by Bella Rose
“I’m a medical student,” the kid explained.
Grigori changed his mind. That made some sense. “The bullet went through, but she’s bleeding.”
“Lay her down.” The kid went into doctor mode. He stuffed his backpack beneath Flynn’s head and began probing her shoulder.
When she made a tiny noise of pain, Grigori nearly decked the guy. He had to clench his fist to keep control. That was when Igor showed up with Ivan on his heels.
“Boss?” Igor said in Russian. “They were aiming for her. Flynn was the target.”
Grigori had wondered about that. “Her father was acting strange. Perhaps he knew this was coming.”
“But why?” Igor demanded.
“I think it has something to do with the money.” Grigori didn’t have all the pieces yet, but he would. “Nobody tries to murder my wife and gets away with it.”
“It looks like Anson took down their shooter.”
“Where is Anson?” Grigori almost hated to ask.
Igor sighed. “We got separated, but I saw him run like hell in the other direction. He’ll meet us at the backup point, I’m sure.”
“I hope so,” Grigori murmured.
Meanwhile, the med student had pulled out what looked like clean socks. He was using a water bottle to wet a sock in order to cleanse the wound. Then it appeared as though he was going to use the rest of his socks to dress it.
“It’s not the neatest bandage job,” the student explained. “But it’ll keep her from bleeding to death. The wound is clean. It doesn’t look as if it nicked anything inside her shoulder, but she should definitely see a doctor to determine if there was damage to the bones or tendons.”
“Thank you.” Grigori pulled out his wallet and gave the kid a hundred dollar bill. “Keep your mouth shut if anyone asks.”
The med student’s eyes went wide at the sight of the money. “No problem, dude.”
“When will she wake up?” Igor asked the kid, remembering to speak English.
The student frowned. “It’s hard to say. If she passed out from lack of blood, she may need a transfusion, although I doubt it. When her body is ready, she’ll wake up. Unless she got hit on the head.”
“Not that I know of,” Grigori said, feeling relieved. “She was awake one second, and then out the next.”
“So probably the low blood pressure.” The student nodded. “She’ll wake up when her body replenishes what it needs. And she’ll be tired and thirsty.”
“Boss, we have to get out of here.” Ivan touched Grigori’s arm. “Teller and his men are sweeping the area. I see one of them headed this way now.”
Grigori noticed a narrow alley between the buildings that seemed to lead out toward the parking garage. “Let’s head that way now. We’ll pick up Anson and go home to regroup.”
Chapter Nine
Flynn blinked experimentally, trying to decide why she was lying on her back in bed. She never slept on her back. It was uncomfortable. But when she attempted to roll to her right side, an agonizing pain shot through her shoulder all the way to her fingertips. The haze of pain left her tingling all over.
“Grigori?” she called out, knowing exactly where she was now but not remembering how she’d gotten there.
He appeared in the doorway. “I’m right here.”
She gazed at his disheveled good looks and briefly had the thought that there really had to be some crazy explanation for why she was so attracted to a man she should theoretically hate. Then she noticed how worried he looked.
There were dark circles beneath his eyes, and his arms were crossed tensely over his chest. His jeans were spattered with something that looked disturbingly like gore, and he had changed from the blue shirt he had been wearing earlier to a simple black T-shirt. He walked into the bedroom and sat down beside her.
He pursed his lips and appeared to give her a thorough onceover from her head to her toes. “How are you feeling?”
“Good, I guess.” Then she tried to sit up and had to reevaluate that statement. “Sore, actually. And my head aches. What happened?”
Something in his expression tipped her off that she was not going to like the answer. Her gut churned. She remembered meeting with her father. Teller had made some threats. Then Anson had been yelling at them and they were running. Her mind just sort of went blank after that.
“Someone tried to kill you, Flynn,” Grigori said quietly. “I think it was your father, but I can’t be certain as to why he would make a move like that.”
A tight feeling of mingled horror and sorrow lodged itself in her gut. Her father had attempted to kill her? She put her face in her hands to hide her shame.
“Someone shot you from a rooftop. Do you remember?”
“Not much, but that explains why my shoulder hurts like hell.” Then she lowered her hands and twisted her head, trying to see her injury.
“You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“Did I go to a hospital? Who took care of this?” She racked her brain, trying to remember.
“There was a medical student hiding around the corner of a building with us. He dressed it. Then when we got home I had Ivan redo it with something other than socks.”
“Wait. Did you just say socks?” Her brain couldn’t even process that nonsense. “My shoulder was packed with socks?”
“We used what we had.” He shrugged it off, so she did the same.
“Am I going to be okay?” It felt stupid to ask that, but she really didn’t know anything about gunshot wounds.
“That depends on whether or not your father is going to make another attempt on your life. Flynn, why would he do that?” Grigori gently stroked her hair. The touch was so very soothing. She didn’t want him to stop.
“He wants the money. My father is a US district attorney, but he has political aspirations far beyond that. He wants to run for a Senate seat, and that takes money.”
