Bone Deep (7 page)

Bone hadn’t moved an inch from her place at the door yet Dmitry recognized she knew everything about her surroundings. He’d known she would come and try to steal Vadim from him. The interplay between her and a man who was obviously another of Joseph’s killers had him thrown though.

She treated Azrael as a mother would treat her child. Loving. Patient.

A look of rage blanketed Azrael’s face then. And so it began. He was in his space one moment and locked in combat with Bone the next. Dmitry barely followed his movements he was so quick.

Dmitry stood and raced for the gun Azrael set aside. He’d just grabbed it when the sound of bones popping and cracking met his ear.

He turned and watched as Bone held both of Azrael’s hands in hers, crushing them. Azrael made not a sound but he was on his knees. Bone wasn’t breathing hard and did not have a single mark on her. That such a tiny, delicate woman held a man twice her size in check with nothing more than her hands would have been unbelievable had he not witnessed it for himself.

“Brother,” she whispered. “You weren’t ready for me. I know there are others and it is my promise to you that I will free them as I free you. You have been brave. Take your peace and find forever.”

Azrael’s head drooped and it seemed he was bowing, accepting and acceding to the greater power.

“Don’t do this, Togarmah,” Dmitry said over the rushing of the blood in his ears, using her given name to jar her.

She stilled for a moment but didn’t acknowledge him in any other way. She released Azrael’s hands and stroked over the soot-colored strands of his hair. The she grabbed his head in her hands and between one breath and the next she twisted, breaking his neck and taking his life.

She glanced up at Dmitry and he went to a knee, the breath knocked from him. Her eyes were black, the pupils blown and glassy. Pain, fear, and pleasure commanded that reaction of the pupils.

Bone had already acknowledged pain was her friend and she felt no fear. That left pleasure and it broke Dmitry’s heart that a woman, any woman, would know joy in killing.

“The mistake was mine in giving you my name. Allow me to correct it now. Do not ever call me that again, Asinimov. My name is my own,” she bit out. “I am Bone and it is all I will ever be.”

Her voice raked his soul.

She stepped over Azrael’s body and picked up a wing-backed chair, wedging it under the door handles to the room. Then she turned and made her way to Vadim. She didn’t acknowledge Dmitry in any way.

He would have intercepted her but something stopped him—some intangible caution kept his feet still. This kill was his by blood right but he remained where he was. He didn’t understand it at all.

She lifted Vadim by his lapels and thrust him on the sofa. The man whimpered. Vadim was at least two hundred pounds heavier than Bone and a good foot taller, but she moved him as if were a ragdoll and he let her.

“You have killed innocents,” she said softly.

Vadim opened his mouth but nothing came out.

Bone walked around behind him and stood, not touching him. It was enough of a threat that Vadim’s pants wet at the front.

She sighed and it rang with death. “You have sold young girls into slavery for years and years, Vadim Yesipov.”

“He is mine,” Dmitry said, finding his voice. He couldn’t let her have him.

Her gaze sought his and when their eyes met, Dmitry hissed in a breath.

“Why would you take him?”

“He killed my father,” Dmitry answered. He was on autopilot, every sense blanketed, overcome, by her.

She shook her head. “No, he did not.”

Chills danced up his spine as a warning shot through his brain. Something was wrong with this entire picture.

Dmitry didn’t move, blood pouring from his shoulder, pain breaking over him in great waves as confusion rained down. “You know who it was,”

She remained silent, simply staring.

“I gave the order,” Vadim wheezed from the couch.

“It mattered not that you gave any order, Yesipov. You forget who pulls your strings,” Bone quipped.

She cocked her head but her gaze never left Dmitry and his soul froze. “Who was it?” he demanded, his voice strident in the enormous, quiet room.

“A killer.” She directed her next words to Vadim Yesipov. “I have followed you from the time I knew your name. I have watched as you and your partner sold young girls to Joseph, stepping away from their cries for freedom, abandoning them to a life filled with strife and pain. Tell me, Yesipov, I would know—do you think you are a good man?”

