Agostini knew there were enough low walls, planters, and shrubbery to keep him out of view until he could reach the door. He passed the matte black Hummer at the curb.
He looked through the foliage toward the lobby and caught a quick glimpse inside. The five Russians were in the reception area. Mikey was still behind the desk, hands raised, shaking his head slowly.
Mikey had been a Navy SEAL, and Agostini knew that he kept a Magnum under the desk. With the Russians brandishing weapons, he must not have had a chance to break it out. That, or maybe he figured his odds weren’t great against four guns, maybe five.
Agostini slipped his automatic into the back of his waistband, stood, and approached the opening door at a relaxed walking pace. The Russians were in front of the reception desk, with the stairway to their right and the elevators farther ahead. Yvgeny was still behind the group of four goons, so nearer to Agostini as he entered.
“Yvgeny,” he said breezily, “how have you been all this time? Must be almost half an hour I haven’t seen you.”
“Pierce. The stupid man here told us you weren’t at home.”
“Well, as you can see…” Passing in the doorway, he raised his arms. “…I’m not. Or, I wasn’t. I’m here now, though. Not very nice of your friends to arrive with weapons out like that. Can’t you do something about them?”
Yvgeny shrugged and said, “We’re very cautious where we come from, tovarich.” The goons turned to face Agostini. One of them was about to step out in front of Yvgeny, but Yvgeny put an arm out to stop him. “No, Mikhial. You don’t have to worry. Mr. Agostini is not afraid of me, so he isn’t going to do anything stupid.”
Yvgeny took a step toward him. “You aren’t going to do anything stupid, are you, Pierce Agostini?”
“I wonder how often people set out to do stupid things, Yvgeny.”
“Stupid people, Pierce. Whatever they do is going to be stupid, isn’t it?”
Then Yvgeny strode straight at Agostini and grabbed him by the hair. Yanked it straight up. “Stupid things like this.” He heard the four goons rack their guns. He thought about pulling his Beretta but, while Yvgeny’s left arm was up, he decided it would be quicker to jam his right fist in a fast hook, hard into Yvgeny’s liver.
He hadn’t anticipated how hard Yvgeny would keep a grip on his hair. As the Russian folded and twisted, Agostini’s scalp seared in pain. He saw the goons lift their weapons, but Yvgeny was in the way.
Quiet as a breeze, Calhoun and Callaghan were down the stairs, both with a gun in each hand. They got the barrels pointed at the four goons while Yvgeny writhed with his head down, still gripping Pierce’s hair.
Agostini reached back for his gun, but Yvgeny swung upward with a massive blade. Agostini spun to avoid it, and the pain in his scalp was like a fire. He heard the tearing of his hair and Yvgeny’s face was wild as he brought the blade back.
The elevator dinged and the door started to open. Instantly, all four Russian goons ducked down and started to shoot. Mikey came up with his pistol and got off a shot. The biggest of the goons caught it on his shoulder.
Dino stepped out of the elevator, standing tall, two guns blazing. The Russians scurried for the door, firing backwards or over their shoulders.
Calhoun and Dino ran after them. Callaghan came for Yvgeny, but he couldn’t shoot with Agostini so near. Agostini caught Yvgeny’s arm when he swung the blade again, enough for him to lose his grip and drop the weapon, and Yvgeny ran for the door.
Pierce, Callaghan, Calhoun, and Dino stood in the doorway, guns pointed, and watched the four henchmen pile hastily into the Hummer. At least two of them were injured. The big one that Mikey had hit was bleeding badly.
The doors slammed and they skidded away.
“You see where Yvgeny went?” Calhoun asked. All three shook their heads. Agostini looked back and saw Mikey holding his arm, and he had blood on his shirt. Agostini ran over to him, but he smiled and held up a hand. “It hurts some, but it’s nothing serious.”
Agostini heard a slump and he turned to see Dino, collapsed on the ground.
Princess sat behind the wheel feeling useless. Here she was with a car and a gun, and nothing at all to do. With no idea at all what was going on, she at least wanted to drive around to the front of the lobby.
Repeatedly, she deliberated whether to take the gun out of the glovebox. Agostini’s warning of “no safety” had made her apprehensive, though. Sounded like she could easily fire it without meaning to.
It had been several minutes since Agostini ran up the ramp and back around to the reception desk. She couldn’t stand waiting any longer. First, though, it was vital to decide whether she would be safer to have the gun in the glovebox or on the seat beside her.
Remembering how powerless she felt when Yvgeny held her, Princess decided she would be safer with the gun out where she could reach it. After she clipped the safety belt on and started the engine, she leaned over and struggled with the catch on the glovebox.
