AllFreeNovel
Share Us
2
TANYA
Two Minutes Earlier
I stood in the bedroom, staring at the diagram I’d created on the wall. Scarlet threads drew connections between people, dates, and locations. And at the center of it all was a face. A man in his fifties with a broad, brutish face and a pointed, snow-white beard. Maravic.
The man who must die.
I looked between the diagram and my laptop screen, scowling. I’d been standing there close to an hour and I still couldn’t figure it out. What was Maravic doing in America? Why had he killed that stockbroker? When I found the murder scene, I’d managed to raid the stockbroker’s computer before the police arrived, but all I’d gotten was some computer code full of equations that I didn’t have the math skill to decipher and a list of contacts. The only name I recognized was Konstantin Gulyev. I was meeting with him tomorrow to ask why the hell a stockbroker had been talking to a Russian mafia boss.
There was a sound behind me: distant and quiet, just a delicate metallic scraping, but it made me whip around, heart thumping, because I knew what it was. A lockpick working in a lock. Someone was trying to get into my apartment. “Chyort!” I whispered under my breath. Damn!
I brought up the feed from the camera in the hallway. Five men. From their boots and weapons, Americans. CIA. I grabbed my phone and dialed from memory. “I need to speak to Roberta Geiss,” I told the voice at the other end. “Urgent!”
“I’m sorry, Director Geiss is in the hospital. She was in a car accident yesterday—”
I cursed and ended the call, a creeping dread soaking through me.
Footsteps from the hallway. They were inside, searching the apartment. I heard voices calling clear, clear, clear. And one set of footsteps, heavier than the rest, was heading straight towards the bedroom. I glanced around the room. I’d been trained not to acquire possessions: they only slow you down. There were no lover’s letters, no framed photos, nothing I couldn’t leave behind. The computer data I’d collected was already backed up to the cloud, so I could access it from anywhere. All I had to do was get out of there.
The door flew open, crashed against the wall and wilted, one hinge broken. And standing there was—
I froze, staring. I’d expected a man but—Chyort!—this was a beast.
He wore huge, black leather combat boots, his feet twice the size of mine. Black combat pants were stretched over calves and quads as thickly solid as tree trunks. My eyes crept up his body to where he narrowed to a midsection loaded with power. Then he began to flare out again, his muscled torso giving him an X shape, his chest like two huge whiskey barrels placed side by side. He was huge but lean, his body carved by hard physical work.
That’s when I felt it, deep in the core of me, under all my layers of ice and rock where nothing should have been able to reach me. A tremor that completely unsettled me. A weakness.
The sleeves of his black combat shirt had been cut off—no, I could see the dangling threads, they’d been torn off, as if he’d grown tired of them constraining him. His shoulders were big, tan boulders and they brushed the edges of the door frame. His biceps were scarcely any smaller and they were covered with the dark ink of tattoos: from this distance, all I could make out was a leathery wing spread across one arm and what looked like a vine curled around the other. My eyes tracked down over forearms thickly corded with muscle. He was holding a shotgun with a barrel that looked big enough to swallow me whole, but in his huge hands, it looked like a toy.
My gaze locked on those hands. On the big, solid palms and the thickly powerful fingers, on the brutish knuckles. I suddenly felt...small.
Another of those tremors. It ran straight down to my groin, making me catch my breath. It was even more unsettling, the second time, and I silently cursed, furious at myself. Weakness!
He was tall enough that I had to tilt my head way back to see his face and from that angle the sheer, muscled size of him was overwhelming. I felt like I was an inch tall, clambering up a giant, sinking my hands into his soft, black beard for grip. I climbed up, up, up…
Oh God. He was gorgeous. Roughly, brutally gorgeous in a way I was completely unused to. Suddenly, the rich men I spent so much time with felt absurdly fragile and fake, pampered and coiffured like poodles at a dog show. This man wasn’t a king, he was the barbarian who overthrew him.
He had a wide mouth, his hard upper lip curling a little as he scowled and his soft lower one pouting sexily. My gaze roved helplessly over that mouth, darting around like a deer in the forest seeking escape and finding none. I would have no chance against those lips. So big and strong, he’d just force me open and take what he wanted.
