Chapter 10
Kai
THE WOMAN I was hired to protect is bleeding warmth into my neck, and the only thought my brain can hold is that I’d take ten more bullets to keep her right here, safe.
Her arms stay locked around my torso. My shoulder is on fire. The adrenaline is thinning out, and the nerve endings underneath are clocking back in with a vengeance.
I don’t move. My good hand is flat against her back, holding her steady, feeling her ribs lifting against my palm with each breath she takes. Slower now. More even.
I need to know she’s okay.
Pulling back enough to see her face, I look. Her eyes are dry. The shake in her hands has stopped. The woman looking back at me is the same one who walked into the gym for the first time. The panic that had her a few minutes ago is gone.
When she catches me watching, the corner of her mouth lifts. She leans her head against the box behind her, eyes never leaving my face. Something in her expression doesn’t quite add up.
“I know who you are, Kai.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you’re a Rutherford.”
The floor drops. My pulse, which held steady through the gunfire and the burn of the graze, isn’t holding now.
“How?”
“You take me for a fool?” She waves a manicured hand at my face. “You’re a replica of Jack. And your brothers. Same eyes, same build, same”—she gestures at my jaw, my shoulders, the whole of me—“same everything. I walked into that gym and thought, well. There’s another one.”
“Illegitimate.”
Her eyes narrow, and she nods.
“Does anyone else know?” My voice has gravel in it. The graze on my shoulder throbs in time with my heartbeat.
“Maybe. I don’t know.” She shrugs. “I haven’t talked about it with anyone, but Vance probably knows. He’s a friend of Jack’s. You’re aware?”
She’s right. Vance would’ve clocked it the second my application hit his desk. That’s probably why he hired me. Fuck.
“So why are you here?” Her voice stays even. “I’ve known who you are from the start, but I have no idea why.”
I look down at my hands. The knuckles on my right are starting to scab.
“Revenge.” She doesn’t even flinch, so I continue.
“My mother had a one-night stand with Jack Rutherford. Then he left, and nine months later.” I stare at the door.
A saxophone is playing on the other side.
“She raised me alone. Growing up, we moved from city to city, wherever the job was. And every time I turned on a television or walked past a newsstand, there they were. Him. His children.”
My hands close into fists on my thighs. The scabbed knuckles ache under the pressure.
“He knew about me. He chose not to care. So I decided I’d make him care.”
Diana is quiet for a while. Then a laugh breaks out of her, soft, but a laugh. She holds up a hand before I can react.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean it in a bad way. It’s just… I’m not Jack’s girlfriend. Did you think I was?”
I stare at her, unbelieving.
“When he visited this branch, we had a few wild nights together. That’s all it was. Some nosy person with a camera caught us, and suddenly I’m the billionaire’s mystery woman. The media ran with it. Neither of us corrected it, because neither of us cared enough to bother.”
I sit with that. The entire foundation of my plan.
She was never his.
There was nothing to steal.
Diana reaches over and lays her fingers on my forearm.
“So he’s just one of them? One of the many.” My jaw works. “Affairs. Sex?”
“They’re not affairs. I don’t sleep with men who have girlfriends. Or wives. Or anything in between. So technically, it’s just sex.”
She pauses, considering.
“I can’t control it. Some days, if I don’t have it, the whole day feels off. You know how some people need coffee in the morning or they can’t function? Or cigarettes? It’s that. It’s exactly that.”
“Use me, then.”
She looks up.
“Use me,” I repeat it, because I want her to hear it the second time and know I meant it the first. “If that’s what you need. Use me. Every day. Every night. However you want it.”
I mean every word. Not because I’m noble. I’m saying it because I am in love with this woman, and the thought of another man’s hands on her is a knife I can’t keep swallowing.
“But no one else.”
She’s quiet. She looks at the boxes across from us, at nothing in particular, and when she speaks again, her voice has dropped a register.
“Men can sense it. I know they can. Women who are… available. Easy. If you want to put it bluntly. They approach differently. Talk differently. It’s a frequency, and once you’re tuned to it, they find you.” She looks at me. “Is that what you thought? The first time we had sex?”
“No.”
“Oh, Kai.” She laughs. “You’re sweet.”
I’m not sweet. I’ve ended lives. I’ve spent every day before her running on rage for blood. But I don’t correct her.
“I’ve never had a serious relationship,” she says. “Never been with one man for any real stretch of time. The men I’m with are after one thing, and it doesn’t bother me, because I’m after the same thing. Strip away the gender and we’re all chasing the same animal need. Sex.”
“Would you try?”
She raises a brow.
“Go exclusive. With me. Only me. No one else.”
