Pavel covered his mouth with a veined, shaking hand.
“But don’t despair,” Zhoglo went on. “Your good behavior may still be worth something if it saves Marya and your other little son, no? I must do some calculations and assess my financial losses in this disaster. Your mistakes are expensive, Pavel. I fear it will bump poor little Sasha to the head of the line. Such a shame.”
Pavel made a hoarse sound. Zhoglo reached down, and took the Heckler & Koch from the man’s nerveless fingers. He used the barrel to tip up Pavel’s face. Pavel’s eyes were wide, staring. Swimming with tears.
“Now, my friend,” he said softly. “Tell me everything there is to know about this Ludmilla.”
“I have known her for years,” Pavel said. “From back when she lived in Ukraina. She was married to Aleksei Dubov in the nineties. They operated brothels in Kiev. She and Aleksei moved girls in the pipeline to western Europe, the Middle East, America. Then Dubov was killed.”
Yes, yes. He had ordered the man’s death himself. He had not known, or else he had forgotten, that Dubov had a wife. Zhoglo made an impatient gesture for the man to continue.
“Ludmilla married a Hungarian, who died shortly afterwards, and set up business in Budapest. Then she married an American—”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess. He died shortly afterwards? Clutching his throat after a glass of wine?”
Pavel coughed. “Heart attack. After she was widowed, she set up business in Seattle. We have supplied her with girls off and on. I don’t understand. She is not stupid, and she is a good business-woman. She has everything to lose by crossing you, and she knows it. So I think that—”
“Don’t think, Pavel.” Zhoglo dug the gun barrel into the hollow under Pavel’s cheekbone. “The results of you trying to think are damaging to me.”
Pavel closed his eyes. “Shall I kill her, Vor?” he asked, hoarsely. “Or bring her to you, for questioning?”
Zhoglo considered it, tapping the gun barrel idly against Pavel’s temple. He concluded after a moment that it would be unwise to kill this Ludmilla before his imagination had exhausted every possibility of using her. She was his only tenuous link to that stinking turd Solokov and his lying, green-eyed whore. His only tool to feed false information back to whoever had really hired Solokov.
In the end, of course, Ludmilla would die, screaming. He would see to the matter personally.
“Not yet, Pavel.” He patted the man’s cheek with the gun. “Not yet. But you will be paying a visit to your favorite madam very soon. Take him—” he gestured with the gun toward the surgeon “—and get him back to the mainland. Out of my sight.”
“Do you want me to kill—”
“No, Pavel. Deliver him to wherever Yevgeni picked him up. Do not kill anyone. Idiot. And hurry back. It will be your task to dispose of all these bodies. It is the least you can do.”
Zhoglo watched Pavel herd the surgeon out the door. The man’s gabbling, excited questions receded into the distance. He lit a cigarette and turned his gaze away from the spectacle of soon-to-be-rotting meat sprawled on the floor. All that money wasted in recruiting, training. His cadre of bodyguards cut by more than half.
He hated waste. It was an obsessive tic, for a man who was filthy rich, but he was convinced that his thrift was one of the reasons for his prodigious success. It came from growing up on the streets of Kiev, he supposed. Thieving and whoring to eat. Nothing taught a man the value of money like near starvation.
In fact, the idea for this project had sprung directly from his loathing of waste. It had come to him while overseeing the punishment of one of his business rivals, mere months after his own heart transplant. Seeing human organs tossed about with abandon had gotten him thinking.
He’d tallied the resale value of the gory offal that had been scooped out of the fellow’s abdominal cavity. It was a considerable sum.
He’d mulled over this, as he gazed at the moaning, mutilated creature. One could not strictly call it a man any longer, since that which defined manhood had been separated from him.
It was by no means a new idea, but he was sure that no one as well financed and well organized as himself had ever attempted it.
And on the eve of the debut of his project, it had been infiltrated. The audacity of the culprit infuriated him.
Like any intense emotion, it unleashed a desire to eat, despite the large meal he had just consumed. Powerful stress always induced a violent, cramping hunger in his belly, like the hunger he remembered from his boyhood, foraging for survival in maggoty garbage heaps.
The lying whore with bouncing breasts had spoken of a Grand Marnier chocolate torte. God forbid that, too, should go to waste.
He stubbed out his cigarette on the floor and made his way to the kitchen. There it was, on a dessert tray by the door. A tempting confection covered with a coating of dark chocolate, drizzled with syrup.
Unfortunately, Solokov had chosen just that spot to open the jugular of one of his men. The dessert tray had been liberally sprayed with blood. Zhoglo shrugged inwardly. Gouged out a piece with his fingers.
His men would not begrudge him a few drops of their heart’s blood, he thought, stuffing it into his face, gulping without chewing.
And he was anything but squeamish.
The long drive back to the city was as surreal as the boat ride. Heat was blasting over her, but she couldn’t stop shaking. She drifted from one waking dream to another, nightmares where she was always helpless, always naked, always cold, legs sunk in icy muck. Men with sliced throats that gaped like wet red mouths screamed their rage at her in some harsh, alien language. The Spider’s pink, smiling face, eyes sparkling with unholy glee as he reached to fondle her breasts. In her dream he didn’t stop there. His fingers slid right through her skin as if she were made of butter, and closed around her heart, squeezing with cruel iron fingers until she thought it would explode—
After that one, she forced her eyes to stay open. She hurt all over. She shook with adrenaline, vibrating at a screamingly high frequency, despite her exhaustion. She felt so exposed, as if lights were glaring down on her in a sports stadium. No cover. All the painful, shameful, embarrassing truths about her, right there for all to see. How small and stupid she was. She had made enormous mistakes.
This guy had risked his neck, done something incredibly brave and difficult and dangerous to save her.
