Chapter 36
COLE
If I didn’t despise Pyotr Tarasov before he arrived at the playground, I would hate his miserable bratva ass after I heard him boasting to his bodyguard.
“Stay here,” Tarasov said, nearly invisible in the trees. “And don’t worry if you hear the little cunt beg for mercy.”
The bodyguard muttered something I couldn’t make out, making a pumping motion with his fist. He watched diligently as Tarasov crossed to the merry-go-round. We both did.
I glanced at Kate, barely recognizable in that teen-girl-fantasy of a wedding dress.
I knew she was armed with a Taser; I spent the better part of the afternoon coaching her on how to use it.
I was ready, even if she failed to land the leads; I had my own stun gun, plus my Glock in a shoulder harness.
Mostly, I worried Kate would move too soon. She’d show her face and Tarasov would attack her. She’d let him see the neon yellow grip of the Taser, and he’d run. She’d miss with her first shot, and he’d have time to call for help.
But Kate is perfect, like she’s practiced every day for years, plotting and planning to take down a Russian killer.
There is just enough of a breeze to rattle the leaves above me, covering the electric sizzle of the Taser cables landing.
Kate pulls the incapacitated Tarasov down on top of her, doing her best to lull the watching bodyguard, to make him easy prey for me.
As Tarasov’s short-circuiting body collapses, the bodyguard’s teeth gleam in the dark. I barely hear the slide of his zipper, but the face of his watch catches a sliver of moonlight as he starts to work his cock.
His soft grunts hide the sound of my gliding up behind him. I aim my Taser at the back of his neck, but he turns at the last moment, catching the electric wire at the soft spot under his jaw. Taking care to avoid contact with his thrashing body, I hold the connection for a full count of five.
His knees buckle when I release the trigger, and he crashes to the ground, landing face-first in the dirt. I bend down to check the pulse point in his throat.
Nothing.
Shit.
I shift my grip a few times, but I can’t find any sign of a heartbeat. I don’t trust my sense of touch, though, not with the possibility of criminal prosecution hanging in the balance. I jam a ball gag past the moron’s lips and yank the buckle tight across the back of his head.
After that, it’s short work hogtying his unmoving body.
I bind his wrists together, lashing the nylon rope tighter than I’d do for any consenting sub.
I wrap his ankles in the same manner. Keeping him on his belly, I lash his hands to his feet, pulling hard enough to stretch his back into a painful-looking bow.
Once he’s secured, I kick his body over to one side.
His cock, still hard, is caught in the teeth of his zipper.
Only then do I cross the grass to the merry-go-round.
“Jaysus,” Kate greets me, a little breathless beneath Tarasov’s body. “Took ya long enough.” She writhes beneath the Russian, working to push him off her voluminous white skirts.
“Let’s get him to the trees,” I say.
Adrenaline carried me through tying up the bodyguard. Now, with my heartbeat back to normal, I’m feeling every one of my own aches and bruises. My abs protest loudly as I shove my hands into Tarasov’s armpits. My jaw throbs as his head flops against my collar bone.
Kate does her best to collect his feet, but she’s hampered by the bodice of her dress. “Forget it,” I finally say. “I’ll drag him.”
She goes on ahead, which means she’s waiting with a second gag once I finally reach the relative safety of the trees. She’s rougher with her device than I was with mine, or maybe it’s just that her victim is still alive. She jams the ball past Tarasov’s lips hard enough to provoke a gag response.
“Don’t let him choke,” I say.
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
But she turns him to the side, letting puke dribble from the side of his mouth. I pass her the first length of rope for his wrists, but she shakes her head. “I don’t know how. You do it. Make it hurt.”
I may be her Dom, but I know how to follow orders when necessary. Tarasov moans as I link his wrists to his ankles, but he never regains full consciousness.
“This one’s a charm,” Kate says, eyeing the bodyguard’s persistent hard-on as she digs her toe into his side.
“Was,” I say. “Not part of the plan, but…”
Her eyes widen in surprise. “Not part of the plan,” she echoes. “But I think I just came up with a new plan…”
“I’ll get the car,” I say.
I don’t want to leave her here, barely hidden in the woods, with a corpse and an unconscious trussed-up man. But my usual black clothes offer me decent camouflage—a lot better than her gleaming wedding dress.
“Hurry,” she says.
We considered bringing assistants for this part. Nilsson would do it, no questions asked. I could pay for muscle, enough cash that no one would ever say a word.
But in the end, we decided we had to keep this just between us.
That means retrieving the Land Rover from its spot in the nearby parking lot and driving, lights off, across the grassy field to the edge of the trees.
I had the back window replaced this morning.
Before we ever left the Georgetown house, I turned off the dome light.
The vehicle should be just another hulking shadow on an almost moonless night.
As I open the back hatch, Kate retrieves the bag of clothes she left on the front seat. The wedding dress rustles like wind in a cornfield, but she shimmies out of it quickly. She sighs as she pulls on black yoga pants and a matching long-sleeve tee.
