AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She, however, has not recovered from our threat. While his gun is now lowered, her eyes remain wide with horror, and while her lips are moving, there is no sound coming out of them. I’ve seen that sort of reaction before. She’s had the living shit scared out of her. It will take her a few minutes to recover. This sort of thing is to be expected when you happen upon a room littered with dead bodies. Not to mention, have guns pointed at you.
To put it plainly, she’s freaked the fuck out.
In spite of Artem’s intervention, my brother raises his gun again in reflex. This time, instead of knocking his arm down, I speak evenly. Calmly. Quietly.
“Grish, we are taking her with us,” I say.
It’s no coincidence I initiated the shooting when she was out of the room, and my intention is now dawning on him.
He looks at me like he’s considering my words. It’s a good sign. I’ve successfully distracted him from his impulsivity.
And in a perfectly normal reaction to the shitshow around her, the redhead gasps, finally jolted out of her initial shock. “No, no, no,” she begs, suddenly able to speak. “I… I’ll stay here. I can’t go with… you.”
Artem takes her by the upper arm, and she tries to twist out of his grip, but her feet slip in the blood covering the gallery floor and she has no leverage. Not that she could escape him, anyway.
For a moment, I feel for her, not unusual for me. I’m the one in the group with the least rage. I’d rather we carried out our work with a minimum of conflict. I don’t enjoy taking out people who aren’t complying with our… business practices. It gives me no joy, unlike some of the other men who do the work we do.
And this woman—what was her name?—looks like a nice girl trying to make sure the gallery party comes off without a hitch. She had no freaking idea what she was walking into when she arrived to work this evening.
Unlike most other people here.
Who either ran when the shooting started or took a split second too long in drawing their own guns, and now lie on the gallery floor in a thickening carpet of red ooze.
Grisha directs her toward the exit. “Lily,” —that’sher name— “my brother is right. You need to come with us. It’s not safe for you here.”
We don’t explain any further. She doesn’t need to know that the target of our attack, Sergey, somehow managed to escape. Of course, the fucker sacrificed all his henchmen, hiding behind them like the nasty little coward he is.
I fucking hate a man who can’t own up to his shit.
The scream of the inevitable police sirens gets louder, so I grab Lily’s other arm and between Artem and me, my brother bringing up the rear, we steer her out of the gallery and to our waiting SUV, complete with dark, tinted, bullet-proof windows.
Once inside, sandwiched between the two of us, Lily covers her face with her hands, as if by wishing hard enough, her nightmare might end. And behind her hands, she’s incoherently mumbling.
Turning around from the front passenger seat, Artem sighs in frustration. He doesn’t like complications, and an unexpected guest is always a complication. And a risk. “Lily? Please quiet down,” he says.
She removes her hands from her face and draws her lips into a thin line, her emotions morphing from terror to a modicum of indignant anger. This is when they get combative, not that I’m really worried. She doesn’t stand a chance against one of us, never mind all three.
“Whatam I doing here? You can’t just… kidnap me, aftermurderingall those people,” she says, unsuccessfully trying to hide her trembling voice.
I want to tell her it’s normal to be scared. That we’re just doing our job.
But I don’t. I know from experience it won’t help.
I steal a sidelong glance at her, and even through the drama, her red hair is still neatly slicked back into a low ponytail. There is a spot of blood on her face, where she must have touched herself after falling, and her hands are pretty much covered in the drying, cracking shit. Fortunately, she either hasn’t noticed, because when she does she’ll freak, or shehasnoticed and is more concerned about other things.
She’s actually quite pretty, this Lily, so different from the other women at the party with their flashy clothes and jewels. It’s like she took a page out of a handbook on elegant minimalism or something, with her black, fitted sheath dress, matching high heels, and sleek hairstyle.
I know that look. It’s what women wear when they don’t have a lot of money, but want to look chic, nonetheless. I don’t meet a lot of women like this, but when I do, they catch my attention.
As piggish as it sounds, I’ve always wanted to fuck a girl like this, one who I can see writhing under me like I’m giving her something she’s never had. One who acts shy at first, but then opens like a beautiful flower as I initiate her into a new level of sexuality, one she never knew was possible.
She’d be nothing like the women I normally bed, for whom sex is ridiculously performative. A means to an end.
That end being snagging a guy with money, and if she’s really lucky, who’s not half-bad looking. Yeah, I was over chicks like that. They bored the shit out of me.
Grisha looks past Lily toward Artem and me. “What do you want to do about that fucker, Sergey? I’m thinking he won’t be hard to find. You know how stupid he is.”
Lily’s eyes widen as she looks from one of us to the other. We pay her no mind. At the moment, we have higher priorities.
