Utterly horrified and shocked, I could do nothing but keep putting one step in front of the next. Igor, Yuri’s driver pretended as if he’d seen nothing. We marched across the courtyard. My heart kept pounding in my chest.
Good God, I’d just seen a dead man!
For the first time, I started really looking around me. I was in a massive construction yard somewhere out in the East End. We reached the building and Igor opened the metal door and let me precede him. We were immediately in a corridor. We walked along it. We passed one room where the door was open and I could a see cluster of men with visible weapons tucked into their pants, puffing smoke from their mouths, and boisterous tones of Russian from their lips in hearty, or heated discussion, I couldn’t tell.
I knew only that they had pale dangerous faces.
Yuri’s words the previous evening, the disappearing act, and the crazy-tight security around the house were already beginning to put images and ideas into my head that made my blood run cold. I’d been all mouth at breakfast, challenging a man whom I realized could quite possibly snap my neck in two with his bare hands, or more easily send one of these hefty Russian brutes I’d passed to handle the job.
But the gunshot. This was truly the last straw.
Somehow, without understanding a word of Russian, I knew Yuri’s imposing companion had said something horrible about me. His coarse tone in the foreign language had reverberated through the room and scattered goose bumps across my flesh.
Yuri wasn’t ordinary. I don’t know about the Queen being a reptile, but in this case, the tabloids were right. The Mafia angle wasn’t fake news.
When the Russian man left, he turned to me.
“Why?” I asked simply.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
I could see in his eyes he was sincere, but like he almost didn’t know how to say the word. Maybe it was something people in his world did to people in my world just to see how we would react. It was a big risk. I could have gone to the police.
Whatever. I knew though he wasn’t going to snap my neck in half with his bare hands. Just like that, I felt the fear in my soul begin to dissipate and in its place, came the charge of primal desire that strung up my body without fail every time I came into his presence. It made me want to claw up along his torso and hang on for dear life… My bare breasts against those pure slabs of muscle that was his chest, his cutting blue eyes on mine, and my tongue in his mouth.
I shook my head in wonder at the new direction of my thoughts. How could I feel like having sex when I’d just seen a dead body? I must be going insane. This was madness. Wrong. All wrong. I needed to leave. And I had to leave now, before I became this unrecognizable person who got turned on after seeing a dead body. I should have just kept walking that day. But I will this time. This time I was serious.
“April,” he called.
I didn’t even look at him. I just put one foot in front of the other and kept going. I was leaving and nothing, but nothing would stop me.
Until the gun went off. He shot me!
I screamed, but whether it was all in my head, or sounded in reality, I couldn’t tell. My heart collapsed into my stomach. My hands rushed to my ears and my entire frame shivered in mind numbing terror. I felt certain that a hole had been bored somewhere through my body. I waited and waited to feel the pain, or perhaps feel nothing at all as I slipped into unconsciousness, but when I opened my eyes a lifetime later I saw the hole he had blasted instead through the concrete wall near where my head was.
I spun violently around, in such a rage that the tears spilled from my eyes. “Are you fucking out of your mind?” I screeched. Still reeling from the slam of my heart against the walls of my chest. I charged him. The shock and terror rendering me incoherent even as I shoved him violently. When the joint of one wrist twisted on contact with his rock-hard chest, and with no effect whatsoever on him, both of my arms shot out and attacked him, instead. He allowed me to rain blows on him until I slammed his back into the wall, my chest heaving with uncontrollable fury.
Effortlessly, he grabbed and held down both my hands. “Enough. Calm down. I wasn’t shooting at you,” he said, his gaze sharp, but his expression stoic and unreadable.
I knew I must be an unsightly mess. “Let go of me. I’m calm now,” I said through gritted teeth.