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Great. I now got to flash my tits to the mercenary army from hell on my mystery helicopter ride to who-the-fuck-knew-what. Might as well render the whole thing a little more entertaining for everybody while I was at it, I suppose.
Masters leaned closer, mouthing something at me, inaudible in the huge noise. I shook my head, being no lipreader, and he reached out and patted my cheek.
What the fuck? I was not some kittenish waif to cheek-pat! What was going on in his head? What was he trying to say with that gesture?Awww. There, there, little one, it’s going to be fine. Put your life in my hands without fear! Trust the big strong filthy rich guy who has his own personal army and deals death with nonchalance. No worries!
Hardly. But trapped in the big vibrating chamber of death with vast propeller blades madly spinning above me and a bunch of mean motherfuckers watching us with intense interest, I judged that now was not the optimal time to freak out and break the guy’s very attractive, aquiline nose. Would be a real shame to damage it, anyhow.
Now the bastard was smiling at me. Of all things. Blood streamed from the earlobe where I’d bitten him. Amazingly, he didn’t seem to hold it against me.
That was a first. I was quite a handful for the unlucky fellas who had dared to attempt physical intimacy with me. None had lasted long. A couple days, and they beat a hasty retreat, out of simple self-preservation. I didn’t blame them. I’d do the same in their shoes. At close range, I was a freaking hot mess. Hell, I scared my own self.
Ethan Masters would figure it out soon enough, just like they had. He hadn’t gotten the memo yet, but it was on its way to him, inevitable as the dawn.
My heart was trying to bang its way right out of my chest. I just sat there, frozen, letting myself be carted off to who the fuck knew where. Not fighting them.
I had drawn my conclusion long ago. Better to die quick, and hopefully have the satisfaction of taking a few bastards with me. Not a slow, ugly death, like Tony had promised me when I was fourteen years old.
I evaded that knife-stab of a thought, with the ease of long practice. This was not the same situation at all. Ethan Masters was some kind of huge boss, definitely, with a big-ass budget and some pissed-off enemies. But he just didn’t have the same toxic, no-soul, dead-eyed vibe as the Petruzzi gang. This was a whole different scene.
I immediately started lecturing myself for trying to spin it.Don’t be a dumb bitch. He’s just big and ripped and gorgeous, and you want some.
Well, yeah. Maybe. But more than anything else, I had been enchanted by what happened when we’d fought those elevator goons, back-to-back. The way we came together, that subtle, magneticclick,like a well-machined instrument, and instantly, magically, he anticipated me, trusted me, read my mind. He was there for me when I needed him, and I was there for him. I had trusted him in battle. I’d never experienced that phenomenon before. I’d always seen combat as a solo endeavor. Or at the very least, me alone, fighting a big, snarling pack of bad guys. But never a team sport.
But with him, fighting had felt almost like…intimacy. Not that I was any sort of expert on that, God knows. On the contrary. I was intimacy-challenged.
It was all muddled in my head, my seesawing feelings as chaotic as the noise in the chopper, which made my whole head rattle and buzz. We were swooping heavily through the air, and as we banked a turn, I saw a glimpse of Seattle’s burgeoning skyline. Then we turned again, and I saw mountains, clouds, mist. The water of the Puget Sound far below, steel-gray and rippled with whitecaps.
I tried not to stare hungrily at Ethan Masters, since he kept looking at me, and eye contact was just too damn much to deal with right now. The other guys kept sneaking peeks at me whenever Ethan was texting on his phone.
I could not project what was coming next. All I could do was to center myself to fight, as soon as I figured out what the hell was in store.
If it was the worst-case scenario, I still had a chance to go down fighting. Those guys had no clue how hard a cornered Kat could fight. I would punish the shit out of them, until I forced them to kill me. That had always been the plan.
But there was no need to jump the gun. I had to breathe, watch, wait for my moment. Be smart about it. Maximum damage, that was the goal.
Whowasthis guy? And that team that attacked us in the elevator...those guys were for him, and not for me? That went right in the face of all my expectations, which was a real brain-squeezer. I wasn’t quite sure which scenario was worse. If those guys had been sent by Tony Sr. or Tony Jr., then at least I would know what course of action to take. Simple and obvious. Run like hell for as long as I could, or else turn and fight like hell, when running was no longer an option. To the death. End of story.
I’d known for fourteen years that I was destined to die young, so I’d spent my life learning to fight. When the day arrived that I finally engaged with the Petruzzis, the plan was to inflict memorable damage upon them before they took me down. I would extract as much revenge as possible for Raffi and Gabri. It wouldn’t be anywhere near enough, but too fucking bad. All I could do was my best.
I was good with my hands and feet, not bad with knives, good with handguns, not bad with a rifle. And I had the added advantage of being blond, stacked, and relatively cute. I had half a chance to catch them off their guard. A girl could hope.
I had spent half my life gearing up for this confrontation. Of course, I was scared. I didn’t like pain, or want to die. But nobody got to choose their moment. People died all the time. Even people whose lives were not as fucked up as mine.
Truth was, I was sick of waiting. That tight, suspended feeling, constantly waiting to breathe. I couldn’t stand that tension any longer. I wanted it to be over. One way or another. If I was going to live, I needed more goddamn air to breathe.
If today’s attackers were not the Petruzzis, then this was a whole different shitshow that I was letting into my life. I had to reconfigure my whole world, recalibrate my brain to deal with it. That took a crap-ton of energy which I was accustomed to conserving.
I kept things severely simple in my life. I never got attached. Not to homes, to things, to jobs. Or people, either. Sometimes people got attached to me, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about that. I certainly didn’t go out looking for friends. I wouldn’t be doing them any favors if I did. If Petruzzi’s goons found me while I was having a drink with my besties, I’d just get those poor women killed. So I never put out “friend” vibes.
My specialty was “cold bitch” vibes. That was a much better strategy if I wanted to keep the innocent off the firing line.
The same thing held true for men, for the most part. I had attempted to enjoy a man’s sexual company a few times, when a likely opportunity presented itself, but it never worked out well for me. Mostly because I just couldn’t relax in bed. I flinched or lashed out whenever anyone touched me unexpectedly, and I always ended up making the poor guy feel nervous and inadequate. That, added to the undeniable fact that I was endangering the poor dude’s life just by getting near him, and the whole endeavor started to seem as selfish as hell. By the time I worked through all that conflict, the fun factor was drained completely out of it, leaving me bluer and more lonesome than before. It had been over a year since I’d tried it last.
Until this morning, when I’d basically invited Ethan Masters into my bed. Well, for coffee, but we had both known perfectly well it wasn’t going to stop with coffee. I would have jumped aboard and ridden that train all the way to the end of the line. The very thought of it made my whole body clench and tingle and hum.
And he turned me down. Now, I would never in a million years have described myself as a vain person, but that snub had sent me reeling.
And then hell broke loose. But he said that those guys were after him, not me.