Dmitry cursed and it rang through the room. But still he didn’t move. He had waited years for this moment. He’d suspected Vadim was the one behind his sisters’ disappearance. Though he’d been nothing more than a child himself when they were taken, once he’d reached his teens, he and his father searched for them.

Then his father was murdered and Dmitry had been given another quest. Always he searched for killers. He was sick of it.

But his sisters were never far from his mind or heart. Over the years he’d managed to unravel a bit of the tangle of their disappearance. When he discovered Vadim had been involved in it Dmitry vowed to make him pay.

One thing led to another and then First Team had been in Trident’s lap. So the time for vengeance on Vadim Yesipov was upon him. Was he going to let another killer step in and take the right from him?

“He is not yours. He is mine, Bullet’s, Arrow’s, Blade’s, and…” Her voice trailed off as her gaze pierced him and it seemed she read his mind.

“Say it,” he demanded. “I would hear her name from your lips.”

Dmitry had heard her whisper the name as she’d taken Minton that morning in Virginia. It shocked him as nothing else had. Of course there were many girls in Russia who held that name. It might not be…

“He is Ninka’s and by right of her suffering, he is ours to take.”

It was if saying the dead girl’s name cracked open her soul or at the very least her memories. There was a pregnant pause and Dmitry took a step forward.

Bone cocked her head, and the killer peering from her eyes measured him. It was eerie how the violence bled off her, soaking the room in her intent.

“Do not move any farther, Asinimov. It is time to deal death and I would not take you by mistake,” she dropped into the silence.

He stilled, recognizing she was on a hair trigger. Her fingers held Vadim’s head surely, almost but not quite stroking the other man as she had Azrael.

“She was mine,” Dmitry told her.

“She was ours the moment this man sold her to Joseph. I know what my sisters have failed to realize—she was your sibling. I have kept your secret and I recognize your blood rights here, now. But you did not watch her break. You did not hold her hand in the dark of night. You did not feed her when she starved. Where were you when she needed you, Asinimov?”

His heart shredded. He’d been a child himself when Ninka and their sister disappeared. Yet every single day he blamed himself for not finding them. It was a cross he bore in his waking and sleeping moments.

She shook her head when he said nothing, and then lowered her mouth to Vadim’s ear. “Do you think you are a good man? Give me your truth and I will make it easy. Lie and I will make it more painful that you could ever imagine.”

“She will come for you,” Vadim said with a sob.

“And I will be waiting,” Bone assured him.

“Go to hell!” Vadim yelled. His voice was hoarse, the knowledge he was about to perish written in the deep grooves of his face.

Bone smiled and it was an ugly thing.
“Esli ja popadu v ad, ja vozjmu tebja s soboj,”
she promised him in perfect Russian. “Or I could just send you to wait for me.”

Dmitry took another step forward but he wouldn’t be in time. She’d given him more in the last two minutes than he’d had in the last twelve years of searching. Ninka had been with the women of First Team and then she’d been no more. And Vadim was but a part of the scourge who’d sent his sister to her death. There was another, a woman head of the
Bratva
, and Bone knew who she was.

What happened next appeared in slow motion to Dmitry. She moved with such grace, such wicked beauty, that even when she murdered it was a dance. She twisted Vadim’s head, stepped back, and pushed his body forward.

Bone closed her eyes and lifted her face to the heavens as if praying for forgiveness, but Dmitry was well-aware she cared nothing for it. She had a duty and she’d seen it through. She cared naught for anything else.

Vadim fell in a dead heap on the floor and the sound of gunfire erupted. The doors to the study began to splinter as machine gun rounds ripped into the wood. The chair she’d wedged under the door handles fell into a useless heap and Dmitry glanced at her.

“It is time to run, Asinimov. I would not have another on my conscience.” Her tone was harsh above the sound of the men outside the door reloading.

“Fuck your conscience,
ubiytsa
. Stand and fight with me. If Joseph is on the other side, we can take him together,” Dmitry shouted above the renewed gunfire.

She shook her head. “It is not time. The empire he’s built is shaky, but it is not quite ready to tumble. There is more work to be done. Now let’s be gone from this place. You are injured and I’m tired of arguing with you.”

