by Lea Griffith
Her body swayed to the rhythm, hips twisting and curling with the beat. She raised her hands raised in the air as she grasped the pole behind her and lifted to hang upside down, legs wrapping sinuously around the pole and holding her aloft.
Anatoly Yesipov stepped closer to the stage. Bone’s gaze settled on him and the smile she bestowed on the man had Dmitry’s blood heating in fury. The curve of her lips was validation that Anatoly was indeed her prey.
Dmitry blinked, once, twice and leaned back against the leather of the booth. He forced his anger to dissipate, swallowing it. It burned a vile path down his throat. There was no place for it here, now. He needed to prepare and the jealousy raging through his veins wasn’t appropriate. It was irrational.
She lowered to the floor before unlatching her legs from around the pole, shifting and then standing in a fluid motion. She turned quickly and cast Anatoly a coy look over her shoulder. Bone was not like the other women in the club and it showed in her healthy, lithe musculature.
As she turned, Dmitry bit off his groan at the sight of her ass. His hands clenched on his thighs and the woman at his side pressed closer, rubbing her hands over his now very hard cock.
Bone sauntered around the pole and Dmitry saw her take in everything—who stood in the corner, how many there were, and how close Anatoly was. He witnessed her calculating the time it would take Boris to react and how many obstacles stood between her and the door.
Then her eyes met his again and as always when their gazes touched, he was lost. Her gaze dropped to the woman’s hand working Dmitry feverishly and for a moment, a tell-tale moment for Dmitry, her eyes flinched.
Dmitry smiled, raised his chin in the air and cocked an eyebrow at Bone. His taunt was clear. She responded by lifting back up on the pole and sliding down slowly, legs wrapped around the metal once again as if she would wrap them around her lover’s hips.
Then she looked at him again and winked. Her cheeks were rouged and she bit her full lower lip, the white of her teeth bisecting the ruby red of her lips. A hardness rode the delicate lines of her face now, speaking more than words about her anger. He thought out of all the killers of First Team, this one had the least control. She always vibrated with untapped emotion that caused her to ride a knife’s blade of life and death.
In Dmitry’s book that lack of control also made her the most dangerous. When everything you were brought death and you could not manage your reactions, those around you suffered. Good or bad, deserving or not.
Anatoly stepped closer, the music reaching a peak as everyone leaned forward in their seats. Even the women on the other stages were enthralled.
Dmitry’s heart pounded in time with her movements and he fell under the spell she wove, the same as every other man in the club, but he was helpless to stop the slide. It was the renewed rise of his anger that prompted him to shut down his emotions.
If she had no control, he had more than his fair share. His dick went limp and the woman at his side sighed. She risked a glance at Boris but her owner paid her no attention so she carefully got up and walked to the bar. She may have cursed at Dmitry but he ignored it.
Anatoly moved even closer to the stage, his gaze rapt on the woman commanding his attention, hands held out in a plea. Bone reached for him, her eyes bright with the light of lust. Anatoly, the poor bastard, misinterpreted that glow. It wasn’t for him per se, it was for his life.
His death.
Dmitry was incapable of stopping what was sure to set the entire Russian Mafia into a spiral. This then was First Team’s next move. Her other kills had simply been foreplay. He stood but no one noticed.
She was too fast for him to catch. Why the fuck he hadn’t intercepted her before she even made it to the stage?
Maybe because he wanted Anatoly dead as much as she did. Maybe because her need to deal that death was an open wound in his own soul. Eliminating Anatoly would hurt Boris and wasn’t that on Dmitry’s bucket list? Of course the true boss of the Russian mafia, Vadim Yepisov, was the ultimate target, but why not have some fun along the way? Hell, Dmitry didn’t even have to get his hands dirty.
Anatoly took another step and Bone welcomed him. She slid up and down his body, writhing in and out of the bastard’s embrace. Dmitry’s emotions darkened to black, tinged with red. He would never admit to those feelings but they were so filled with rage that had she not made her move, Dmitry would have made it for her.
Fuck his control.
The music faded and another song kicked on. She moved, faster, slower, harder, softer and Anatoly was lost to the woman with the ebony hair and ocean blue eyes. He reached for her and she struck.
Her movement was subtle, quick, but the glint of silver in her hands as she punched him once in the chest wasn’t completely hidden by the strobe lights. She’d used his own knife against him. Anatoly fell forward, and she whispered in his ear before dropping the knife, reaching up, and wrenching his head so fast and hard the snapping of his neck could be heard above the music.
She glanced at Boris, licked her lips and smiled.
Dmitry’s heart skipped a beat.
Everything stopped then—the music, Boris, hell, everyone in the club. Nothing moved and in the silence Dmitry heard Anatoly’s body hit the floor. He shook his head. He would have to kill Boris too quickly now.
Dmitry sighed as he pulled out his Desert Eagle.357, aimed, and fired. Boris’s head exploded and pandemonium erupted. Men calling out rapid fire orders in Russian, women screaming in terror and in the middle of it all their gazes met.
In the distance between them, a promise was given life yet again. She would run. He would chase. But he would catch her and when he did…
She lifted her chin, saluted, and then disappeared in the throng of people pressing toward the door.
