Total pages in book: 48
Estimated words: 46132 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46132 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
I pump the sit-ups, feeling my hard abs crunching together. Sparky tilts his head as I come up, and then tilts it the other way when I lower myself down, over and over like he’s telling me no.
“I’m a killer, Sparky,” I tell him. “The men I kill, they may be bad, but that doesn’t change things. I’m a killer. I’ve killed twenty-eight men and tonight it’s going to be twenty-nine. I wonder how you’d feel if you could understand me. I wonder if you’d still love me, little man.”
I laugh grimly at myself, wondering what Felix would say if he could see me now, the grizzled old bastard.
Felix was the one who begged me to find a lady, to settle down. As he lay bleeding to death in my arms, his voice gurgling, choking with blood, he told me that his biggest regret was never seeing me find a woman and making a home, making a life, making something.
My phone vibrates and I leap up, shaking my head at the memory.
That might have been his biggest regret.
But I’ve never found a woman that stirs me like that, that awakens something primal and impossible-to-ignore inside of me.
Maybe it’s this life. Maybe it’s made me too cold.
But all I care about right now is getting this job done and then finding a quiet corner of the world with Sparky.
I pick up the phone and study the photo of Dobry Kuznetsov, a high ranking lieutenant in the East Coast Bratva.
He’s a red-faced man with a few pale hairs combed over his sweaty head, his glasses thick, magnifying his eyes. In the photo he sits at a dinner table, grinning widely, face shining.
He looks happy.
He looks like a man with no clue he’s going to be dead very soon.
Chapter Two
Dakota
I stand at the window and look out upon the estate, the moonlight turning the icy grass a deep blue. Past the long fields, the guard turrets sit like squat stone creatures, the night-silhouetted shapes of the guards just about visible from where I stand. Even without the guards, climbing a wall that absurdly tall would be an insane feat.
And then even to get to the wall I’d have to run across the lawn—
No, scratch that.
Getting outside would be the challenge, considering that every door is locked and only the guards have the keys.
“What are you doing?” one of the guards snaps, striding down the hallway.
I flinch, cursing myself.
I turn and face him and make sure not to look him in the eye. I stare past him instead, because I’ve learned that they don’t like it when you look at the floor. They think it makes you weak-spirited, not worthy to serve them … but neither do they like it if you look at them squarely. They think it makes you overly spirited, and not worthy to serve them.
In the periphery of my vision, the guard looks like they all do to me. A big, leering, tattooed Russian man casually wearing a firearm on his hip. He nods back the way he came, from which come the sounds of the party, the too-happy music, and the boisterous laughter of the Bratva, Dobry’s laughter the loudest of all. It’s like he thinks if he guffaws with enough force he can pretend he isn’t a complete freaking psychopath.
“Do your job. Or we will find something else for you to do. Dobry’s brother, the noble Andrei, didn’t send good vodka directly from Moscow for you to gaze like a fool out of the window instead of serving it. Go.”
I quickly walk down the hallway, heart thudding in my chest like it always does when I have a run-in with the guards.
I slide into the room and take one of the silver platters from the servers’ table, walking as gracefully as I can around the cavernous ballroom.
The floor is marble and decorated in ancient Russian scenes, a sweeping kaleidoscope of color that is impossible to study closely with all the ladies’ heels and men’s shoes clipping across it.
As I stride between the tattooed, grinning Russian men and the chirping women in their elegant dresses, I see a sword and a spark of lightning and the corner of a globe, the sail of a ship, the room so huge that it can contain dozens of separate scenes.
I make my circuit, letting out a breath, glad that I didn’t stumble in my heels.
Before they brought me here, I was never much for wearing heels. I was always more comfortable in boots or sneakers. Heels require an expertise that I never cultivated.
I feel my mind trying to tug me back to the night it happened, but I forcefully drag it back. Thinking about that will only sting me with shame and regret and self-hatred, and I haven’t got time for that.
Another platter—another circuit.