“You need to be more careful,” she chided him. “If those rip open, I am not sewing it back up.”
He stared at her, genuinely outraged by her sense. “You did this when you took off,” he told her.
Unfazed by the accusation, she merely sniffed haughtily and tossed the used gauze into the trash. Then she dusted her hands and faced him squarely.
“What’s for breakfast?”
“Where are you?” Erik’s voice crackled through the crappy reception at the diner, some shit hole nearly two hours from the cabin, in a town not even listed on a bloody map.
“I don’t know,” he muttered, glowering at the smiling face of a plastic leprechaun taped to the wall outside the men’s bathroom. “Hell, maybe.”
“When are you coming back?” Erik said.
A bell chimed in the main area. Dimitri turned on impulse and sought out Ava sitting in the corner booth with her plate of pancakes. The rest of the dining room occupied a cluster of truckers, a family a few tables from Ava, and two elderly men playing chess at the back. Ava had her head bent over her plate. Occasionally, she’d glance out the window at the parking lot and the post office across the street, but she was oblivious to the glances she was getting from a few of the men at the counter. Dimitri wasn’t.
“Might not be for a few days,” he said to his uncle. “Had some trouble last night.”
“What kind of trouble?” Erik demanded at once.
His gaze went to Ava. The worst kind, he thought miserably.
“I’ll handle it,” he said instead.
“Do it quickly. The first chair meeting is in a couple of days. You need to be here.”
“I’ll be there.” He hung up and dialed Stephen.
The kid picked up on the third ring. “Talk to me,” he said in the way of greeting.
There was the distinct pew, pew, pew of lasers being shot in the background, the rapid clicking of fingers on a keypad.
“Can you hack into a hotel camera feed?”
There was a quickening of breath, a groan, then an exhalation of defeat. “Fuck.” Something cracked. Another sigh. “Sometimes,” he muttered. “Most hotels keep their records in some backroom, but a lot of them have upgraded and download straight to a cloud. Which hotel are we talking about?”
Dimitri gave the name and address, along with the times he needed Stephen to delete.
“I also need you to delete a name off their database.”
“That I can do,” Stephen said with some enthusiasm. “But no can do on the videos. Someone needs to go in and handle that in person. It’s all old school.”
Dimitri cursed inwardly. “Okay, do what you can with the name and text me.”
“Cool. What name?”
“Ava Emerson.”
There was a pause on the other end, then, “That’s the chick you wanted me to find yesterday.” Another pause. “Dude, did you whack her?”
Dimitri frowned. “Mind your business … and no one says whack.” He shook his head. “Just delete all record of her off the computer.”
“Uh…”
“What?”
Stephen cleared his throat. “Might be a bit too late for that, brah. Your chick’s already made the papers.”
“What?”
Dimitri spun in Ava’s direction. She was still eating. But the men at the counter were all looking at her now, murmuring quietly to each other and pointing at a newspaper one of them held.
“What does it say, Stephen?”
“Uh…” There was a series of rapping sounds on the other end. “That the police are looking to question her regarding a shooting at the hotel that left two dead. She was last seen leaving the building with an unidentified man. Police are not sure if she’s being held hostage or—”
Dimitri hung up. He started towards Ava just as one of the truckers rose as well, paper in hand.
Fuck!
Ducking back towards the bathroom, Dimitri reached into his pocket. He exchanged his phone for the balaclava, but stopped; if he went out there as the Devil, his secret would be out if the people after them ever found out. It would ruin his chances at the chair, never mind cost him his life, and Ava’s. But if he went as himself, they would have his face.
The trucker was at Ava’s table now. She looked up when he set the paper in front of her with a smack Dimitri could hear from across the room.
Ava jerked back. She stared down at where the man was pointing with a stubby finger. Dimitri reached for his gun. He started forward.