“I thought politicians sold themselves to their constituency in order to get campaign funds.” He seemed amused by this concept.
“Sort of. You have to have enough money to start a campaign.” She thought about all of the fights and the pressure over the last few years. “Sort of like that old saying that you have to spend money to make money, you know?”
“So he wants your inheritance to fund his campaign?” He seemed to be working through this idea in his head. “How much money did your mother leave you?”
“Several million dollars.” Flynn cleared her throat. “Okay, so more like ten million.”
His elegant dark brows shot up in surprise. “That’s certainly motivation for murder, but killing your own child? That’s despicable.”
“I have to admit that it surprises me too.” She traced the pattern woven into the blanket still covering her body. “He’s been pressuring me since I turned eighteen to turn control of my trust over to him. It’s held by an executor who was my mother’s financial planner.”
“He wanted to be the executor,” Grigori guessed.
She nodded. “When I turned eighteen, I could have filled out the paperwork to have it changed. Most people would have, you know. But my mother knew my father. She knew he would go through the money in a week trying to buy his ambitions.”
“So she protected you the best way she could.” His soft smile made her feel so protected. It was the first time Flynn had felt like this since her mother’s passing.
Then she remembered the other thing that had happened at the meeting with her father. “Grigori, I’m really sorry about your brother. I’m not much of a winning pick.”
“That was a play on your father’s part to make you doubt my intentions.” He gently touched her face with his fingertips. “My main goal was to be married in order to stay in this country. I had Anson file the marriage certificate this morning. I’m sure immigration will be knocking on the door at some point and demanding proof.”
“Speaking of knocking. How is it that
we can be a few hours from Washington DC in a nice neighborhood in Richmond, and nobody is knocking the door down trying to get to you?”
“First of all, the community is gated. Second, we keep round the clock surveillance. Third, I have a rather elaborate identity set up to hide this place.” He paused for a moment, getting up and walking to the window. “Your father knows where we are. He sent a message to you here this morning. He’s choosing not to act here. I’m not sure why. It very likely has to do with the way he wants your murder to look.”
Flynn frowned. She took a few deep breaths, trying to clear the cobwebs from her mind. Then she realized what they were missing. “College campus, public shooting—he’s trying to make it a public spectacle to drum up an outpouring of voter sympathy.”
“By killing his own daughter?”
She carefully drew her knees up and rested her chin on them. “If I die before I turn twenty-one, he gets my inheritance. No questions asked.”
IT WAS ONE thing to speculate that District Attorney Ronald Callaghan was trying to have his own daughter murdered for money. It was another thing to imagine that the man was trying to use her death as a multifaceted attempt to gain public approval and a subsequent win in the political arena.
“That is disgusting.” Grigori gazed at the beautiful woman who continually impressed the hell out of him. “It actually makes me want to get my rifle and go to work.”
He could actually see her working that through in her head. Then she exhaled a sigh and tucked her tangled hair behind her ears. “I wish I could tell you yes. I really do. I never thought I would agree that assassination was a good idea, but there you go, I guess.”
“Most of my contracts are real scumbags, sweetheart.” He sat back on the bed and rested his shoulders against the headboard. It gave him a true rush of pleasure when she curled up beside him as best she could with her sore shoulder.
“How does it work?” she asked.
He felt odd telling her about his job, but she seemed to be coming to grips with it, and that was very important to him for some reason he didn’t particularly want to examine. “There are nine main Russian mafia families here in the US. Most of them have branches in Russia or the Ukraine as well.”
“That sounds bizarrely organized.”
He laughed. “If you could see us together, you would think it the opposite. We are loud and argumentative and basically a bunch of stubborn asses only concerned with ourselves.”
“That’s not flattering at all.” She affectionately nuzzled his arm.
“There are different ranks throughout the families. But most of us use what we call enforcers to carry out minor punishments or collect debts. Enforcers handle security as well.”
“So you’re one of them?”
He grimaced. He had been for years. It had taken almost a decade of working his way through the ranks to achieve his position now. “I’m an assassin. I used to be an enforcer. Now my job is more specialized.”
“So when the enforcers can’t make someone behave, they call you?”
“Something like that, yes.” He sighed. “My brother Yakov had just been given his assassin status not long before your father decided to have him deported.”
“How did that happen?” Two lines appeared between her brows. “I don’t even remember him talking about that kind of thing.”
“He had Yakov on trumped up charges. I believe it was a drug charge of some kind, but my brother was never even on the dealing side of the local family’s business here in Richmond.” Grigori had been so concerned with his brother’s fate that he had failed to really look at what had happened.
“Do you think someone might have sold your brother out to my father? The evidence had to come from somewhere. It can be altered or enhanced, but there has to be a seed.”
“Yuri,” he murmured. “That bastard.”
“Who’s Yuri?” She seemed to taste the word as she said it.
He wound a lock of her hair around his finger. Somehow just touching her helped to keep him from losing his head and giving into the roiling anger filling his gut. “Yuri is the head of the family here in Richmond.”