First Team was playing with Joseph. It was more than dismantling The Collective, it was about destroying their creator. He didn’t agree with it, almost opened his mouth to berate her, but gunfire littered the room, the furniture, and the walls, and finally the doors fell. He took off, and then they were through the window and headed toward the woods. She disappeared in the darkness, blending in seamlessly with the night and he thought that as it should be.

He was winded and his left arm was numb but still he ran. He hadn’t endured years of training to die so easily.

“You need to move, Asinimov. They are hunting with Vadim’s hounds,” Bone said from the shadows. “Follow me,” she urged.

Dmitry knew the land well, scouted it each time he’d visited Vadim, plotting the many ways he would take the man who sold innocents to Joseph Bombardier. Vadim’s property bordered the eastern edge of the Neva River and that was the direction she was headed.

“I don’t swim,” he murmured.

She stopped. “What the hell do you mean, you don’t swim?”

Anger burned through him, replacing the pain. “I fucking mean I don’t swim.”

He would have laughed at the expression on her face but it wasn’t funny. The baying of Vadim’s dogs in the distance lent credibility to her assertion they, whoever the hell “they” were, were hunting them.

He huffed. “I’m from the Ural Mountains, Bone. We do not fucking swim in the Ural Mountains.”

“Then I will pull you. Can you at least float?” she asked, impatience in her tone.

He didn’t answer and the sound of pursuit prodded him to move again. He passed her and took off running, calling on his reserves and hoping against hope he did not have to go in the cold-as-hell Neva River.

“I will divert them,” she said, not sounding winded at all.

“No! You will come with me,” he ordered.

“There is no time for this petty squabbling. They will find you and Joseph will kill you to spite me. Do not be another tool he uses to hurt me,” she pleaded.

Her words stopped him for a moment. “I’m not so easy to kill and I don’t know why you would care about my end either way.” He glanced at her, noticed her blank face and bright eyes and then he nodded.

He understood he would get no reaction from her, though some nameless emotion twisted her lips as if she was acknowledging he mattered but did not like it one damn bit. It would be the same for him if she were taken. He didn’t like being tied to her with these invisible strings of emotion but they were there, something he could not avoid. There was some satisfaction that she was in the same boat.

“Take the river, stick to the bank. I will find you.” She paused, and the growling of dogs rent the air. “Run.”

He would slow her down, possibly lead them straight to her. It went against everything he was but he ran, knowing Joseph wouldn’t eliminate one of his prize killers. At least he hoped not.

With the sound of hounds crying in the night, blood dripping down his arm, and fear for her life in his heart, Dmitry ran and fell into the loving embrace of the Neva.

Bone climbed the pine with ease, using her legs to hold herself aloft, as the branches were too high to be of any help. The bark scraped her palms and the cold teased her face. The dogs had passed one minute ago, their handlers unable to keep up.

But soon they’d be beneath her and she would dance with death again. It was inevitable. She rested her forehead against the tree trunk and mused that perhaps she was weary of killing. The need to distribute endings no longer brought the glorious, painful rush of completion it once had. Now it was simply a necessary evil.

She wondered, not for the first time, if that was how she managed to catch Abela Badr. Had he too grown tired of the game of life? Maybe he’d allowed her to take him?

She shook her head, denying it. No, she’d caught Master unprepared. The student had become the teacher. The look of surprise on his face still haunted her dreams. She usually woke satisfied from those dreams. Lately, she was nothing more than drained.

The first man burst into the small clearing before her and turned in a circle. His flashlight tracked the shadows. Then another man and another made an appearance until the clearing held at least ten men. She would get her fight it seemed.

If only Joseph had come. But she didn’t smell him in the air, didn’t feel the horror of his presence flaying the skin from her bones. He’d stayed at the house, possibly understanding that if she met him tonight, she would kill him.

She’d take his head—deny her sisters their piece of him. She would have no choice because the demon inside her was becoming a demanding bastard. It only silenced when Dmitry was close and while entirely unacceptable it was her truth now.

She’d allowed the big Russian inside and he’d commandeered a part of her she’d not realized was there.