“Why?” she asks. “What about your revenge? I’m not useful to your plot anymore. Shouldn’t you be packing your bags and finding another angle?”
The plan is dead.
It’s been dead since I first heard her with that barrister. Maybe even before that. Maybe since the first time I saw her, and I was just too blind with rage to notice that. I open my mouth to tell her so, but she’s already speaking.
“I don’t go telling people about this, but I’ll let you in on a little secret.” She winks. “My biological father was a pedophile.”
My hand, the one resting on my thigh, goes still.
“We lived in a small apartment. We had a small attic above the living room. You could see the whole downstairs from up there… the kitchen, the front door, everything. Everything except the bedrooms. It was cramped and full of books and boxes and dusty. My mother never went up there.” She touches her own cheek, distracted.
“He’d drag me up. Pin me down. Gag me, or cover my mouth with his hand.
Then fuck me from behind, once, twice, three rounds.
I was a little girl, Kai. Eight when it started. ”
My throat closes.
My whole body locks down. The ache in my shoulder migrates to my chest, digs in, drills through the flesh. The pain is worse now. It is so much worse than a bullet.
“Sometimes we’d watch my mother from the wide slats.
She’d come home from work. She’d hang up her coat.
Start cooking, hum a song. Sometimes at night, when she was already asleep.
And the whole time, he—” She makes a small gesture with her hand, a wave that dismisses the rest of the sentence.
“He died of a heart attack when I was twelve.” She exhales through her nose. “That was a good day.”
Then she laughs.
“I hated every second of it. Every single one. But it’s funny now, in a way.
I’m pretty sure that’s where I get my… inclination.
” She rolls her wrist, searching for the word.
“For rough. My body doesn’t know what to do with gentle.
The wires got all tangled somewhere in that attic, and I’ve made my peace with it. ”
I’m not breathing.
My teeth are locked together so tight a chisel couldn’t find the seam. There is a roar in my ears that has no source, and it’s deafening.
I want to break something in half. No. Not half. I want to reduce it to dust.
I want a name.
I want a grave. I want the address of the apartment and the location of the attic and a crowbar. I want to dig the man up and put him back together, only so I can take him apart again.
My hands on my thighs are not shaking. They have gone past shaking. They have gone into that other place I have no control over.
I want him alive.
I want him fucking alive now, in this room, on his knees in front of me, because a heart attack was too kind. A heart attack was a man dying in his sleep next to the woman he raised in hell, and that is not justice.
I have killed before. I have killed men who deserved less than this one.
“Kai.” It’s Diana’s voice, and it’s quiet. “Are you okay?”
I breathe. It’s jagged.
“What’s his name?”
She tilts her head.
“His name.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like a man with a mouth full of blood that isn’t his. “What’s his name?”
“Why?”
“Diana.”
“He’s dead, Kai.”
“I know he’s dead.” My jaw is locked so hard that the words come out through my teeth.
“I want the name. I want to know who his people were. If he had a brother. A friend. I want to know if your mother is still alive. I want to know if there is anyone walking around right now who knew about it but didn’t do anything. ”
She doesn’t answer.
“Did anyone know?”
“Kai—”
“Did anyone know, Diana?”
“I think my mother suspected. At the end.”
The roar in my ears magnifies.
“She’s dead now, too,” she adds, gently.
There is a wounded animal inside me, and it wants to howl in pain.
A murderous soldier who wants to rip that attic apart with his bare hands.
He wants a grenade. Pin between his teeth, blow the whole damn apartment to splinters.
He wants to stand in the doorway with a machine gun and empty every round into every face and keep firing until there is nothing left of them but holes.
“I would have killed him.”
“Kai.”
“If he were alive. If I had gotten to you earlier, I would have walked into that apartment, and I would have killed him with my bare hands.” My voice has gravel and glass in it.
“I would have done it slow. I would have cut his fucking dick off and nailed it to the attic wall for everyone to see. I want him alive and bleeding, staring at pieces of himself while he begs for your forgiveness. While he begs for mercy I will never give.”
She stares at me.
“And it kills me.” I’m shaking harder now. Not just my hands, but my whole body, from the size of what’s inside me. “It-kills me-that I c-can’t do-anything.”
Tears are running down my face because where is the door? Where is the fucking door to kick down? There is no man to bury. I have a body full of training for a war that’s already over, and I am full of violence with nowhere to put it. Nowhere.
“I promise-you, no one is ever going to hurt you-again. Not a word. Not a look. No-one. As long as I am breathing, no one. Do you understand me?”
She opens her mouth.
“Do you understand me, Diana?”
She nods.