Chapter 9
“ W ho the fuck are you?” He looks to his right then back down at me.
He must realize I’m with Rurik, because he launches himself at me, grabbing my arms and yanking me to my feet. He’s not as big as Rurik, but he’s got strength. I can’t get free of his grip as he yanks me completely from the blushes and out into the open.
“This your bitch?” He shouts at Rurik, who is now taking long, steady strides toward us.
“Just let me go,” I try to wrench myself out of his grip again but then he presses something sharp against my throat.
“You’re my way out of here.” Spittle lands on my cheek.
Rurik catches up to us, and I take a chance at looking directly at him. Ice drags down my spine at the pitch blackness of his expression. His jaw is set firm; his eyes fixated on the asshole holding me. Maybe to someone else he’d look calm.
But it’s the calmness that sends another shiver through me.
“I’m gonna take that car over there. She’s gonna come with me, I’ll drop her at the end of the road so long as you don’t follow.”
“That’s not going to happen.” Rurik lifts a shoulder, like this is the most boring conversation he’s had.
“I’m leaving.”
“Again. Not. Going. To. Happen.” Rurik’s gaze flicks to the knife at my neck.
“I’ll cut her.”
“Seems likely.” Rurik agrees with a nod.
“I’ll stab her. She’ll be dead before she hits the ground.” He’s panicking now.
His grip on the knife gets shaky. I wince as the tip of it pricks my skin. He puts a little more pressure, and it sinks in deeper.
I wrap my hands around his arm, trying to pull his hand away from my neck, but his terror is giving him hulk-like strength. The knife twists thanks to me, and I groan from the pain of it.
“Just let me?—”
His knife falls away, followed by the rest of his body as he hits the forest floor with a thud. I suck in air as my heart gallops up through my throat.
My face is hot. Warm liquid covers the right side of my face. When I wipe my hand across it, I see all the blood dripping from my fingers. As though my brain still can’t comprehend it, I turn just enough to see the man crumpled on the ground at my feet.
A single hole between his eyes. His blood pools around him, staining the leaves as the ground sucks up as much as it can.
I jump back, away from his body.
For a moment, my brain changes this man’s face with Nico’s. Bile rises up and I have to take several steps away, still trying to suck in enough air to calm the heated nausea rolling through me.
“Mira.” Rurik’s voice is a football field away.
I make it back to the bushes before I double over and vomit.
His hand rests on my back until my body finally realizes everything inside is now out, and my muscles stop spasming.
“I’m okay,” I say, turning to him.
His gaze moves to my neck, and he grabs my chin to tilt my head to the side so he can get a better look. I wince, because his thumb is pressing into the bruise there, but I don’t complain.
Now is the wrong time to say anything.
“It’s not deep, but it needs to get cleaned. Who knows what he had on that knife.” He lets go of me and settles his stare on me .
I wish he wouldn’t.
The calmness of before has been replaced with a cold that I can almost feel. I’ve seen him irritated. Angry even. Nothing compares to the look he’s giving me now.
“I-I’m sorry. I had to pee.” It’s such a stupid thing to say, but I have nothing else to offer.
His jaw ticks. I can hear his teeth grinding together.
Without a word, he leaves me and stalks off to the car. At this point, he doesn’t need to tell me he wants me to stay put. I’m too shell shocked to do much else than stand still.
He grabs his black duffel from the back seat and slams the car door before stalking back to me. When he reaches me, he grabs my elbow and starts pulling me with him.
Thankfully, he goes around the bushes the opposite side of where the dead body lays as he half drags me toward the cabin.
“Are you sure it’s safe in there?” I question, like an idiot.
He must not think I deserve an answer, because he doesn’t give one.
On the outside it looks like a rustic hunting cabin tucked in the middle of nowhere. But on the inside, it’s all the comforts of home. He pulls me through the living room, past the kitchen, into a bathroom.
Without a word, he swings me around and pushes me down to sit on the toilet while he tosses his bag onto the counter.
“You need to shower off all that blood. Clean your neck real good.” He pulls out a bar of soap and drops it onto the counter .
“A shower?” I look at the walk-in shower with the glass doors, clean white and gray marbled tiles. It looks nice enough.
He grabs my face again, pulling my attention up to his eyes. They’re still dark, but there’s a little wrinkle between them now. He seems slightly less likely to kill me for saying the wrong thing.
