by Lea Griffith
Julio moved, breaking her line of sight to Minton. And so it began, Ninka’s death walk. If she could remember her people’s death prayer she would speak it now but the verses were as leaves tossed in the wind of her memory, brittle and scattered.
They were only words anyway. They meant nothing. But she could give the weakest of them all something as she left this world. Bone could be a witness to her passing and later give a testament to the girl’s walk. Ninka had broken last night though she’d been splintered all along. The cracks miniscule then widening under the force of the black-eyed man’s will.
He had known what he was doing as he destroyed her. It was in every glance, every word he wrote in his little red book. He watched them all, always. Bone felt his attention in her sleep. But today he would shape the rest of them and little Ninka would be his tool.
Ninka would be their Hell and the fires of her death would forge them. She wondered if the man realized what he was setting into motion. She shook her head as much as her tied hair would allow. He did not. If he did, he wouldn’t do this thing here today.
Ninka cried out and Bone’s gaze narrowed on Julio. She couldn’t watch the broken one—it would make her mad. As twisted and crazy as Julio perhaps. His black eyes were bright with pleasure. Bone’s stomach heaved, the ropes digging deep as her body tightened in primal fear and the need to act, to move and help Ninka.
Her stare remained on Julio but Ninka’s wheat-colored hair flailed, catching on his rough clothes as her cries turned to grunts of pain.
“You’re such a stupid child! Why can’t you learn to be quiet?” he yelled at her, his words stuttered and deep.
He was shaking Ninka, breaking her body to match her mind. The hate rose, coloring Bone’s world, outlining Julio in the shade of her parents’ blood. He threw Ninka to the ground, stepped back, his breathing harsh but a smile on his face.
He kicked her. The tiny child’s indrawn breath reverberated through her mind, sinking into her heart and ripping a hole. She couldn’t force air into her lungs but it was Ninka who coughed, blood flying from her mouth.
“Help me, Bullet,” Ninka cried out and reached for the one she clung to in the night.
More than any other Ninka had relied on Bullet, climbing into bed with her while Bullet held her close. They all provided rations but Bullet had provided more. Bullet’s pain at this loss would be great, maybe greater than all of theirs combined.
Bone didn’t look at Bullet, there was no reason. Bone had already decided Minton and the black-eyed man were going to die—it was only a matter of when. Besides, Bullet would do what she would and if the gun was in her hands no one could stop her.
So she did not glance at Bullet. Right now she would witness for Ninka so when the darkness fell again she could remember how the smallest of them all suffered the most.
Julio kicked her again, over and over and as the blue completely consumed the pink of the morning, he turned to Minton who simply nodded. Julio grabbed Ninka’s head, her frail body dangling like a wilted vine.
Bone met Ninka’s eyes then and in them she saw peace. A breath, a turn, a hawk’s wicked scream, and it was done. Ninka’s body fell but so did Julio’s. A single, smoking hole, dead-center of his forehead. His death had been too quick, painless. That made Bone sad. He deserved torture and agony, his body writhing in the fires of their hatred.
She watched as his limbs twitched but Ninka’s never moved. She heard the black-eyed man murmuring to Bullet, praising her and then demanding she untie them all and get back to camp.
Bullet did as she was told, untying them all. Bone fell to the ground, her legs unable to bear her weight. It took a few minutes to push her own pain aside but she made it to her feet slowly, drawing in air and feeling her strength return with every breath. She joined her sisters and they pulled Julio’s body to the edge of the clearing for the buzzards to feast on.
Bone gazed up at the bird of prey who still held a winged vigil in the sky above them—a portent maybe of more evil to come.
Slowly, Bone sat down beside Ninka’s body wondering if the tiny girl’s soul had already fled or if she’d remained to watch them all gathering around her. “She’s dead. Why wouldn’t she shut up?” she asked.
Her question had been directed at the God who abandoned her but it was Arrow who answered. “She was breaking.”
“We can’t break,” Bullet said and wiped tears from her cheek.
Bone wished for the desire to cry. Where were her tears now?
