knowing how thick Drake’s windows were and at this angle of inflection, he had no guarantee that it would penetrate or, if it penetrated, whether it would pass through the woman to Drake.
So he watched the fiery figures writhe and told himself to hold his fire, watched the woman’s hands outstretched on the glass like five-fingered flames as Drake fucked her from behind.
They would be in his sights at a straighter angle soon enough.
He could wait.
For 10 million dollars, he could wait for as long as it took.
November 24
Early morning
Blood. Blood and the bleak darkness of violence. Blood was everywhere. It came up to her ankles, deep red, glistening in the darkness. So dense it dragged at her feet.
Her heart beat fast, like a trapped animal’s. Danger was close, she could feel it, she could almost smell it. In the distance was a faint light. Not the white light of hope, but merely a slight lifting of the penumbral gloom. She could barely see. The darkness was oppressive, close and dank.
Her skin prickled in animal warning. Something was there. Something alive, something ferocious. There was cruelty here, vast cruelty and a love of death. Death was a thick pall in the air.
She looked down at where she was walking. Under the lake of blood, her feet bumped against obstacles, odd shapes. It was hard to keep her balance, though she knew she had to move quickly. The menace was close, coming closer. Her muscles screamed at her to run, but she couldn’t, it was like walking over stones barefoot. She tripped and almost fell. At her feet something rose to the surface, bobbing. As it rose, small pale points appeared, like a mountain rising up from the primordial mud. A white tip, then smooth waxen surfaces that resolved themselves in nose, lips, cheeks, eyes. Black blood-streaked hair flowed from the smooth pale forehead.
A severed woman’s head, bobbing in the red blood.
She tried to scream, but there was no breath in her lungs, no air to be found in this airless, soulless place.
He was coming. She didn’t know who he was, but she knew what he was. He was cruelty, he was death, with a vast gaping hole where his heart should be. And he was coming for her.
The blood at her feet stirred, started moving like a sluggish river. Whatever was coming was big—big enough to sweep everything before it.
There was no place to hide. The lake of blood stretched out to infinity. Now she could see broken bits of bodies rising to the surface. A hand, outstretched, as if asking for help for a body that was no longer there. A foot, still clad in a shoe. Another head, popping up like a balloon, then subsiding.
She was walking through a bloody river of death.
The blood was flowing faster now. Darkness fell suddenly, as if something behind her was covering the feeble light on the horizon. Whatever was coming for her was huge.
She tried to hurry, but kept tripping over parts of people, like offal in a slaughterhouse. The faster she tried to move, it seemed, the denser the parts became, until there was an interlocked puzzle of human pieces blocking her path.
She chanced a look backward, breathing fast. There was something there, huge and dark on the horizon, dressed in a long coat. Moving forward in giant strides, unperturbed by the bodies.
She could hear a faint crackling that grew louder. The cracking of human bones as the monster carelessly stepped on them. She turned her head forward, blindly seeking a hiding place, and tripped. Her hand fell out to break her fall and she pushed a head down under the surface. Snatching her hand away, the head bobbed back up. A child’s head, small features looking puzzled.
Oh God, oh God, coming closer…
A frigid wind rose at her back. What was coming for her was cold, with no human warmth at all. Something grazed her back. His huge hand. He’d almost caught her.
Faster! Faster! Sobbing, she bent to push the cadavers away so she could run faster. A cold wind came and went, the monster breathing.
She was tiring and he was tireless. He would never waver, never renounce. It wasn’t in his nature.
She tripped, then tripped again. Oh God, he was almost upon her!
A head rose to the surface just before her. It took her exhausted, terrified mind a second to realize that the head was rising vertically, up up up. Broad, naked shoulders emerged, dripping red. A man, a hugely strong man. He lifted his hands, muscles rippling with tension and strength. Huge hands held a sword, glinting in the uneven light. He lifted the sword to his shoulder, ready for the cutting blow.
He had fully emerged now, an immensely powerful man standing on the blood, sword at the ready. He lifted one hand from the sword and beckoned to her,
fingers curled in a universal message.
Come to me.
He was aware of her but wasn’t looking at her. He was looking behind her, at the danger close on her heels.
Safety. He was safety and protection. Every line of his strong body was a wall she could hide behind if only she could reach him. But it was so hard to move, as she tripped and slipped in the blood, stumbling over the bones of men and women and children, terrified of the icy cold at her back.
She cried out as something cut across her back in a fiery line of pain. The creature had claws, fully out, and slashed her again across her back. She was bleeding, her blood mingling with that of the uncounted dead.
The pain was unbearable, the creature had slashed across muscle, down to bone. She slipped, fell to one knee. The creature’s claws snapped over her head.
The man with the sword was striding forward, eyes still fixed on the monster behind her, face hard, determined. He’d been caught by the monster, too, some time ago. A broad white scar ran down the side of his face, gleaming in the gathering darkness.
Leathery ropes wrapped around her torso, squeezing so tightly she could barely breathe. She was lifted from the earth, her body dripping blood.
They weren’t leathery ropes, they were fingers, their grip tightening so hard she felt a rib crack. She looked up, into blood red eyes, a cruel mouth with sharp teeth. The mouth was smiling.
He had her. It was over. This was how her life would end—in pieces at the bottom of a lake of blood, dying cold and alone.
She turned for a last look at the last human she’d see. The man with the sword was running, slashing at the monster’s legs.
The monster laughed. She struggled desperately in his cruel grip, trying to free herself.
“Grace!” The man screamed. “Grace!”
She tried to call to him but there was no breath in her, the world was fading…
“Grace!”
She couldn’t breathe…
“Grace, wake up!”
She came awake on a shuddering gasp, trembling and shaking, flailing madly, as if she’d been underwater and crested the surface an instant before drowning.
The Dangerous Boxed Set Page 49