“Get in the shower. Wash up. Get dressed and wait for me in here. Do not leave this room until I get back.” He leans down until his nose is almost touching mine.
Worse. His mouth is close enough that I wonder if he’ll kiss me like he did in the hospital.
“Mira. Repeat back to me what I said.”
I smile a little. “You said to take a shower and wait here.”
He makes a little grunting sound.
“Where are you going to be?” I ask while he digs out some towels from the linen closet in the bathroom.
He yanks off the towels already hanging from the rack outside the shower and replaces them with the clean towels.
“I have to deal with him.”
My stomach rolls again at the image flashing in my mind.
“Is…is he why you needed to come here? Because you needed to…kill him?”
He looks at me, his features going stoic. “I needed information from him.”
“Oh.” I pause only a beat. “Did you get the information?”
“No.” He grabs his bag from the counter and leaves the bathroom, slamming the door behind him .
I sit for another minute, waiting for him to come back with more instructions, but then I hear the screen door slam.
The water in the shower softens my muscles, but it does nothing to take the edge off the electricity jumping from nerve to nerve.
The image of that man lying on the forest floor keeps popping into my head.
What if he wasn’t here alone? What if Rurik is out there right now fighting off another guy, and I’m in the cabin having a nice, relaxing shower?
I quickly get washed up and cut the water. If there is someone lurking in the cabin with me, I wouldn’t be able to hear anything with the shower going. Listening intently for unwanted footsteps, I wrap a surprisingly lush towel around my torso and check out the clothes on the counter.
Rurik left me a pair of his boxers and a black t-shirt. Both of which are too big, so I dig around the drawers of the bad guy’s bathroom until I find some safety-pins.
A quick look in the mirror reminds me of what a shitshow my life has turned into. The bruise on my cheek is turning into a messy mixture of green and yellow, the cut above my eyebrow has a bruise around it as well. And now we have the addition of the cut on my neck.
Rurik’s right, it’s not deep. And now that it’s not bleeding, it’s just ugly.
Time drags on while I’m stuck in the bathroom. Curiosity nags me to sneak out of the bathroom and explore the cabin while Rurik does whatever he’s doing with the body. But I decide against it.
My mind wanders to imagining what Rurik might be doing out there in the dark. I assume he’s burying the guy, which makes me consider that he might have a family. Someone out there could be waiting for him to come home or to call and say good night.
They’ll likely never find him. So now I’m sitting alone in the bathroom with the only distraction being the gut punch of guilt.
An eternity later, the screen door closes again. Less of a slam this time, so I take that as a good sign.
When the door to the bathroom opens, I’m sitting on the counter next to the sink.
“You actually listened for once,” he says.
His boots are covered in mud, as are his jeans and his arms. Sweat has rolled down his temple, leaving a trail through the dirt clinging to his skin.
Dried blood mixes with the dirt on his hands, on his forearms.
“I need the shower.” He steps into the bathroom, his bag with him again. “If you think you can behave, you can sit in the living room.”
“Yeah. I can…can do that.” I hop off the counter, my bare feet hitting the slightly damp tiled floor and slipping. He catches me before I fall against the wall, leaving a dirty handprint on my elbow.
He lets me go as soon as he realizes we’re touching.
“If you need to pee, just come in and use the bathroom. Don’t go wandering off into the bushes,” he says as I step into the hall .
“I didn’t mean—” I’m cut off as the door shuts in my face.
Taking the hint that he needs some space, I pad into the living room. There’s a smart TV hanging on the wall over the fireplace, but the remote is missing. I’m not sure digging through drawers is a great idea, so I explore the rest of the cabin.
It’s definitely not as rustic as it looked on the outside. Lush carpets cover the floor in the living room and what looks like an office. The kitchen has smart appliances and marble countertops. Whatever this guy did for a living, he was doing extremely well for himself.
Some comfort is offered when I realize there’s no family pictures anywhere to be seen.
As I reach the back of the cabin, the water turns off in the shower and I hurry back to the living room.
The door to the bathroom opens and Rurik steps out in a pair of clean jeans, and only the jeans. His belt wraps around his waist, but he hasn’t buckled it. It’s just hanging open, drawing my attention not only to it but the muscular abs just above.
“You managed not to get into any trouble. I’m impressed,” he says catching me staring at him from the recliner in the living room.
