Bound to the Beast: Russian Hitman Romance (12 page)

I didn’t let her finish. “I’m trying to execute him.”

Instantly, she paled. The hope died and I felt a twinge of guilt attack me. “How is that any different?” she demanded angrily, throwing her arms down beside her, her hands clenching into tight fists.

“It’s different because murder suggests senselessness. That there is no purpose behind it save violence. But an execution has a reason.
I
have a reason.”

She scoffed at me. “What?
Money?
”

“No, that was your
brother’s
reason,” I said pointedly, even angrily. Yes, I killed people for a living. And yes, it was about the money. And yes, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about Christopher or his buddy or whether or not they were homegrown farm boys. Vinny gave me a job, I accepted it. Period. But she was under some delusion that her brother was this poor young man, innocent and wrongly accused. That his head was on the chopping block for some mistake, something that wasn’t his fault. Like we were the villains. And maybe we were, but even villains like us had a
code
, and I didn’t go around murdering people for shits and giggles.

Susanna stared at me with wide, confused eyes. There was a flicker in them that I thought might be understanding, but she shoved it away determinedly. She didn’t
want
to know that her brother was responsible. Well, it was too late for that.

“That’s right. Money. Your brother pissed off the wrong people by stealing a lot of money that he had no right to.” She opened her mouth to interject something, but I wasn’t finished. “And maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe you could even say that someone had a right to walk away from that, couldn’t you? No, it’s not the
moral
thing to do, it doesn’t make him the
good guy
, does it? But it’s not like he
killed
someone, right?”

I looked at Susanna pointedly, watched as realization tried to flicker in her expression even as she fought to shove it back down. She was fighting hard to hold on to this idea of what her brother was
supposed
to be while painting me as the bad guy, but it was getting harder I could tell. She sensed that something was wrong, maybe always had.

“Except that he did kill someone, Susanna,” I continued, eyes flashing in anger. “Not in self-defense. Not to save someone else. In cold blooded murder. That’s what your brother is now, Susanna. A murderer.”

Susanna

How was I supposed to stand there and listen to this?

Every part of my being was telling me that he was wrong. Alexei
couldn’t
be right about Chris. But even as I thought that, I couldn’t one hundred percent deny his claim. Chris and I had been close as kids, but as we grew older he became…unruly. And not just in the way that children often were, testing their limits and boundaries. He had grown almost cruel. It was in reaction to our mother’s death and I had always felt that he took it so hard because they’d been very close. But even so, I never believed it was a permanent thing.

After a while, he’d gotten better. He didn’t torture people like he did in high school, teasing and taunting at every opportunity. Moving to the city had been really good for him, and though he was constantly screwing up perfectly good opportunities, he at least was trying and making his way in the world.

That was all any of us were trying to do, right?

But as Alexei stood there and told me about everything that my brother had supposedly done, I held my breath, trying to pretend it wasn’t easy to imagine him doing those things.

“He was hired to do a job, a construction job for a very powerful organization,” Alexei continued, oblivious to the way I was struggling to take all of this in. Or maybe he knew and just didn’t care. I was pretty sure that this “very powerful organization” meant some sort of mafia, so there was every chance that he really didn’t give a shit.

Oh god, I had sex with someone connected to the mafia!
Worse than that, though, I’d given my virginity to Alexei, gotten pregnant by him, and not only was he connected to the mafia, but he was a contract killer for them!

The father of my baby—I couldn’t finish the thought. My only relief was that I hadn’t mentioned the baby to him. I had decided that I would, though I had been terrified to do so. In fact, before Chris showed up in my apartment, I’d been hoping to see Alexei again so that I could tell him. Now, I was incredibly grateful that I hadn’t shared that information with him yet.

What would I do then if he wanted to be a part of the baby’s life? He was a hit man for Christ’s sake! I couldn’t let him have anything to do with the baby or me. No matter how much my body continued to call out for his strong arms or his muscled chest or other things. It didn’t matter if I wanted the length of his manhood buried in me or not, Alexei just simply couldn’t be a part of my life now.

“It all would have been fine, except that Christopher found out that there was money being housed there. He decided that it would be a better way to make money to steal it than to earn it. But he didn’t stop there. When he discovered that there was a guard watching the money, he beat that guard to death. The man was barely recognizable when they found him. Quite the mess.”

I paled. I wished that Alexei would stop speaking, that he would just
leave
. Walk out that door and back out of my life—how had I let myself get into this mess? I was having difficulty breathing, imagining the brutality that my brother had done to that other man. I even felt a little dizzy, though I tried to stay strong while Alexei was here. I didn’t need him seeing any weakness from me. What would he do if he did?