Dmitry took out three more men but the rest had scattered the moment their boss’s head went hollow with a bullet. Criminal loyalty didn’t extend past death it seemed. Dmitry followed the throng, tucking his weapon back in the holster at his back.
She’d begun a war on his turf but if he didn’t get to her quickly, she’d be in the wind again and that Dmitry couldn’t afford. Vadim Yesipov was his and if she attempted to take that kill from Dmitry he would take her life and damn the consequences.
It didn’t matter that she made his heart beat hard and his soul squeeze in need. Vadim was his.
And she damn well would be too.
•●•
The cold bit into her skin, the air frosting her lungs a reminder of her location and the danger she was in. She blew out a breath and pressed against the brick wall at her back, the hardened clay taking its own pieces of her flesh as she tried to meld into it. People streamed past, not aware death stood inches from them as they ran screaming and desperate into the snow-coated street. Their fear taunted the killer inside her. It seemed nothing appeased the demon residing in her broken soul.
She’d just taken a life but still wanted more.
Cars honked as they swerved to miss the fleeing people and in the distance a siren split the night.
Bone drew in a deep breath, allowing the icy coldness to soothe her rage. She risked a single glance around the corner only to see more men and women trampling one another to escape the death she’d wrought in Yesipov’s lair.
But no Dmitry Asinimov. It went against everything she’d been trained to do after a kill, but she’d stayed for one more look at the man who made her feel things she couldn’t name. Her window of opportunity was gone now and she’d have to console herself with the few glimpses she’d had of him inside the club.
Precious glimpses they’d been, and far too few. There’d be time later to bring them out and remember.
She re-entered the building and headed down a blackened corridor to a set of stairs. She climbed flight after flight until the door marked ROOF faced her. The wood splintered under her kick and she was left high above the city of St. Petersburg, the wind tearing at her wig and the silken material
of her skirt.
Bone located the pack she’d stashed there a week ago and ripped it open as she tore off the offending bra, thong-slash-skirt and wig. She removed the contacts as well. And then Bone dressed quickly in an all-black, full-body unitard. She slipped her feet into a pair of a black running shoes and was pulling up the hood to the unitard when everything inside her stilled.
“You are not so hard to track after a kill, Etzem,” he whispered at her back. “This is something you should work on.”
Bone, he called her. His deep baritone gave life to her native Hebrew language and spread heat through her body. It was if he tasted each word he spoke, regardless of the language, and found the flavor delightful.
She closed her eyes and the wind whipped away tears she’d managed to hold inside for two decades. He’d made her cry. Goddamn him. It mattered not that she’d given him the word two weeks ago as the sun had shone down and the breeze of the ocean caressed them. She’d granted him her name right before she tranquilized him with a syringe meant for her. And now he was using the weakness against her.
“Do not make me hurt you, Asinimov.”
“What would you do?” he asked silkily. “Would you knife me in the heart and then break my neck? Would you hold my revenge in your hands and tease me with a truth I’ve searched years for?”
He tugged on a curl that had escaped her tied hair. There was an answering pull in her abdomen. Always with Dmitry Asinimov there was…feeling. She hated him for that. Another emotion to struggle with but at least one she understood.
More and more her reasoning, her existence itself, was being tested by emotions. Because of this man.
She had work to do and the dark, lovely, safe depth of her lust to kill couldn’t be contained when rippled with other emotions. When he was around that lust morphed into something she didn’t understand—it became something she simply wanted to succumb to.
“Ah, but yes,” he continued, drawing her attention from the grand city below them. “You’ve already done those things.”
“Rest assured had I knifed you in the heart and broken your neck, we would not be having this conversation,” she mused aloud.
He taunted her at every turn.
Bone squeezed her eyes shut and opened them, taking in the Russian skyline before her. The multi-colored, onion-shaped domes of the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood rose above the streets below, dominating the sky with light. She wanted to laugh that the Russian Mafia had commandeered a building so close to a religious site for their “club.” They trained girls in this building, girls barely off their mother’s knees, to do things only grown women should ever consider. Things that would make even the most experienced whore gasp. She wondered what the God of her fathers would think of that.
His breath drifted over her cold cheek, warming her from the inside out. “But the truth…you’ve managed to keep that from me for years and thus you’ve held my life in your hands.”
“The truth,” she began, “has always been in front of you, Asinimov. Joseph Bombardier took your family. There has never been a reason to pursue me.”
Her mind squeezed with the memory of a different Asinimov. Sharp, jagged spikes of pain radiated through her body as the cold feel of Sacha Asinimov’s throat in her hands replaced the heat his son had started. Her own throat strangled under the pressure of a similar hold—Sacha’s huge hands taking her life even as she sought to take his. Their rakad shel mavet ended brutally, but Bone had been the one to walk away.
She took away knowledge from every contract because what did not kill you made you stronger. Sacha Asinimov taught her more than any other—strength was not the only necessity for a killer. Persistence and hatred were requirements as well.
She had outlasted Sacha. She could outlast the son.