“Is this a joke?” Ava’s voice rose over the low whir of the fan, the sultry croon of Elvis and stilled the chatter in the room. She shot to her feet, paper rolled up in her hand and, to everyone’s astonishment, whacked the trucker on the nose.
The trucker reared back. “What the fuck…?”
“If you are going to behave like a dog,” she was saying when Dimitri got past his shock. She smacked the trucker again, this time on the head. “I will treat you like a dog.”
The truckers at the counter howled. The one getting beaten by a newspaper didn’t.
He wrenched the paper from Ava’s grasp when it came down for a third strike, his face blotchy from the abuse and embarrassment. “You stupid bitch!”
Dimitri got there just as the hand with the paper came down towards Ava. He caught it by the wrist, and in a single, fluid motion, wrenched it behind the trucker’s back and slammed him face first into the table.
The dishes rattled. Someone gasped. The little boy with the family leaped up on his chair and exclaimed, “Cool!”
Dimitri focused on the douche. “It’s a very small man who raises a hand to a woman,” he said quietly enough for the trucker to hear him. “It’s a dead man who raises his hand to my woman.” He added just the right amount of pressure to make the man squeal like a pig. He lowered his voice even further. “Apologize.”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” the man cried even before Dimitri finished speaking.
Dimitri released him.
The trucker scrambled off the table, clutching at his arm, his face the reddish purple of a beet. He avoided Ava’s gaze entirely as he hurried back to his friends.
Dimitri snatched the paper from his hand in passing and looked to Ava. “Let’s go.”
She was staring at him, her green eyes enormous with shock.
“What?”
She started to say something, but seemed to think better of it and just shook her head.
After paying for her meal—and leaving a generous tip—they left the diner. They got back into the car and drove in the opposite direction from the cabin.
“This isn’t the way back,” Ava said.
“We need to change cars,” he said.
“Why?
Rather than answer, he pushed the bunched wad of paper into her lap. “What were they showing you?”
Ava smoothed the paper out the best she could before flipping to the spot. “This month’s bikini girl.” She found the page and showed him the scantily clad woman in a bright, orange bikini. “They wanted to know if my breasts were as firm as hers and if I’d let them compare. Quite rude if you ask me. I mean, who does that in a diner?”
They were, he thought absently. Ava’s breasts couldn’t be matched by any woman. But that was a discussion for another day.
“Is there anything else in there?”
Seconds passed as she went from article to article, head rocking slowly from side to side. “I don’t see … oh, wait!” She stopped on something and began reading. “Authorities are on the lookout for the persons involved in the shooting late last night that left two unidentified men dead at the East End Hotel. Cameras at the hotel show a woman being dragged off by who the authorities are considering as the suspect to the … oh my God! That’s me! Dimitri, it’s my picture!”
Carefully, he pulled onto the shoulder of the road and took the paper from her trembling grasp. He scanned the article carefully and the found the only mention of him as an unknown dark man. Ava
, on the other hand, had been mentioned by name and even wielded a picture of her, bright and smiling into the camera. It gave her description, along with her job at Chaud Magazine. What they didn’t mention was John Paul or her mother, which momentarily hit him as odd, but not enough to dwell on.
“I didn’t kill those men,” Ava gasped, looking dangerously pale under the green tinge of her skin.
Dimitri shook his head. “You’re not their suspect. They only want to talk to you.”
What he didn’t tell her was that this also put her face on the Most Wanted hit list for the person whose men Dimitri had shot the night before.
“I need to call John Paul,” she said firmly, but with an undertone of terror. “And Robby. They will have seen this. They will…” she broke off with a sound between a gasp and a sob.
Wordlessly, Dimitri took out his phone and passed it to her. The flicker of surprise on her face told him she hadn’t expected that, but she took the phone quickly and dialed.
“Don’t tell them where we are,” he warned her. “We don’t know who is listening. Ava.” He put a restraining hand on her arm, stopping her from hitting talk. “I mean it.”
She nodded. “I won’t.”