At this point, Alexei had turned away from me, running his large hands through his thick, silky hair. He’d begun to pace anxiously, or maybe angrily, throwing glances my way every so often. For the first time, I considered how truly menacing he was.

He was much taller than I was, towering over me. His face was full of sharp, hard lines that I’d once thought of only as strong and even devilishly charming. Well, I’d gotten the devilish part right, hadn’t I? His eyes were striking, entrancing even, but now I noticed that they easily flashed with anger and might even be considered cold where once I had only thought of them as warm and inviting. His shoulders were broad and now I couldn’t help but picture a body being thrown over them, not a naked woman—me, for instance—writhing in passion or begging, but rather a
dead
body. My brother, even. How many times had he carried his victims like that, throwing them over his shoulder before dumping them in a ditch or a shallow grave somewhere?

Did he even bother with graves?

I shuddered.

The large muscles of his arms flexed, reminding me how much stronger he was. How easily he’d pinned me to the floor, both of my arms held tightly above my head with only one of his. He’d done that without even breaking a sweat, I thought, and there was no denying that I’d been completely unable to break free of that grasp. Sure, at the time I’d been consumed by passion and need, but what if I’d been struggling? What if I’d wanted to get free? I wouldn’t have been able to.

It was a terrifying thought.

Everything about Alexei suddenly seemed menacing, though I was trying to reconcile the image of him as a killer with the image I knew of him as a passionate, aggressive, but dedicated lover.

I didn’t know what to think anymore and it was getting harder for me to breathe, not to mention stand up straight.

“You…you need to go,” I managed to get out. My voice was timid, shaky even, but at least I managed to get the words out. That alone seemed pretty impressive given who he was and what he was clearly capable of.

This caused Alexei to stop. He whipped his head around in my direction, a look that I couldn’t quite read sliding across his features. Then he seemed to freeze. I thought his gaze was fixed on me, but then I realized that his eyes were actually stuck on something just past me, sitting behind me. I waited for him to respond, but when he just continued to stare at whatever it was that had so surely caught his attention, I finally risked turning. I hadn’t wanted to look away from him, for fear that he might do something crazy, but I was too curious to know what it was that had caused him to freeze.

When I looked behind me, at first I didn’t see anything. It was the kitchen, mostly clean except for a mug of tea—I was trying to ween myself off of coffee for the sake of the baby—and a half eaten bagel which had actually been Chris’s not mine. I hadn’t been able to make myself eat that morning at all, partially because of the terrible morning sickness that happened pretty much every morning now, and partially because the thought of Chris nearly dying was too terrible to think of. And the idea that Alexei was the one to kill him? Well, it was all just too much for me anymore.

I was just about to turn away and ask him what his problem was, or maybe just tell him to go, when I saw it. The thing that must have caught his attention.

The baby book.

I paled. At school that day, I’d gone to the bookstore on campus. They had all of the class books listed on the required reading material for the classes, but they also had other books, too. They had a lot of fiction books, ranging through all the subgenres there in—I admitted, I’d bought more than a few romance books over the years in attendance. Then there were the nonfiction books, which were mostly biographies or books about geographical locations. But there were a few other oddball books, including a whole section that was dedicated to the “expecting mother.” I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do or what I was looking for, I didn’t know what would happen with Alexei, but I’d known that it was time to start taking care of myself.

So I’d bought a book. It was all about what to eat, how to deal with morning sickness—the tea was supposed to help, but I didn’t think it did in the slightest—what sort of prenatal vitamins to get, how to start preparing for the hormonal imbalances, and so on. Though I hadn’t gotten the chance to look through it much, it was still sitting there on the counter, taunting me.

I’d never even thought to put it up. I couldn’t believe how stupid I was.

When my eyes went back to Alexei, I saw that he was focused on me now, too. His eyes flashed with something that I couldn’t decipher. Was it anger at finding out I was pregnant? Was it pride at knowing he’d spread his seed inside me and created something that would grow in my womb? Was it annoyance that I was yet again another complication?

The possibilities raced through my head, all of them becoming more and more terrible as they went on. What if he decided I was too much trouble now? Would he kill me—kill the baby? Oh, god, what if he did? He was certainly capable. He was a contract killer for god’s sake!

“Why do you need a book for expecting mothers, Susanna?” he asked quietly, calmly though I could see emotions raging in his eyes.

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing could get out. My vision began to blur, the edges going black. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. I was already falling, fading out completely.

