“You are not so hard to track after a kill, Etzem,” he whispered at her back. “This is something you should work on.”
Bone, he called her. His deep baritone gave life to her native Hebrew language and spread heat through her body. It was if he tasted each word he spoke, regardless of the language, and found the flavor delightful.
She closed her eyes and the wind whipped away tears she’d managed to hold inside for two decades. He’d made her cry. Goddamn him. It mattered not that she’d given him the word two weeks ago as the sun had shone down and the breeze of the ocean caressed them. She’d granted him her name right before she tranquilized him with a syringe meant for her. And now he was using the weakness against her.
“Do not make me hurt you, Asinimov.”
“What would you do?” he asked silkily. “Would you knife me in the heart and then break my neck? Would you hold my revenge in your hands and tease me with a truth I’ve searched years for?”
He tugged on a curl that had escaped her tied hair. There was an answering pull in her abdomen. Always with Dmitry Asinimov there was…feeling. She hated him for that. Another emotion to struggle with but at least one she understood.
More and more her reasoning, her existence itself, was being tested by emotions. Because of this man.
She had work to do and the dark, lovely, safe depth of her lust to kill couldn’t be contained when rippled with other emotions. When he was around that lust morphed into something she didn’t understand—it became something she simply wanted to succumb to.
“Ah, but yes,” he continued, drawing her attention from the grand city below them. “You’ve already done those things.”
“Rest assured had I knifed you in the heart and broken your neck, we would not be having this conversation,” she mused aloud.
He taunted her at every turn.
Bone squeezed her eyes shut and opened them, taking in the Russian skyline before her. The multi-colored, onion-shaped domes of the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood rose above the streets below, dominating the sky with light. She wanted to laugh that the Russian Mafia had commandeered a building so close to a religious site for their “club.” They trained girls in this building, girls barely off their mother’s knees, to do things only grown women should ever consider. Things that would make even the most experienced whore gasp. She wondered what the God of her fathers would think of that.
His breath drifted over her cold cheek, warming her from the inside out. “But the truth…you’ve managed to keep that from me for years and thus you’ve held my life in your hands.”
“The truth,” she began, “has always been in front of you, Asinimov. Joseph Bombardier took your family. There has never been a reason to pursue me.”
Her mind squeezed with the memory of a different Asinimov. Sharp, jagged spikes of pain radiated through her body as the cold feel of Sacha Asinimov’s throat in her hands replaced the heat his son had started. Her own throat strangled under the pressure of a similar hold—Sacha’s huge hands taking her life even as she sought to take his. Their rakad shel mavet ended brutally, but Bone had been the one to walk away.
She took away knowledge from every contract because what did not kill you made you stronger. Sacha Asinimov taught her more than any other—strength was not the only necessity for a killer. Persistence and hatred were requirements as well.
She had outlasted Sacha. She could outlast the son.
And so the truth mocked her. Dmitry always had a reason to pursue her. He was a man honed in the fires of revenge. Most of his family had been wiped off the planet by Joseph Bombardier. And while she wasn’t the only one of Joseph’s killers to play a hand in their demise—after all, Bullet had taken his brother Alexander—Bone had taken someone who obviously meant more to Dmitry than anyone else.
Dmitry would not care that someone had not been a good man.
The urge to flee rose, taking her breath even as her muscles loosened with the flood of adrenaline. Fight or flight? She measured her options. He was close enough that the heat from his big body burned through the material of her Gortex unitard. His breath carried the hint of mint and vodka and her mouth watered. Russia had the best vodka. She could only imagine the taste when flavored with Dmitry.
His scent teased her nostrils. The smell of snow-kissed pine and juniper—fresh, seductive—sank into her pores, making her core clench.
Out of every person she’d ever met, this one man called to her on a level she was neither comfortable with nor complacent about. He made her want to move.
Into him.
Away from him.
Both.
The one thing she could never do was hold him against her. He would sink too deep then and would destroy her when he found out the truth of who she was.