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“Andrei is dead out in the parking lot.”
“I am aware,” she says in her Irish singsong.
“You can cut the shit now, Jessica. That’s your name. Jessica Roswell. And you’re from fucking San Bernardino.”
Her expression shutters. Slowly, she rises to her feet and steps away from the table. “You should have just requested my full biography, Haven. It would have been less theatrical.”
Her accent has melted with the façade. She sounds like someone who was born and raised in California. Which would be accurate.
“I didn’t think your full biography was relevant.”
“It isn’t relevant at all.” The Irish accent returns, and she laughs with a shake of her head. “Habit. You play a part for so long you begin believing it.”
She crosses to the bar while I keep a wary eye on her. In a pair of gold heels she’s a couple of inches taller than I am in my Converse. She’s one of the few women around who could match me in hand to hand combat. However, the hole in Andrei’s skull indicates her tactics might be more lethal.
So be it. Mine are as well.
If she hears the click of the safety on the handgun at my side, she offers no clue. Instead, her slow movements show hints of fatigue as she fills two shot glasses with whiskey and carries them to a table only a few feet from where I stand.
“Relax. Have a drink.”
“No. And no.”
Her gaze strays to the gun in my hand and she blows out a breath of exasperation. “Put that down.”
“I think not.”
“Fine.” She swallows the contents of one shot glass. Then the other. She throws the glasses in the general direction of the bar. They jointly shatter. Her mouth bends into a grim smirk and she kicks her heels off. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”
She advances in a blink, latching onto my right forearm and twisting, no doubt expecting that I’ll drop the gun.
Stupid bitch.
I’m not made of fluff.
My left hook collides with her cheek and she staggers. Her bare feet have put her at a disadvantage and I use this by stomping on her manicured toes.
“Fucking hell,” she spits and whirls, releasing my arm.
Rather than let her take a breath and regroup, I use a wrestling move I learned years ago in a self defense class, seizing her around the waist and slamming her to the ground. She gasps, the wind knocked out of her for an instant. That’s all the time I need to trap her between my knees while she’s knocked flat.
Fiona’s eyes widen when I raise the gun. Her pile of curly red hair has escaped its clip and fans out on the floor.
Straddling her prone body, I hold the gun steady. “Now that the games are over, you’re going to answer some questions.”
She coughs. A bruise, courtesy of my fist, already colors the side of her face. “If you wanted me on my back, Marchenko, you could have gone about it a little more gently.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. You made the first grab. This drama is on you.”
This fact penetrates enough to make her frown. “I guess that’s true. Ask away.”
“What happened to Andrei?”
“Someone killed him.”
“You?”
“Of course not.” She grimaces. “He was dead when I arrived. I think he’d been out there for a while. I don’t know who killed him.”