Resorted to believing her, he let go and sat back in his seat. The paper was tossed into the backseat and he pulled back onto the deserted road.
“Dad? It’s me.”
Dimitri couldn’t hear the exact words coming from the other end, but the volume of John Paul’s exclamation echoed into the air in an intelligible garble.
“No, I’m okay,” Ava assured him, sounding horribly false even to Dimitri’s ears. “I’m with Dimitri. He saved me last night from those men.”
The response was lower, calmer, but firm. He was no doubt telling Ava to tell him where she was.
His theory proved correct when Ava said, “I honestly don’t know where we are, but I’m safe. I promise I am. I just needed to call you and…” she broke off abruptly, then, “No, I understand that. I do, but Dimitri … yes, but…”
There was a stretch of silence on her end.
“All right.” She whispered at last, pulling the phone from her ear. She glanced sideways at Dimitri. “He wants to talk to you.”
He’d expected as much, and didn’t bother concealing his deep exhalation as he put the call through the car speakers.
“Yeah?” he said in the way of greeting.
“What the hell have you done?” was John Paul’s immediate response.
Dimitri shook his head when Ava opened her mouth. Didn’t matter. John Paul wasn’t done.
“If anything happens to her, Tasarov, I will personally put you so far into the ground, the earth’s core will melt your bones.”
“Dad!” Ava cried, horrified.
John Paul either didn’t hear her, or chose to ignore it. “I have spent the last sixteen years keeping her away from your bullshit, away from that world, and now, she is at the very center of a nationwide manhunt. Every dirty bag in the country is looking for her, because of you.”
“Dimitri had nothing to do with any of this!” Ava protested.
Dimitri put his hand up to stop her.
“He knows what he’s done,” John Paul hissed, livid fury a white hot iron in his voice. “Bring her back. Now.”
It was now or never, Dimitri thought, gripping the wheel more securely between his hands.
“What’s in it for me?”
Chapter Six
The silence rolled through the car with the same intensity as an approaching storm. It rose in dark, electric currents that had all the hairs on Ava’s arms lifting. A chill rippled along her spine with serrated fingers. She shivered.
“What?” Calm, so much eerie calm in a single word, it terrified her.
“You want her back, but I also want something,” Dimitri replied with a curtness that suggested they were discussing a matter that meant very little to him. “I think I have the bigger bargaining chip, don’t you?”
Ava sat in horror as the conversation unfolded. The flippant disregard cut deep, leaving jagged claw marks on her soul, but it was the implication of what he was saying, the emphasis on her life that had her staring at the man next to her, horrified.
“You won’t hurt her,” John Paul countered after a heartbeat.
Dimitri laughed, the sound actually amused. “Based on what? Some ridiculous few months a hundred years ago? I’ve worked very hard to be where I am and to get what I want. Ava barely means a thing to me anymore.”
John Paul was silent long enough to make her heart skip over. The absence of his immediate resolution had her stomach jittering. All her life, he’d been her knight, the one with all the answers to all her problems. To hear nothing when her life was in danger made her want to cry.
But was she? She glanced back at Dimitri, at his cool, confident profile, and really wondered if he would hurt her. It had been eight years, but he wouldn’t. She had to believe he wouldn’t. No. Absolutely not. Whatever he was playing at, it was to rile John Paul, because even while he was discussing her life as though it meant less to him than the flicking of an ant off a picnic blanket, she had never felt more safe. Maybe that made her a lunatic, but she stood by it.
Then another thought occurred to her—John Paul knew. He knew about her and Dimitri. How? She had no idea, but he seemed unconfused by Dimitri’s backhand response.
“What do you want?”
If the question pleased him at all, Dimitri’s expression never altered. His eyes remained focused on the road, slightly narrowed as he came to a rolling stop at a four way, glanced in all four directions and then turned the wheel right down a long stretch of dirt. He never even peeked at her.
“You know what I want,” he said at last.