“She was a stupid girl and we are already broken,” she responded. Her body was tired, her skin raw and her heart bleeding.
She hated them all in that moment—the black-eyed man, Minton, Julio, Ninka. Hated them with a violent ferocity because they’d each taken something from her she knew she’d never get back.
She was only six and she knew what it was to yearn for revenge.
Blade bent over Ninka’s head, lifted it and placed it in her lap. “We can bend. Like the steel that is used to make my long blades, we can bend,” she whispered.
Bone considered Blade’s words—took them in and processed them but quickly came to the conclusion that bending was nothing more than the beginning of a break. She would never bend. Ever.
“We have to hide her so nothing can hurt her anymore,” Arrow said as she stroked Ninka’s long, mud-stained yellow hair.
They could hide her. It was a way for them to protect her since God had failed in his duty. “Then we’ll have to say a death prayer, but the God of my fathers doesn’t listen to my prayers anymore, so someone else will have to,” Bone replied.
Her bleeding heart stopped for single beat. When it began again she acknowledged He wasn’t there. She would struggle in the land of death for eternity because He had abandoned her. Beloved hate replaced her rage and in it was a coolness she welcomed.
Better to kill with the ice of hate than with the fires of rage. She fisted her hands, really looking at them, seeing the broken nails and short digits and she knew she’d kill many before she revisited this place where Ninka had left them.
She raised her head and stared at her sisters. Bullet rubbed her chest, Blade stroked Bullet’s hair, and Arrow stroked Ninka’s. Bullet grabbed Ninka’s hands, flattening them between her own, praying.
Bone wanted to shout at her He wasn’t listening but decided against it. The black-eyed man would return soon. The warning was on the wind. They needed to get back to camp.
Arrow whispered in her native Japanese and chills danced across Bone’s skin. Bone stared at the ground but her hand was on Ninka’s arm, squeezing and letting go, squeezing and letting go.
They were all there but Ninka was gone from them. Five had become four. Bone finally looked at Ninka so she could remember.
Bullet leaned over the girl’s head which still rested on Blade’s lap, placed a kiss on her brow and whispered, “I’ll kill them Ninka. I’ll kill them all.”
Arrow leaned over and whispered something in her native tongue and then it was Bone’s turn. Righteousness poured through her, floating on a wind she imagined came from the plains of Jericho.
“Baruch dayan emet, aval n’kamah hayah mokesh,” Bone whispered. “Shalom, achot.”
A single tear dropped onto Ninka’s pale cheek. Bone wiped it off, smudging dirt and blood on her sister’s pale cheeks. She stood then, raised her arms to the wind and silently promised that no matter what happened she would live to kill.
She would lust for death and hate would hold her hand but she would survive it all for the ones who remained—her sisters. And in the end they would stand over the black-eyed man and watch the life drain from his eyes.
Chapter One
St. Petersburg, Russia, Present Day
The woman was a killer. If you drank from the cup of wrath she carried inside her soul she would go down like milk mixed with honey, sweet and smooth, putting you to bed with a smile on her face and death in her eyes.
Taut, slim muscles rolled
beneath the silky sand of her skin. Everything in his body squeezed tight as the colors of the strobe lights above them danced over her body, slicking over supple skin and sexy hollows. She walked with a grace not many women could match—fluid, even, nothing spared in the stride. Her back was straight, but the generous curve of her hips swayed just enough to definitively belie her intentions.
Dmitry didn’t understand the pull he felt toward her but realized there was no way to control it. It was what it was, no matter how bitter the taste in his mouth.
Her attire consisted of a bra-like contraption and a thong. Attached to the bra and thong were long silken skeins of light pink and blue material that fell to the floor in a halo of sorts. There were swift, tantalizing glimpses of her skin which only served to frustrate. His fisted a hand around his snifter of vodka, cursing softly.
Her only other adornment was the glitter covering her from head to toe. The frail material parted as she walked offering glimpses of the firm, round globes of her ass. The light danced off her body and returned before shying away once again as though fearful of what it would reveal.
