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“It’s over,” he says, staring at the glass on the table. “We did it.”
“We did,” I agree. “We killed the man who killed her.”
“He deserved worse. He deserved whatever fucking hell we could rain down on him.” My twin curls his fingers into a fist on the table.
I watch him for a second and then shrug. “He got what was coming to him. That’s what matters.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to bed,” I tell him.
He nods, already looking lost in his own thoughts again. I clean my lowball glass, dry it, and put it back in its place before taking my case and heading up to my room. My thoughts churn as I make my way up the stairs, and I run my tongue over my teeth, tasting the remnants of the whiskey I drank.
Malice said it’s over, but in a way, that’s not true.
Nikolai is dead, I erased every trace that we were ever there or had anything to do with it, and the whorehouse has been burned to the ground. But there’s still that girl.
She’s a loose end. Unexpected. A wrench in our otherwise smoothly plotted plan.
I don’t like that.
I don’t like it one damn bit.
We don’t know her or much at all about her, so we can’t predict what she’ll do. That means she’llkeepbeing a dangerous unknown, and I grind my teeth a little at the thought of that.
I told Malice I was going to bed, but instead, I set things up on my computer so I can watch the feeds from the cameras I installed in her apartment.
Each one works perfectly, showing me angles of each room I put the cameras in. I flip to her bedroom, bringing it up on the biggest screen. She’s still there, curled up in bed, sleeping on her side now. Every so often, she twitches, and at one point she nestles down deeper in the blankets, despite the fact that she still has to be so fucking overheated.
It’s late, and it’s been a long fucking day. I should go to sleep so I won’t be exhausted when my alarm goes off at six-thirty tomorrow morning like it always does.
But for a little while longer, I just watch her. Curious about her, even though I don’t want to be.
7
WILLOW
In my dreams,I see the three of them.
Ransom. Malice. The one called Vic.
Malice is angry, punching a wall, slamming his fist into the drywall and leaving a dent behind. Ransom is smiling, but somehow it doesn’t reach his blue-green eyes. He talks, but I can’t hear what he’s saying over Malice’s rage. The quiet one, Vic, just stands there, taking it all in. His eyes are cold and unreadable, and he doesn’t speak or move. He might as well be a robot, observing and not interacting, and it sends a chill down my spine.
The Russian man is there too. One minute, he’s on the bed, pinning me down. His hands are on my body, touching me, groping me roughly, and no matter how hard I fight to get away, he keeps holding me in place.
“You asked for this,” he snarls in his thick accent. “You can’t say no.”
In the back of my mind, I know he’s right. I know I can’t turn him down, even though I don’t want this. I don’t want it.
I yell for him to get off me, but no sound comes out.
Then, almost like he teleported there, the massive Russian is across the room. His body is crumpled on the floor, and there’s blood everywhere. It soaks into the floorboards and creeps its way across the scuffed wood toward the bed.
I scramble up, every muscle in my body tensed to run.
But then the three men who killed the Russian converge on me.
Ransom helps me off the bed, his grip firm but almost gentle. Then Malice rips me out of his grasp. He pins me to the wall, one hand at my throat, the other holding his shiny, dark gun.