Alexei

As soon as I noticed her falling, I went to her. Susanna crumpled, pale and fragile, just as I swallowed her in my arms. She was dead weight, but I lifted her easily, carrying her as I might a bride in my arms. A fissure of panic sliced through my already pounding heart, calmed only by the realization that though she was incredibly pale and looked so breakable in my arms, she was most definitely breathing.

She had only fainted.

I carried her to the little section of her studio apartment that was cordoned off. The section clearly acted as her bedroom with a curtain sectioning it away privately from the rest of the place. As a result, it was tiny and contained essentially only a bed and a bedside table with a tiny little light sitting on the top. There was a clock set there, too, otherwise, there was only a door I noticed as her closet and nothing else. Not that there was room for anything else. The bed took up so much space that I could barely fit around the edges of it. It reminded me again how much smaller she was than me.

Carefully, I laid her out on the bed, pulling back the covers slightly so that I could tuck them around her fragile frame.

When I straightened, I took a long moment to just stare down at her.

That book…expecting mothers? Why would Susanna have something like that? But even as I thought about that, I knew the answer. We’d had a passionate night together a couple of months ago. A passionate night in which I’d claimed her as mine twice and twice released myself into her waiting, willing body. At the time, I hadn’t thought a single thing of it. Why would I? But I should have. After she told me that I’d been her first, her only, well, I should have considered that perhaps she wasn’t on any type of birth control. What would be the need if she’d never lain with a man before?

Part of me swelled with pride. I’d impregnated her. Was there any clearer claim than that? She was mine. Period.

Unfortunately, things weren’t one hundred percent that simple. I acknowledged that perhaps this was all a misunderstanding. She was in college, that book could have been for a class or a friend or maybe just for her own curiosity. But if she was pregnant, then there would be complications. I was a hit man for the Russian mob; her being pregnant didn’t change that and
I
wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. I was good at my job, even enjoyed it on occasion, and it paid better than any other job I might find out there. Especially since I’d been doing this for so long now that I didn’t even have a resume to speak of. My last job had been tossing pizzas in a restaurant down the road from Vinny’s, still owned by him, of course, and had lasted about five months before I’d started getting involved with the mob boss.

What sort of job could I even hope to find? Not one that could provide for a baby and its mother, that was for sure.

I frowned. Was I seriously considering
keeping
Susanna and this hypothetical baby?

On the one hand, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Hadn’t I already decided that I couldn’t stay away from Susanna? Whether it was the incredibly tempting pussy between her legs or the fact that she lingered in my mind regardless of what else was happening in my life, there was no denying that I wanted her. Hungrily, I wanted her.

On the other hand, hadn’t I come to the conclusion a long time ago that having a wife and a family wasn’t an option? In my line of work that was just an impossibility. No one wanted to spend their lives with a man who killed other men to pay the bills.

I studied Susanna as she lay there on her bed. Color was slowly returning to her cheeks, making her instantly look healthier. And not just healthier, sexier, too. Maybe it was the thought that she could have my baby growing inside of her, this direct link to me that could not be denied, or maybe it was just the same attraction I’d always felt for her, but I found myself thinking of the ways I wanted to have her.

We’d been pressed together in the shower before, my cock sliding between her slick thighs until I dove into her, filling that impossibly tight space with everything that I had. I’d had her in my bed, tasting her and pounding into her, until we were both driven to sweet pleasure and release. And I’d had her on the floor of her tiny, mostly empty apartment. But there were other places I wanted her.

In this little bed where she lay right now. I wanted to make her mine there, too, so that she remembered the force with which I fucked her every time she lay down in it. And I wanted her in the kitchen—hers, mine, some random restaurant, it didn’t matter—where I’d sit her perky, full ass on the counter and maybe taste her sweet pussy lips before burying myself in her over and over again.

Other places, too. My car. Outdoors somewhere maybe, a lake or a park or up in the mountains. I wanted her on a beach, in a bathroom, bent over a porch railing in the rain wearing nothing but a white dress that quickly became soaked, see through, her breasts bouncing as her hard nipples pressed into the fabric.

I shook my head. I couldn’t keep thinking about this. My cock was straining against my pants already, begging to be let free and to dive into Susanna’s hot, tight little body. Thinking about the things I wanted from her was too much; I’d lose myself if I didn’t try to focus.

There were more important things going on. Besides, I had the feeling that she wasn’t really in the mood right then to let me fuck her senseless. I’d just have to be patient.