Lives were at stake. I traded them. For yours.
She owed him for that and it was a debt she could never repay. There was no point in trying to find out his name. He would never tell her the real one anyway, if he was running true to form.
She wrapped her arms around herself, clutching the thermal blanket, trying to endure her own existence, second by second. Time ground by. Her feet hurt, her joints hurt, her wrists hurt from breaking her fall into that puddle of blood, her shoulders hurt from being handcuffed to the banister the night before—it was hard to find a place that didn’t hurt.
The one small redeeming thing was that Mr. Big was not a ruthless criminal.
Wonderful news.
Not that it mattered. He was a ruthless something else that was probably just as bad. That he’d saved her life against unbelievable odds and that he made her wild with sexual excitement when he took a break from being a hero, was beside the point. Irrelevant.
Besides, he had to despise her, for screwing up his operation. He’d only had sex with her—all-the-way sex—because he’d been coerced. The night before didn’t count. It would be silly to take it personally.
All things considered, the experience they’d shared was not a good foundation for a relationship. Hell, it wasn’t even a foundation for a one-night stand.
She buried her face in her hands, tried to burrow into a hole in her mind and just hide there.
She jumped when she felt his hand on her shoulder. “Huh?” she said. “What?”
“We’re there.”
She looked around. The world was a blur without her glasses, particularly at night. She wrenched her brain into line and squinted until she could make out the big, ramshackle house where she lived in the top floor apartment. Dawn was far away. The cold orange glow of streetlights reflected off the thick cloud cover.
“How did you know where I lived?” she asked.
“Went through your purse at the A-frame,” he said. “So I could ditch your license and your plastic. Didn’t want him to find it.”
“So that’s why you had my lipstick.”
“Yeah. Don’t know why I stuck that in my pocket.”
She blinked. He’d thought of everything. Her purse and stuff was gone, but only because he’d been trying to save her from the start. Becca struggled for something meaningful to say that would not come across as idiotic. Before he disappeared forever.
So sorry for screwing up your life. Thanks for saving me from a fate worse than death. The sex was great too. See ya.
She wondered if she would ever see him again and fought a jolt of odd, irrational panic at the idea of him just fading into black. Leaving her alone, unmoored. Her inner world smashed to junk.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Probably trying to think of a way to get her out of his truck. Her tongue felt thick.
“I’ll walk you up,” he said abruptly.
Yikes. She didn’t want him to leave, but neither did she want him in her apartment. He was so big and bloodstained and unfathomable. He could contaminate her nest. Infect it with danger, uncertainty.
Aw, hell, the damage was done. And she couldn’t refuse him.
“OK,” she whispered, but he was already out the door and circling the truck, bundling her out onto her shaky legs.
She wouldn’t have made it up the staircase, anyway. His arm clamped around her waist and took most of her weight off her feet.
She had a blank moment as she stood there, staring at the locked door. Keys. Her purse. He’d just explained that they were light years away, in another universe.
“I take it you don’t have a spare under a plant?” Mr. Big said.
She shook her head. “My landlady lives downstairs,” she said. “But I can’t…” She looked down at her disreputable self.
“No,” he agreed. “You can’t.” He bent down, peered at the lock, then fished for a pocketknife and pried a narrow hooked thing out of it.
In a couple of minutes, the door swung open. The familiar scent of vanilla and rose potpourri wafted out. She stumbled forward.
Mr. Big grabbed her arm, pulled her back. “Me first. Just in case.”
His gun appeared in his hand. Her eyes skittered away from it as he slunk into the dimness inside. It didn’t take him long. Her place was small. He came back, waved her in. She fumbled for the light switch.
He clashed with her place. He looked so dense and vivid, prowling around among the light colors, the sheer curtains. Her place looked even smaller with a huge, shaggy, slit-eyed, bloodstained guy stalking through it clutching a gun.
Twitching curtains aside, squinting out windows, he stared at everything as if he expected something to jump out and bite him. He ran his fingers over a fuzzy afghan that was draped over the sofa. Poked a squishy pillow, prodded the floppy silk flowers that dangled off a shelf. He peered at her bookshelf, her CD rack. Carrie’s prints. Josh’s weird, abstract art photography. And the family photo gallery over the couch.
“That the guy?”
He’d found the one of Justin that she hadn’t gotten around to ditching yet. “Yes. How did you know?”
He shrugged. “He looks like an asshole. You should take it down.” He removed it from the shelf and handed it to her. Becca tossed it into a wastebasket, frame and all. Nothing to do but agree with him.
Her life before Nick seemed like something that had happened a long, long time ago. She was embarrassed, when he stared up at the stuffed animals on the shelf, the battered ones Carrie and Josh had played with when they were tiny. He probably thought she collected them. Babyish, but people did it.
He made no move to go. She pondered the options. There were no social rules for what had happened. Should she offer him a drink, as if he’d just brought her home from a date? Should she, what, make him coffee?
This was her last chance, though, to ask the question that would haunt her forever if she didn’t. Even though she was afraid of the answer.
She clutched the edge of the table for support, and swallowed several times. “You said, um, that lives depended on this operation. That you’d traded them for mine.”
His eyes narrowed. “Yeah,” he said, warily.
She took a deep breath. “Whose?”
He was silent for so long, she’d concluded that he wasn’t going to answer at all. She was about to pass out from holding her breath.
“I was overstating it,” he said. “She’s probably already dead.”
Her eyes popped open. Something twisted, knife-sharp, in her chest. “She?” she whispered.
His jaw tightened. A muscle twitched. “A little girl,” he said. “Abducted last year. From Boryspil, in the Ukraine. Her father was an undercover cop. He was helping me. Someone ratted him out. He was killed. I don’t know where the security leak was. But I know it was my fault.”