“Not the information I obtain,” he says darkly, and I chuckle.
“Afraid your knife’s getting rusty?”
Pavel doesn’t deny it. He misses being in the thick of things, just like I do—or did. Right now, I’d much rather be in Idaho with Chloe. I want to be there in case she has another nightmare. I want to hold her, soothe her, comfort her… and eventually, seduce her. Her resolve is already wavering, I can feel it—which is why I decided to reassure her about the bruises on my knuckles and the scar on my shoulder.
I don’t intend to lie to her about the kind of man I am, but I don’t want her to fear me.
I won’t hurt her… not in that way, at least.
“Did you already set up a meeting with the head of the Energy Commission?” Pavel asks as we stop at an intersection, and I nod, pulling my thoughts away from Chloe.
“I’m meeting him for lunch on Monday,” I say, stepping onto the street as the light in front of us turns green. It took three phone calls to get through to the guy, but I succeeded, as I knew I would. “That’s another reason I went this route with Ivan,” I continue. “There was no time to break him properly—we needed that code ASAP.”
“Wouldn’t have taken me long either,” Pavel mutters, and I laugh—just as a motorcycle roars around the corner and barrels straight at me.
34
Nikolai
I react in a split second, but Pavel is even faster. He shoves me just as I dive to the side, and we both hit the ground hard as the bike roars past us, so close I feel a whoosh of hot air on my face.
Adrenaline propels me to my feet straight away, but the biker is already halfway down the block, weaving through the traffic with race car speed. All I can tell from this distance is that it’s a man wearing a black leather jacket and a helmet.
Pavel is already on his feet as well, jaw taut with fury. “Did you see his face?”
“No.” I straighten my jacket and tie and brush the dirt and gravel off my scraped palms. My shoulder throbs from landing on it, and cold rage burns inside me, but my voice is calm. “His helmet had a mirrored visor. Maybe one of Valery’s guys caught his license plate.” I take in the gathering crowd of eyewitnesses, some of whom are pulling out their phones, presumably to call the police. “We better get out of here.”
Pavel nods grimly, and we swiftly make our way to the hotel.
* * *
Levan Abkhazi, Valery’s local security chief, meets us in my room an hour later. A burly Georgian about Pavel’s age, he’s completely bald but sports a thick black unibrow and a matching beard.
Pulling out a folder, he lays out a series of grainy photos on the desk. “This is all we were able to pull from the nearby store and traffic cameras,” he reports in heavily accented Russian. “The team stationed on the rooftops didn’t have a good angle on the license plate at any point, and there were too many civilians to risk taking a shot at him.”
Pavel and I examine the photos. On one of them, it’s possible to make out a portion of a digit, but the other pictures show a corner of the license plate at best. The biker is either the luckiest son of a bitch to ever walk the earth, or he knew where Valery’s team was stationed.
I look at Pavel. “Thoughts?”
“A pro, definitely.” His face is set in harsh lines. “He didn’t slow down, didn’t react in any way to almost running you over. And he knew how to handle that bike—and how to avoid the cameras.”
Abkhazi’s unibrow bunches in a frown. “You don’t think it could’ve been an accident? If the guy’s a pro, he should know that running someone down in the street is not the most efficient way to carry out a hit.”
“That depends on whether you want to make it look like an accident or not,” Pavel says. “Besides, it wasn’t a hit.”
The Georgian gives him a confused look. “What was it then?”
“A message,” I say, placing the photos back in the folder. “From our friends, the Leonovs. They wanted me to know that they know. The question is: know what?”
35
Chloe
I wake up smiling, and for a couple of minutes, I just lie there, eyes closed, floating in that blissful state between dreams and full wakefulness.
And what dreams they were.
My hand slips between my thighs, and I press on the sweet ache that lingers there, trying to remember the sensual scenes that played in my head all night. I only recall fragments of them now, but I know all of them featured Nikolai… his wicked smile… his deep, smooth voice… Best of all, they were the only dreams I had last night.