Adjusting my full erection to a more comfortable position, I took a seat on the bed beside Susanna. I would have to wait until she was conscious before I could get the full story on what was happening. I would make her tell me about the book, about if she was pregnant or not—if she was, it was mine; I was the only man she’d ever been with. If the answer was yes, then my fate was sealed, as was hers. She would be mine, forever. There would be no going back. Whatever my lifestyle, she would have to adapt to it. I was willing to change my living arrangements—if she wanted a bigger place, a house instead of an apartment, to decorate the place herself—that was perfectly acceptable. I would honor her wishes. I would also, of course, stop bringing home other women. My sex life would dwindle to just her small, perfectly curved body, and that tight little core embedded between her long, shapely legs. I couldn’t even make myself upset at the idea of being a one-woman man.

All of that, I would change for her. But I wouldn’t change my profession. There would be no point. When the baby arrived, I could take some time off. Vinny would understand. But I wouldn’t stop being what I was; there was too much at stake. It wasn’t just about the money. People often had grudges against the hit men who retired. I wasn’t willing to take the chance that some disgruntled customer—or family member—would come knocking and find my woman and my child instead of me. I wouldn’t risk that they might be hurt for it.

So the job would stay. Susanna would just have to get used to it.

All of these thoughts filled my head as I made plans for a future. Part of me tried to calm myself, to hold things back. I couldn’t let myself get carried away if it turned out that I’d misunderstood things. If she wasn’t pregnant at all, I was beginning to think that I wanted to keep her anyway and
try
to get her pregnant.

Maybe it was a terrible idea, but I was suddenly so enamored with the thought of having an heir, a child to carry on my name, that I thought it might be worth a try. I was fairly certain that it wouldn’t take much to convince Susanna—once I calmed her down about her brother and my profession.

My thoughts still racing, Susanna finally began to stir. I tensed; this was it.

She groaned, turning slightly in her bed beneath the covers, her head rolling slightly to the side. Her eyelids fluttered, her long lashes batting at her cheeks. When they finally opened, she seemed slightly disoriented, looking around as though getting her bearings. Finally, her bright blue eyes focused on me. She stilled, tensed.

Opening her mouth to say something, she shut it abruptly as though reconsidering whatever she’d been about to say.

She tried to push herself into a sitting position and I helped her, settling a pillow behind her back so that she would have an easier time of it. Susanna was eyeing me warily, but didn’t protest as I helped her.

When she was settled, I asked the question that was burning inside of me, “Are you pregnant?”

Her eyes went wide, then became glassy. It happened so fast that I couldn’t have seen it coming. The tears welled and her face crumbled as she released a wet sob. Something in my chest constricted, letting me know that I most definitely did not like seeing her cry. It was worse because I felt as though I was the cause. Before I could do something—or even decide if I
should
do anything—she choked out an answer.

“Yes,” she said, her voice watery and still wracked by sobs. “I…I found out a few…d-days ago. A-and I w-was going to…to tell you.” She sobbed heavily again and I couldn’t make out what she said. It cleared up again enough that I could at least decipher her words, “…wouldn’t w-want any-anything to do w-with it.”

For a moment, I froze. I didn’t realize how much I’d been worried that she
wasn’t
pregnant until I felt a fire zip through me at the knowledge that for certain she was. Pride filled my chest until I thought I might burst.
I
had made her pregnant. She was carrying
my
child. I pictured her stomach swelling with a part of me. I pictured her holding a baby, smiling up at me, just as beautiful and sexy as she’d ever been, and one hundred percent
mine
.

There was no question about any of it now. Her words confirmed it in my mind. I would take her home. I would keep her safe and take care of her. When the baby came, I would raise it with pride and love. An heir. A concept I’d never even let myself dream about—
an heir.

A slow smile slipped across my lips. She must have seen it, because her sobs slowed. Her breathing was still ragged and her face was ruddy from crying and wet from tears. Her eyes were rimmed in red, still glassy though they were no longer pouring out tears. She blinked at me, sniffling and hiccupping slightly, uncertainty written clearly across her features. A smile was not what she’d expected, clearly, but it didn’t matter. Her expectations had been completely off the mark and I was about to set her straight.

“Good,” I told her, my voice low and husky. She was already pregnant, but I wanted to fill her up again and again with my seed. “It’s settled, then.”

She blinked at me, confused. “What’s settled?”

“You’re mine now. You’ll have to tell your fiancé immediately that you can’t marry him, because you belong to me.”

“Belong to…?” She was dazed, wide-eyed and a little lost-looking.

“You’re carrying my child and I won’t have my child raised by another man. You’re mine now, Susanna. Just mine.”