Infernal: Bite The Bullet (24 page)

My awakening finally came with the news that my
request to see Konstantyn had been granted. Now that I was actually walking the
sterile corridors in my slippers and hospital gown towards him though, I was in
danger of losing my nerve.

You need this, Neva, if only to get closure.

All the same, the thin cotton of my hospital gown shimmied
with a tremble that was nothing to do with the cold gusts blowing up through
the lobby from outside. I turned a corner, shuffling past the discrete mortuary
sign that never failed to get my spine tingling. It was there in that same
morgue I’d said goodbye to my brother Daniel.

Had the cogs of fate turned in another
direction, it would be my lifeless body laid out on one of its cold slabs,
I
thought.

But fate had taken a different direction, and so
did I. Hurrying to the open elevator, I stepped inside and punched the button
for the male wards on the second floor. I used my reflection in the stainless
steel walls to fix my hair and pat some colour into my shadowy cheeks.

He’s already seen you at your worst,
I
reminded myself, but it did nothing to ease my nervous fidgeting.

I didn’t need to ask for Konstantyn’s room. The
two police officers standing sentinel outside were a dead giveaway. I’d had a
matching pair outside my own room until that morning, when the powers that be
decided any threat to my life had passed. I even recognised the bald man with
the goatee as one of my former guards.

“Hey Jamie,” I quipped and he returned my smile.
It was good to see a familiar face. The guy had been approachable from the
get-go, good for passing the time with talk about movies and books, all that
normal stuff. I got the impression if he weren’t on duty, he’d have been
hitting on me.

“Neva, what brings you up here?” he asked.

“I’m here to see Konstantyn,” I said, with a shy
smile. “He’s expecting me.”

I caught Jamie’s look before he had a chance to
shut it down. Disapproval, or disappointment, I couldn’t be sure.

“Go on in,” he said.

I swallowed, took a deep breath and pushed through
the double doors into the private room. The lights were down, and only the
colourful array of monitors illuminated the room.

“Hi,” I said.

His beautiful mouth spread into a smile that lit
up the darkness. “Hi.”

God he looked exactly as I remembered him. My mind
had tried to process so much over the preceding days, I’d begun to wonder if I’d
conjured him from my imagination.

“It’s dark in here,” I said, barely raising my
voice above the whisper the subdued surroundings demanded.

“This is my enforced rest time,” he said sourly.
“And I thought Ukrainian nurses were strict.”

“I’m sorry. I came at a bad time.” I turned,
already reaching for the door.

“No. Stay, please stay. I hate hospitals.”

“Me too.” I smiled and ventured a step closer.

Konstantyn grabbed onto the handgrip dangling
above the bed and pulled himself up the bank of pillows at his back. The white
sheet slid down his bare chest, revealing bandaged ribs and a plastic tube that
fed from his chest cavity into a fluid-filled drain on the floor.

He coughed and air bubbled up through the liquid.
“The blade punctured my lung, and my liver,” he explained, arranging the sheet
across his hips.

Concern widened my eyes. “You shouldn’t be
moving.”

“Pft. I’ve survived worse,” he said, and patted
the bed for me to come sit by his side.“Besides, my ass was numb from lying
down.”

“You don’t get to complain about a pain in your
ass,” I said, giving him my best glare. It was hard to disguise my smile
though. It was so damn good to see him alive.

He winced. “How is the tattoo?”

“Itchy as hell, if you must know.”

At least he had the decency to look sheepish.

Mindful of all the tubes and wires, I perched on
the edge of the mattress and the conversation took a serious turn. “I thought
you were dead, after you punched Dante, and you passed out. I thought I’d lost
you.” My eyes stung with the threat of tears and I bit down on my lip to stop
them coming.

“Hey.” His fingertips grazed my arm. “They call me
Lazarus for a reason, remember?”

“Yeah,” I laughed and dropped my gaze into my lap.

I felt his knuckles stroke my jaw as he murmured,
“You bit the bullet.”

I flipped my eyes up to his and saw an emotion in
his green-flecked eyes that looked a lot like awe.

“That took real guts,” he said.

I shook my head. “I had nothing left to lose.”

“You had your life.”

A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. “You
were dying, and if I had to die too, I was taking those bastards down with me.”

He grinned his approval.

“The doctors said it was a miracle I wasn’t
poisoned.”

“Is it possible you have an immunity?”

I shook my head vigorously. Immunity was unheard
of. I’d picked the doctors’ brains about it until I was blue in the face. There
were some crackpot theories that the Russian monk Rasputin had been immune, but
other than that, the only way to avoid the effects was to take tiny doses over
a long period of time, and build up a tolerance. Clearly that didn’t apply to
me.