Dmitry knew that fear. He’d been luckier than most, he surmised. After their few meetings he’d been left alive, though she never failed to leave a wide aching chasm inside him.
Her steps were swift but unhurried, her face blank but her eyes always moving. Bone was definitely hunting.
Nothing good would come of this. He tracked her movements, unable to tear his gaze away. He wanted to head her off, find out what the hell she was doing there. Instead he watched, transfixed by an assassin.
She was a highlighted shadow, holding your eye even as she hid from you. She was a velvet promise that you reached for with eager hands, the stroke of her presence in your life soft but brutal. And tonight she was so much more—a sultan’s wet dream; a genie’s creation—and everyone, man and woman, stopped what they were doing to watch her glide across the floor.
She wasn’t there to dance or fuck. The woman with hammered gold eyes splintered by jade had come to kill.
Her target was anyone’s guess, hell it could be Dmitry though he speculated it was Anatoly Yesipov. He was the youngest son of Boris Yesipov, who was the underboss and favored brother to the leader of the Russian Mafia. Boris was known as the killer of innocents and twister of souls. Anatoly hadn’t fallen far from the tree, though was an easy mark. The son was one Dmitry thought beneath her. Apparently her lust for killing knew no bounds.
She’d been taking the Yesipov criminal organization down one man at a time for nearly a year, picking them apart like the layers of an onion. Dmitry had not attributed the increasing death toll to her at first. The Russian Mafia was self-limiting. Hell, they killed their own so often it was hard to keep track of the hierarchy. But his reticence to lay the deaths at her door had been his mistake. He’d have been able to catch up to her earlier had the killings been more her style. Yet wasn’t her style a mixture of everything?
Kostolomochka. Little Bone Breaker. Out of all of the killers of First Team, Bone was the one who utilized almost everything at her disposal to send people to the afterlife. Body, gun, knife, her opponent—hell, nothing was off limits, though she killed the very best with her hands.
A psychiatrist would have a field day with her because that need to eliminate with her hands indicated a much darker, deep-seated desire to kill intimately. The woman was…off.
It was abhorrent to him that brittle edge she walked between life and death. Using her body to kill, coming into such close contact with her prey, left her vulnerable. Why it should bother him eluded Dmitry. Everything jumbled inside him when he thought of her. Seeing her now when he was unprepared had lightning tracking down his spine and tentacles of flame scorching his gut.
He both hated and burned for her, the truest of all dichotomies. Yet she had information he needed and had pursued for years now. She was the reason he’d signed on with Trident Corporation five years ago. When Dmitry discovered Rand Beckett and Ken Nodachi were seeking information on The Collective, he’d left behind his assignments with the Russian Secret Service and signed on with them. Anything to get closer to the one called Bone. One of four broken women who could lead him to the truth of what happened to his sisters.
He would not ask the others. Gretchen and Saya were too fragile right now and to ask them to revisit their past was abhorrent to him. There was also the fact that Bone was his. He owed her and their reckoning was coming.
He inhaled deeply and the phantom taste of apricots slid down his throat. That’s what her flavor reminded him of…sugared apricots. Sweet. Addictive. They had been a treat in his youth. Dmitry cursed and slammed his snifter down.
Dmitry did his damndest to push aside his recollections of how her skin smelled and how her breath tasted. He also fought the pull of his past, pushing it as far down in his soul as he could. He concentrated instead on the women dancing around him, bodies synced to some Russian techno-pop blasphemy. They were shells, their emaciated bodies starved for more than food, and nothing like the killer who moved him in ways he didn’t want to acknowledge. The scent of unwashed flesh replaced the sweetness of his memories and he was brought back to his present situation.
Ah, yes. His main reason for being here—Boris Yesipov. The Russian hooked the women on drugs, fed them to his men, and then laughed as they were chewed up and spit out. Bright blue, red, and yellow lights washed them in a garish glow, ripping away their humanity, and leaving skin-clothed skeletons.