Inside the box was dark, and she strained with the safety belt to reach it. She fumbled around almost blindly for the gun. Instinctively, she stopped, thinking, No safety. You could fool around finding it and shoot yourself. Then she felt something smooth with a jagged metal part at the side of the box and realized the gun was in a holster, clipped into the box. As she pulled on the holster there was a snag.
Her heart jumped as she felt it jar. But nothing happened. Princess took a breath. Her fingers felt the little button strap across the top of the holster holding the gun in place. The gun was black and heavy.
As she hefted herself back upright, she saw Yvgeny pointing a gun through the window of the passenger door. Princess dropped the gun on the seat and reached for the lever to put the car in drive. The window exploded.
She couldn’t see, but she had a hold of the lever. As soon as it moved, she took her foot off the brake and jammed it on the gas. The car lurched backwards. Tiny fragments of glass were all over the inside of the car. There was a milky, jagged hole where the passenger window had been.
Yvgeny grinned, hanging halfway in through the window, heaving to climb in the rest of the way. Princess hit the brake and he was violently jolted.
“Little sugar mouse,” he said, “I’m coming to get you.”
She flicked the lever to drive and stamped on the gas pedal. His eyes bulged at the force of acceleration, but he kept on grinning. And climbing in.
She swerved left around a ninety-degree turn to another line of cars. Yvgeny got a grip on the dash. Now only his legs were outside. She sped up and made another hard left. Princess didn’t think her driving skills were up to this.
All the time, between watching him and looking where she was going, her right hand flapped for the gun and she didn’t find it.
“Ooh.” Yvgeny made a theatrical noise as he got himself all the way into the car. In the corner of her eye, she saw the gun. It was all the way down in the passenger footwell.
“Ah, little sugar mouse.” He crawled over to be next to her. He took hold of her throat and her eyes bulged in panic. Then his hand slid down her neck to her chest.
“I feel your little sugar mousey heart pound behind your sweet sugar tits.”
He squeezed her breast, then slid his hand down, slipping it between her legs. Princess pressed as hard into the seat as she could to try and wriggle away from his spidery, probing fingers. She shoved down on the gas pedal and pushed it all the way down.
When the car hit the wall, everything seemed to happen in slo-mo, but not like a movie. First, the nose of the car pitched down hard. The seatbelt cut into her and Yvgeny sailed backwards like an astronaut in space toward the windshield as it went white and bent inward.
Her face and her whole body were swamped in white, and a powerful blast of silky fabric pinned her head, her shoulders, and her body deep into the seat.
Another fast-billowing cloud of fabric blew Yvgeny back, over the seatback, into the rear of the car. As the car continu
ed to tip forwards, Princess realized that if she survived, she would be completely trapped in her seat. And if Yvgeny survived, he wouldn’t.
The insides of her chest and stomach leaped forward into the airbag as the car began to bounce back away from the wall and the rear angled back to the ground. Amid the clatter as her hearing started to return, she heard the gun rattle around uselessly in the footwell.
Her hips, her spine, and her shoulders jarred as the back of the car hit the concrete ground. The vehicle squealed and scraped, then it lurched as it bounced back in the air and Princess tried to brace herself for it to land again. There was almost nothing she could do and the last jolt was almost as bad as the one before.
The car skidded backwards and crunched into something. Another vehicle, obviously, as the manic whoop of an alarm started from behind. When everything stopped moving and Princess was fixed to the seat, she couldn’t tell whether she was hurt or injured or not, and she couldn’t move to look.
She tried to listen through the noise of the dumb alarm screaming, strained to hear where Yvgeny was. If he was breathing. Or moving. She was able to move her head under the pressure of the airbag, and her arms.
With her hand, she hunted for the clasp to undo her seatbelt. A hand grabbed hers. “That was bold, little sugar mouse.” The hand moved up her arm. “Bold and brave.” His chuckle terrified her. “Completely stupid, but very brave.”
There was a bang and the back window exploded. Yvgeny’s hand was gone.
Footsteps, running toward the car. The driver’s door sprang open.
“Princess!” she heard Pierce shout. “Are you okay?” The airbag made a shushing noise and deflated. Pierce had a knife in his hand and a gun in his belt at the front of his pants. Her whole body surged at him.
The seatbelt held her back and she felt like she was bruised all along the line of it. His smile was enough to melt her. He reached across and unsnapped the belt, not taking his eyes off hers.
“Yvgeny,” she panted. Her windpipe was sore and it was hard to speak. “He’s in the back.”
Pierce closed his eyes as he shook his head. “I saw him behind you and I fired at him at him.”
She gasped. “Is he…?”
“Yup. He’s gone.” He was indicating the back of the car. She didn’t want to look. Then she saw what he meant. The far door was open.