We use the dress to drag the bodyguard over to the car, rolling his dead weight onto the yards of taffeta. It doesn’t matter if his head bangs against the ground or the bumper or the hatch as we maneuver him into the vehicle.
When we go back for Tarasov, he’s coming around from the electric charge. I’m about to suggest that we untie his feet and make him walk to the car, but Kate has other ideas. She produces the Taser from the small of her back; I didn’t even know she’d tucked it into her yoga pants.
Tarasov screams behind his gag, begging her to back off. Kate applies the device to the side of his neck, a contact that’s forbidden by just about every police force in the country. He sags like a sack of laundry. As if to check the quality of her work, she kicks him in the ribs. Hard.
We get him into the back of the Land Rover, but the dress is shredded by the time we’re done.
We can’t leave it in the park, so Kate tosses it on top of our prisoners like she’s throwing out the trash.
I’m still catching my breath as she uses the flashlight on her phone, making a quick survey of the space around us.
She finds a KitKat wrapper and a weather-faded can of Coke, but nothing to reveal what we’ve done beneath the trees.
By the time we’re plunged back into darkness, I’ve steeled myself to get behind the wheel.
Kate lets me. That makes me think, for the first time, about how it must have felt to be lying on the metal plate of the merry-go-round, tangled in a polyester nightmare of a wedding dress, pinned beneath the body of the man she hates most in the entire world.
The Apex guards snap to attention as I approach the gate. I roll down my window and ask the one in charge, “Everything under control?”
“Yes, sir,” he says. “It’s been quiet tonight.”
If he only knew… I trigger the biometric lock and drive through the gate, continuing around to the service entrance at the side of the house. The Apex men can’t see us here. I checked before we headed up to Baltimore.
I’m grateful I had the foresight to leave the gardening sledge beside the mudroom door.
If I had testified before tonight’s adventure, I would have sworn we intended to have our targets walk down to the basement unassisted.
But part of me always knew there was a chance we’d be dealing with a corpse.
At least there’s only one dead body to maneuver to the elevator, and we can still use the tattered wedding dress as a tarp. Tarasov will be able to make his own way, guided by my Glock in the small of his back. Or so I think until Kate opens the Land Rover’s hatch.
Tarasov is glaring at her, hollering something from behind his gag. I can’t make out the words—I’m not even sure he’s speaking English. Kate doesn’t wait to figure out what he’s saying, she just jolts him again with the stun gun.
“Christ!” I say, once he’s out. “We could have made him walk.”
“Oops,” she responds, her eyes as flat as the mudroom floor.
By the time we get both bodies to the dungeon, every breath ignites a wildfire in my gut. Kate walks to the armoire as if she owns the room and all its equipment. She picks up a heavy chain and hefts it like she’s considering an Olympic career in shotput.
It takes her three tries to snag the chain on the steel hook in the center of the room. She tests it like a pro, letting the links take all her weight. Looking at me over Tarasov’s unmoving body, she asks, “It’ll hold him?”
“It will.”
Satisfied with my response, she attaches a triangular cuff-and-bar set to the chain, using a heavy-duty padlock. This time, she asks her question with a lift of her eyebrows. I nod.
She could use my emergency shears and cut Tarasov out of the hogtie I set in the park. Instead, she takes her time, unwinding the rope. At first, I’m not sure why she’s delaying, but then I realize she’s cinching the jute every chance she gets, sawing deeper into Tarasov’s already reddened flesh.
It takes longer than it should, but she finally has him where she wants him.
His wrists are locked in solid-steel cuffs that link to a suspension bar above his head.
His ankles are spread wider in a second bar, his bare feet scarcely reaching the floor.
She uses the shears to remove every stitch of his clothing.
He’s not her sub. She’s never been a Domme. She makes no pretense of gaining consent, and this suspension has nothing to do with anyone’s pleasure. This is brutal, grim retribution.
Kate eyes her handiwork critically, like she’s double-checking her answers before submitting an exam. “All right,” she finally says. “Showers for both of us, upstairs. Then I’ll rewrap your bandages.”
I look at the bodyguard, huddled near Tarasov’s feet. His clothes are twisted against the wedding dress’s filthy taffeta, but his ropes hold fast. His dick still pokes from his zipper like some obscene stuffed animal. Sighing, I say, “Let’s deal with him first.”
“He’s dealt with.”
“You can’t just leave him here.”
“I can,” she says. “And I will.”
I suck in a breath, trying to choose careful words. “The floor is heated. He’ll start to turn in just a few hours.”
“You’re right,” she says. The stiffness in my shoulders starts to ease.
She still understands logic. But then she says, “Turn off the heat. In fact, turn on the air con. I want it cold in here. And dark too. But not too dark for the cameras. I want that gobshite knowing that everything he does, everything he says is being recorded…for posterity.”
This is madness. It’s twisted in a way that might well lash back at us.
But I’ll do it for the woman I love. I’ll do it all for Kate.
I kill the heater in the floor and drop the air temperature to sixty. Kate nods approval before she precedes me up the stairs.