One of Yesipov’s women ran her hand down Dmitry’s arm, attempting seduction, her gaze hard with the knowledge that if she failed, she’d be giving up her life. Dmitry was here on Trident business and Boris Yesipov didn’t tolerate failure. It was her job tonight, her one and only job, to seduce Dmitry. If she didn’t see that through, tire him out for the visit Anatoly would pay him later, she would be executed.
Perhaps it would be merciful given her present circumstance. It mattered not. If Yesipov thought Dmitry an easy mark, he had no idea who he was dealing with and it was a mistake that would cost him dearly.
Dmitry tossed back a shot of vodka, relishing the burn and tapping the table for another. His homeland had the very best vodka. It was the only thing he missed about the country he’d been raised in.
He allowed the smile that slashed his face just as he allowed her touch. There was a game to be played here, but all the while his eyes followed the woman striding confidently to the stage. Her hair was hidden tonight by a pitch-black cap of hair. The ends swung around her golden skin, skimming those fragile, rounded shoulders. The choppy black strands were a sacrilege. He much preferred the long, curling sunlit brown tresses natural to her.
Her gaze landed on him, skirted sideways as her lips curved sensually. The lights dimmed and for a second he wondered if he was hallucinating. Maybe it wasn’t her—but, yes, it was. He should never have doubted. No one else affected Dmitry quite so. The eyes that haunted his dreams were simply veiled in electric blue contacts.
Her smile seemed designed to let him know their game was on. Regardless, the shock of her presence danced over his skin, raising the hair at his nape. He downed another shot and shrugged to himself. He was done playing with her.
He’d been so close two weeks ago—so close to tranquilizing her and getting her back to Virginia. She’d eluded him once again there along the edge of the ocean in San Sebastian, Spain. The women of First Team were crafty. Bone the most elusive of them all.
Maybe tonight was his chance. Perhaps he could kill Boris and capture her. Maybe fortune would shine on him. There were many possibilities to the outcome he was so invested in.
The woman beside him lowered her touch to his crotch. His distaste was immediate, her fingers like grasping bones but still he allowed it. Boris watched closely, smiling.
Eat, drink, and be merry, he’d told Dmitry earlier. And in Dmitry’s heart the need for retribution burned. It had taken everything in him to not slice the man’s carotid, leavi
ng the bastard to bleed out.
The only thing reining him in? Caution. He wouldn’t give his hand up so easily. He might be here on Trident business but always there was the prospect he’d catch up to Bone. Gretchen and Saya were concerned for their sister. She’d killed Minton but her rage, the horribly deep well of it, hadn’t been appeased. They were worried she was spinning out of control and being unable to reach Blade, the only one who’d ever been able to truly get through to Bone, they’d requested Dmitry track her.
He’d learned little about her from her sisters, but what he managed to glean from their stingy information was that they considered Bone the strongest of them all. Not simply in form, but in how completely she’d succumbed to what Joseph had trained her to be.
Ubiytsa. Killer.
Her sisters’ fear had held a scent, and it was the stale aroma of self-limiting awareness. Dmitry had read more in what they hadn’t said than what they had. If Bone shattered, the others would follow suit and Joseph would win.
What he didn’t know was why. What made her the glue that held their sisterhood together? Why her? Would he ever find out?
The woman stepping onto the stage, her lithe body rippling like golden fire under the lights was his enemy yet in the recesses of his heart he recognized she was much, much more.
Boris had noticed her too, his attention caught immediately, jaw going slack as he rubbed his dick through his pants. Rage choked Dmitry.
She was his, goddamn it. Only his. Only he was allowed to feel lust for her. Only he was allowed to hunt her. Only he would be allowed to break her.
The music changed. A heavy electric bass and startlingly strident piano rift moved through the club altering the atmosphere instantly. Death sang in the notes—the pledge riding the beat sorrowful yet eerily filled with hope.
That’s what Bone brought. Death, or at the very least hope for it.
Ubiytsa. The word whispered through his mind once more as the woman beside him leaned closer and whispered in his ear. She wanted him, in the bathroom, at the table, wherever she could have him. But all Dmitry knew was Bone.