She sighed when she saw the weariness in his face. He slipped his hand under her and lifted her out. She kept her arm on his shoulder as he turned and put her on the concrete.
“Do you think you can walk?” His voice was quiet and strong. She breathed in deeply, looking into his eyes. “Yes,” she said, “I can.”
He started to lead her away toward the elevator. She stopped. “Wait up.” And she dove back into the car. She had to clamber in over the layers of crumbs of broken glass, but she fished out the gun in its holster and brushed it off as she went back to hand it to him.
“What happened?” she asked him as they mounted the steps to the elevator.
The doors slid open and he said, “I’ll tell you on the way.” But he didn’t. He kissed her. All the way up.
As soon as the elevator doors opened, with his arm still around Princess, Agostini asked Callaghan about Dino.
“I just got off the phone with the hospital. He’s critical. He caught two bullets—one in the shoulder, and one may have ruptured his stomach. They’re operating now. They say they should know much more within an hour or so.”
Agostini said, “We should go.”
“The surgeon asked that we don’t. They’ll keep him unconscious for twelve hours at least, maybe twenty-four. Your man promised that he’d let me know about Dino’s progress.”
“He must have stopped those two when he got out of the elevator,” Calhoun said, shaking his head.
“Must have. The shot they got at Mikey was right then, at the beginning,” said Agostini. “After that, all those goons hit was plants and furniture.”
“Man just kept on walking.” Calhoun’s voice was low. “Walked right at them, two guns blazing.”
“Is Mikey all right?” Agostini asked.
“Sure.” Callaghan chuckled. “The cops got there, this patrolman said, ‘Man, you’re bleeding.’ Mikey said, ‘No shit! And where were you?’ Then he made the guy put his finger on the bandage while Mikey tied himself up.”
Agostini smiled. “He didn’t want to go to hospital?”
“The cop asked him that. He said, ‘If you like hospitals, you go.’ ”
Princess said, “That sounds like a real-deal, full-on gunfight.”
Agostini said, “It wasn’t any more hardcore than what you went through.”
She told him, “I’m going to the dungeon to freshen up. See how much of this glass I can pick out.”
Watching her walk away, apart from the sight of her fantastic ass in that thin dress, Agostini longed not to let her go. To keep her at his side. To hold onto her.
“Princess was in the car down in the garage,” he told Calhoun and Callaghan. “Yvgeny shot a hole in the window and started to climb in.” Their eyes widened. “She threw it into reverse, glass everywhere, mind, and he hung on. She slung that thing around the garage trying to shake him. He climbed in, so she slammed the car full-speed into a wall.”
“Jeez,” Callaghan whispered.
Calhoun said, “She’s got balls on her, boss. There’s no mistaking that.”
Princess put her face up into the cascading shower. All at once, she felt the aches and pains in her neck, shoulders and arms, each like a tiny replay of the moment the car hit the wall. Like it was all just happening. Maybe her body had blocked them as some kind of a defense, but now she felt jabs, cramps and forming bruises.
She’d picked as much of the little chips of glass out as she could. Only a few had even broken her skin, mostly on the backs of her thighs. She cleansed the grazes and pinpricks, found some rubbing alcohol in the bathroom cabinet, and put Band-Aids over three of the bigger scrapes.
The others were pretty tiny. If they still bled after she’d showered, she’d have to bandage them, too, but she figured they’d heal up in time.
She thought about Dino. He didn’t look the heroic type. Since she first met him, though, she’d liked him, and she really hoped that he would be all right.
But Pierce, he had chased into the garage after her and he had rescued her. There was no other way to look at it. If he hadn’t got there, right then, at that moment, and fired at Yvgeny… Even under the hot shower, she shivered.
Yet, there he had been. Ran in to save her. Then when he got to the car, he didn’t hesitate. Didn’t spend an instant looking for Yvgeny. He could have been waiting anywhere in that garage, with a gun.
Pierce came to get her out of the car. Walking to the elevator, he must have been thinking that Yvgeny could be anywhere, must have been looking out for him. But he showed no sign of it. He hadn’t appeared to have anything on his mind other than her welfare.
The picture she had in the back of her mind loomed larger. The image of his huge cock, straining his pants. The smoky taste of him. The feel of his hard flesh against the roof of her mouth, pushing the back of her tongue.
Her fingers brushed the water away from her mound. Flicked her clit out of her hood. Pushed up just a little as she remembered the scrape of his voice. There was a scrape at the window. Her fingers pressed her lips apart.
There definitely was a scratch at the window. Must be a bird, she thought. It tapped. Princess grabbed a towel and stepped over to the frosted glass. There was a shape, a shadow on the outside, at the bottom corner.
Perfectly Bad: a bad boy romance Page 20