“Why would he go against you?” There was a beautiful sort of innocence in her eyes as she asked this question. “Wouldn’t he be afraid of making you angry?”
“I think he would be more afraid of Yakov and I becoming too powerful for him to control. His men respect me, and they respected Yakov. If we had wanted to, we could have taken his position from him.”
Her face settled into an introspective expression. “So you think Yuri engineered the charges against your brother and brought my father in on it to have Yakov deported?”
“It’s kept me busy, hasn’t it? I’ve been so worried about preventing my own deportation that I haven’t paid one bit of attention to anything else.”
“I don’t think my father has ever had any dealings with the mafia before.” Then she froze. “But Teller has. I know he has.”
“The man who was so eager to have you killed?” Grigori asked, trying to remember if he had ever seen Teller before the incident at the church.
She was getting excited. She sat up and turned to look him in the face. Her eyes were bright, and he could hardly resist the urge to kiss her. “I bet that’s what happened! Teller is dirty. He has his fingers in everything. And when Daddy doesn’t do what Teller wants, Teller does it himself.”
“Perhaps it’s time that the boys and I pay this Teller a visit.”
“I want to come!” She moved as though she was about to bound off the bed, but Grigori caught her.
Very carefully, so as not to disturb her shoulder, he pulled her back into his arms. “No, sweetheart. You need to stay here. I will leave Anson here with you. I can’t risk taking you along. Not after what happened earlier.”
Chapter Ten
It was readily apparent that Flynn didn’t like Grigori’s decision to err on the side of caution. Her expression grew stormy, her green eyes flashing fire as she shoved the covers aside and got out of bed. He watched her with fascination. She was nothing like the other women he’d had experience with over the years. That was for certain.
“I’m perfectly capable of going with you.” She put her hands on her hips and even managed not to wince when her shoulder shifted. “See? I’m fine.”
He sighed and wondered how to proceed. He had no desire to insult her pride, but there was no way he wanted to put her in harm’s way for the second time in one day. Although he could have stood there staring at her for eternity. She wasn’t wearing anything but her panties and one of his old T-shirts, and she looked damned enticing.
“You know how fit I am?” Now there was a smile playing in the corner of her mouth.
“No, but I have a feeling you’ve come up with something that will show me.”
She marched around the bed. He turned, letting his legs hang over the edge and preparing to get up and chase her should she decide to make a run for it. With Flynn, there was really no telling what might happen.
Then she dropped to her knees on the floor in front of him. Grigori’s brain seemed to stutter as he wondered what her purpose might be. She stroked his thighs through his jeans. He froze. Her touch was electric. He could not have moved even if he had wanted to.
Her fingers danced up the length of his legs toward his waist. She was staring at him, a mischievous grin on her face. When she unfastened his jeans and wiggled them down toward his hips, he was powerless to argue. He simply shifted his buttocks in order to let her pull the denim over his backside and down his legs.
“You’re not wearing any underwear.” She sounded almost shocked.
Considering it was his cock bouncing against his belly as though it were trying to pound some sense into him, Grigori didn’t figure he needed to comment.
She took hold of his shaft with the hand of her good arm. He groaned. Her grip was firm, but also soft. The skin on the inside of her hand
was silky smooth. She rubbed him as though she were playing, exploring his length and circling him with her fingers until he was panting with the exertion of holding back.
“I’m fit, you know,” she told him. “I’m even well enough to do this.”
Then she took his cock between her lips, and he thought he might die of the sheer pleasure. Her tongue skated up and down his length before circling around and around his head. She slid the tip of her tongue along the hole at the end of his penis and then toyed with the puckered flange.
He was trembling with the ecstasy she was bringing him. Nothing had ever felt this good. She drew her cheeks in and sucked hard from the base, letting her mouth slide up his length until he popped free of her lips. Then she swallowed him whole and did it again. Bobbing her head up and down, she used the flat part of her tongue to tease the most sensitive part of his cock with each stroke. His hips jerked in response.
Grigori twisted his fingers in the blankets to keep from grabbing her head. It was so tempting to hold her still and fuck her face until he could pour his seed across her tongue. But that wasn’t what he wanted.
He could sense how turned on she was. Perhaps he could even smell the warm decadence of her pussy as her core began to heat and she creamed her panties as she crouched before him. He remembered what it was like to be inside her hot, tight pussy. And he wanted it again.
With one hand he touched her hair. He threaded his fingers through the silky strands and watched her eagerly suck his cock as though there was nothing else in the world she would rather do. The sight was erotic beyond belief. Still, he wanted to feel her sweetness wrap around him as she came so prettily with his length inside her.
“Flynn,” he murmured. “I want you so badly. I want to be inside your pussy. I’m going to have you right now. Do you understand?”
She drew back, looking up and meeting his gaze as she gave his dick one last kiss on the tip. It surprised him when she stood. He’d expected her to get on the bed, but she removed her underwear and bent over the edge of the mattress instead.