Then, to her absolute shock, he disconnected the conversation.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “You can’t just tell someone you’re going to kill their daughter and then hang up.”
“That’s how negotiation works,” he told her quietly. “If he wants to see you again, he’ll have to think about what I want and call me back.”
Ava was silent for a long moment, possibly too long, because he shot her a quick, sidelong glance before focusing on the road again.
“Would you really?” she asked, so quietly even she had trouble hearing it.
“What?”
She raised her voice a notch. “Would you kill me if he says no?”
She had to give him credit when he said nothing for a long stretch of time. It made her think he was considering it, debating how to explain to her that he meant none of it.
“Yes.”
Ava blinked, momentarily too distracted by her own swirling confidence that it took a full second to understand his response.
“What?”
He peeked at her, a quick twist of his head before looking away. “I would if he doesn’t do what I say.”
Ava stilled. “You’re lying.”
His shoulders lifted with his deep inhalation. When the air came out, it was with a heavy sense of exasperation.
“It’s been eight years, Ava. I’m not the man you once knew.”
“So, what then?” she snapped. “What kind of man are you now, eh? The sort that beats women? Kills them? Do you get off on the torture of children? Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Doesn’t matter what you believe.”
She refused to let it slide that easily. “I heard what you said back there, at the restaurant to that man. I heard what you called me.”
He turned left down yet another length of road into even more endless nothing.
“Christ, I was caught up in the moment,” he grumbled. “Didn’t mean a damn thing.”
“You’re a liar!” she shot at him. “You said yourself you’d never hurt me. Did you get caught up in the moment then, too?”
“Yes.”
Ava folded her arms. “All right then, Mr. Big, Bad Killer, go on then. Hurt me. Let’s see it.”
&nb
sp; “Ava…”
“No, really. I’m calling you out.”
“Stop it.”
“Can’t do it, can you?”
The car came to a violent, shrieking stop in the middle of the road. Clouds of dust plumed up behind them. Ava pitched forward and only just caught herself on the dash.
Dimitri practically turned all the way in his seat, his eyes molten pools of dark, coiling rage. “Knock it off!” he growled. “Everything I said was to get you to shut up and do what I say until I can get rid of you. That’s what all this is about. You’re a means to an end, Ava. Things will never go back to the way they were between us. Those days are over, or was I not clear when I left? So, whatever stupid idea you have in your head about me loving you, get it out now, because I don’t care. Not about you. Not about what happens to you. Not about how I send you back to John Paul. Understand?”
Not a muscle worked by the time he finished. Every nerve, bone, fiber of her body had crystalized. She’d become a sculpture of ice, frozen to her seat as he sat back, his expression never altering.
Her heart hurt. It was odd because she’d expected the useless thing to be clutched in his bloody hand where he’d torn it from her chest. But it twisted and bled like he’d actually stabbed her. She honestly never thought anything could hurt more than the time he’d left, yet this was worse. The pain was so much more vivid. Maybe she’d lathered herself in a balm of ignorance the last time, the foolish ignorance that maybe it wasn’t what it seemed. There was no salve now, just a cold slap of reality.
“I … understand,” she whispered, finding her voice from the bottom of some distant well.
He hesitated. It was no more than a split second, but then he was slamming down on the gas and nothing more was said.
John Paul never called back. It made her wonder if maybe he didn’t have Dimitri’s number, or if the thing Dimitri wanted would take a long time to obtain. Whatever it was, she wished he’d hurry. Every hour that passed was a new form of torture. It didn’t matter that she’d locked herself up in her room and left him to stomp about below. His very existence in the same air space was suffocating her. She tried to sleep. She crawled beneath the itchy blankets and wedged herself against the lumpy mattress, desperate for sleep to come, to take away the endless hours until she could go home, but each bout of slumber seemed only seconds long and left her edgy and miserable.
The Devil's Beauty (Crime Lord Interconnected Standalone Book 2) Page 9