And so the truth mocked her. Dmitry always had a reason to pursue her. He was a man honed in the fires of revenge. Most of his family had been wiped off the planet by Joseph Bombardier. And while she wasn’t the only one of Joseph’s killers to play a hand in their demise—after all, Bullet had taken his brother Alexander—Bone had taken someone who obviously meant more to Dmitry than anyone else.
Dmitry would not care that someone had not been a good man.
The urge to flee rose, taking her breath even as her muscles loosened with the flood of adrenaline. Fight or flight? She measured her options. He was close enough that the heat from his big body burned through the material of her Gortex unitard. His breath carried the hint of mint and vodka and her mouth watered. Russia had the best vodka. She could only imagine the taste when flavored with Dmitry.
His scent teased her nostrils. The smell of snow-kissed pine and juniper—fresh, seductive—sank into her pores, making her core clench.
Out of every person she’d ever met, this one man called to her on a level she was neither comfortable with nor complacent about. He made her want to move.
Into him.
Away from him.
Both.
The one thing she could never do was hold him against her. He would sink too deep then and would destroy her when he found out the truth of who she was.
So she would run again.
Another caress along the curl he held and then, “I can feel you getting ready to move. Your muscles have gone lax and your breathing has slowed. It is a singular oddity among you and your sisters—instead of your muscles bunching and drawing in to prepare, you go still and soft. It is quite unexpected. Tell me, Bone, will you fight with me or flee?”
She snorted. “I will not fight you. Do you think I have allowed you to live each time we’ve met only to take you now?”
His breath brushed her cheek again as his big body meshed against her back. She wanted to curve into him, let his strength surround her and carry her through her trials. The heat, the strength, the need. It was all there between them.
“You cannot fight without killing?”
She glanced at him, wished she hadn’t. “It is a challenge, Asinimov.”
He smiled. “So you will flee, da?”
She said nothing, just continued to take measured breaths, her body hounded by the one thing it could never have. She hated the weakness, indeed, tasted the need to harm rise in her heart and eclipse her mind with its red haze.
Hurt others before they hurt you and you will survive. Joseph’s words tortured her now. He had trained her personally until she had become too strong for him to spar. She’d been a foot and half shorter and a good one hundred fifty pounds lighter than Joseph, yet she’d been stronger, faster, more instinctive in her movements. He’d recognized it by her eighth birthday and stopped training her, turning her over instead to another, more brutal taskmaster.
She shook the memories off.
“Who is next on your list, Bone?” he asked against her neck.
“Step away from me,” she demanded in a low, cajoling tone.
“Who is next?”
“You are a dog with a—” She caught her words and sighed.
He laughed and it moved through her body in a slow, warm tide. Surely it was the most stunning feeling she’d ever had.
“A bone? Yes, well, I do have one in my hands now, correct?”
His tone was teasing. The situation was anything but.
She turned then, took two steps back and lifted her face. He was stunning. The carved features of his face, thrown in relief by the night lights of St. Petersburg, made her heart beat harder. His gaze narrowed, expression going bleak.
For the laugh he’d just blessed her with, there was no happiness on his face. He was completely shut down.
“Come with me to Virginia, kostolomochka moja.” It seemed a plea wrapped in a command. My little Bone Breaker he called her. The name made her want to smile.
She knew every way to kill it seemed, but this man made her want to live and it hurt.
“No.” She shook her head. “Not yet. Death calls and it is time to mete out punishments. You know this, Dmitry, and yet you refuse
to stop this insane crusade of yours. Leave me to this and we, all of us, will be better off. If you persist, we will dance and I will win. I have no choice,” she whispered.
“There are always choices. Do not hide behind your fear to make the right one,” he warned. “Your sisters sent me. They are worried you are losing sight of the goal.”
Anger exploded in her mind. He did this to her—made her experience so many emotions all at once that she couldn’t comprehend the depth and scope of her rage. “Then perhaps they should come tell me themselves? I have been known to kill messengers.”
“Do not make me hurt you, Bone,” he implored, his deep voice smoke over sandpaper. That he mimicked her words from moments ago gave her pause.
Hurt, hurt ,hurt…she was comfortable with that.
She cocked her head and stared at him. “Pain is nothing but a reminder that I was created for death. It is my alpha and omega—my beginning and my end. My heart craves it, my soul requires it. If you thought the prospect of pain would draw me in line, Dmitry Asinimov, you were wrong.”
She struck before she could question the need not to. One, two, three, she hit him with her closed fist, first to the side of the head, the next two to the gut. She sidestepped and went low, aiming a kick at his hip. He stumbled, clearly unprepared for her attack but gained his balance within seconds.
He spun to meet her next blow, blocking the swing of her arm. The force she’d swung with combined with his re-direction turned her. This gave him her back for mere seconds and he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her against his chest and squeezing. She didn’t draw in a breath, rather she pushed out, because if he squeezed as she breathed out he had the upper hand. Bone aimed a kick backward at his knee as she swung her head back. She connected with his knee and his nose. Not hard enough to maim but she’d hurt him. He grunted and released her, shoving her away.
She glanced up as he shuffled and then once again he was coming, tackling her to the ground but bearing the brunt of the fall.