He ducks back into the bathroom and a moment later comes back out with his bag in one hand and his dirty clothing bunched on top of his boots.
“Here. I can take those outside and get the dirt off.” I get up, reaching for the boots .
“It’s dark outside by now. There’re wild animals around here; you stay inside.” He walks past me to the front door of the cabin and dumps the boots on the floor.
“Did you move the car?” I peer out the front window, finding it parked right outside the cabin now.
He’s right about it being dark outside. The sun’s gone. The only light is the yellow light of the porch.
“I did.”
“My bag? Did you bring it in?” I look around but don’t see it anywhere.
“I’ll get it in the morning.” He saunters to the kitchen. His belt jangles with each step as he moves around, looking through cupboards and the fridge.
“Rurik.” I lean against the kitchen island that separates the kitchen from the living room.
When I don’t continue, he looks up at me from over the door of the fridge. My mouth dries. His brow is all wrinkled, and his eyes are still holding onto the intense darkness he had earlier. Looking at me seems to make it worse.
“I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to get in the way of your…well…whatever you were doing.” Beating the man for information is what it looked like, but I’m pretty sure the guy deserved it.
He stands up to his full height, shoving the fridge closed.
“You’re sorry?”
“Yeah…” I lose track of whatever I was going to say when he hooks his hands on his hips.
No one has ever looked so damn sexy while being so damn scary at the same time .
“Maybe we can find the information you needed here? I mean, maybe he hid it here?”
His eyes narrow a fraction. “It’s possible.”
“Good.” I sigh with relief. “Then we need to just find it.”
“No.” He goes back into the fridge and pulls out what looks like a casserole of some sort. “You need to eat something. I’ll look around.”
“I can help.”
“You can eat and stay out of my way.”
His tone, laced with annoyance, hits me hard in the chest.
“You know, I didn’t ask for you to drag me along on this little mission of yours. In fact, I was very clear that I wanted you to leave me alone.”
He presses his hands against the counter of the island, leaning closer to me. Heat rises up my back until my face is covered with it just from the darkness lingering in his stare.
He’s pissed.
I’ve seen him angry, this is different.
“He could have killed you.” It’s low and growly, the way he makes his statement.
“But he didn’t.”
“He could have. One more hard push of that knife and he would have nicked your carotid artery. He was right there.” His throat flexes as he swallows.
I touch the cut on my neck. “I’ve already apologized and explained.”
He nods sharply. “Right. You had to pee.”
“I did. Do you think I’m lying? ”
“No,” he says after a drawn-out pause.
His voice dips lower, grows harder somehow as he says, “But it doesn’t matter. I told you to stay in the fucking car.”
“And I didn’t obey your command, so what…you’re just gonna…ignore me?” Have I lost my fucking mind? Why am I poking the angry mobster looking like he’s ready to rip my head off?
“No.” He pushes away from the counter, his muscles rippling as he does so.
I need him to put a shirt on. This would be easier if there wasn’t so much of him showing. Every moment is a testament to the abilities of the anatomy, and it’s getting distracting.
He steps around the island until he’s only a few strides from where I stand.
“I’m not going to ignore you. I tried that. It’s not working.” He grabs hold of the buckle of his belt with his right hand, fisting it as he yanks. The leather rips free of his jeans in one fluid motion.
My ass clenches. I shouldn’t have provoked him. I should have let him ignore me.
I’m certain the attention I’m about to get isn’t what I wanted.
Or is it?
Heavy fog rolls in, confusing my thoughts.
“I said I was sorry. Can’t we put it behind us?” I retreat a small step, unsure of where to even go. The cabin isn’t very large, and going outside in the dark is an absolutely bad idea.
“I warned you.” He sucks his top lip between his teeth, dragging it out with a harsh breath. It’s like he’s been debating, and now a decision has been made.
“I know, but…seriously? Your belt?” I try to laugh. “I mean…maybe I could just go to bed without dinner?”
My attempt at lightening the situation doesn’t work on him.
“You have a choice here, Mira.” The belt dangles at his side like a snake ready to strike at any second.
“Oh yeah?” My voice cracks as I ask.
“You can either bend over the back of the couch and accept your punishment, or I can tie you up and make you take it.”
“That’s not much of a choice,” I point out with what I hope is an endearing smile, but the look of steel in his eyes tells me he’s immune to any sort of adorability right now.
“What’s it going to be? Decide now.”