“Dante wasn’t affected either,” Konstantyn
murmured.

I looked away, not liking his implication one bit.
Dante had hinted about my paternity, but if that were true, what in hell did
that make me? Part demon? No. The guy was a deranged sicko with a wildly
overdeveloped fantasy life. To accept any other reality would be to admit my
own insanity. “They’re working on the theory I somehow managed to crack the
rubber and glass just enough to spit it in the cup without getting the cyanide
in my mouth.”

Konstantyn sucked on his teeth and nodded,
accepting the whitewash for what it was.

“They pumped me full of antidote and had me hooked
up to all kinds of monitors for days. But I knew, once Alexei fell. I knew then
I wasn’t going to die. My biggest fear was that they’d make you drink first.
That I’d have to watch you die by my hand.”

“It would have been a mercy. I was good as dead
already.”

“Have you seen the newspapers?”

“Da.” He leaned over to rummage in the bedside locker.
The movement triggered another fit of coughing and the liquid in the drain
rumbled ominously. I opened my mouth to protest but he waved me off, dumping a
stack of broadsheets and tabloids onto the bed as he settled back against the
stacked pillows.

I’d read most of the salacious headlines. Having a
senior politician, a surgeon and a high-ranking police detective embroiled in
an occult sex ring was enough to whip the media sharks into a feeding frenzy.
That they’d died of cyanide poisoning in the midst of a masked orgy was more
chum in the water. There were interviews with some of the survivors, and
photographs, including some of Daniel, but I’d had to skim over those.

“Have you been approached?” Konstantyn asked.

“Hounded more like.” I’d turned down some
seriously large sums from newspapers wanting to buy my exclusive story.

He frowned at that.

“I just want to put this whole horrible experience
behind me,” I said, heaving a sigh.

The disappointment I caught in his eyes was
unexpected, but it was gone before I could place the reason for it.

“It’ll blow over soon enough,” I said, forcing a
smile. “I just can’t believe Dante didn’t make the front pages.” I leafed
through the newspapers at the top of the pile. One had a mention, on the third
page, about a member of the cult receiving severe burns to his face during the
struggle, but that was the extent of the coverage about Dante Barron. He wasn’t
even named.

“The authorities must tread carefully to avoid a
diplomatic crisis. Dante has immunity. He will never stand trial in this
country. All they can do is deport him back to the Ukraine.”

I felt my jaw tighten. “It’s not right. He can’t
just walk away from this.”

“He can. I told you, nobody in my county will
touch the man.”

“Where’s the justice in that?”

“You want me to kill him for you?” he asked, and
his hand curled around my thigh. “I can do it.”

“No,” I lied. Yes, I wanted him dead, but more
than that, I wanted Konstantyn alive. Pressing my lips into a hard line, I
shook my head. “Enough killing.”

“He can’t walk away from cancer,” he replied,
stroking my thigh through the thin hospital gown. His touch was equal parts
reassurance and distraction. “By all accounts, you’ve left him blind too. He
will really hate that. Cyanide would have been too fast. His will be a slow,
humiliating death. Perhaps that’s punishment enough, for a man who could never
accept his own mortality?”

The desire for revenge pounding behind my
breastbone said it wasn’t nearly enough, but I held my tongue. Something told
me if I voiced the truth, Konstantyn would be dragging himself, chest drain and
all, on a do or die vengeance mission across Eastern Europe. I thought I’d lost
him once, my fragile heart couldn’t take that again.

“How’s your mother?” he asked.

“Still refusing to see me. Maybe it’s for the
best.” The last thing I needed was another person reinforcing my crazy. “Have
you heard from your sister?” I whispered.

Konstantyn’s lids fell and he shook his head.
“Last I heard, she was taken into custody,” he said tightly. He dragged his
fingertips down his temples and muttered what I took to be curses in his mother
tongue. “I never knew she was helping Dante.” I watched his hands curl into
fists. He couldn’t even look at me when he spoke. “He played me. They both did.
I am sorry, Neva. So sorry.”

“Hey.” I smiled and cupped his jaw, loving the
scratch of his beard growth against my palm. “I’m sorry I doubted you.”

“I told you I’d do whatever it took. I had to play
a part, to get a foothold in their inner circle. I thought Dante would kill me
on sight if he knew the truth.”

“I know that now,” I said, dropping my hands into
my lap. “I should have known all along. Time and again, you stopped them from
hurting me. But being tied up, alone, and knowing what was to come, my mind
became my enemy. I couldn’t make sense of it all: Why you’d singled me out at
the audition, why you chased me down the road and brought me to your apartment.
The only logical explanation was that you targeted me, from the very
beginning.”

“I did target you,” he replied, and there was a
roughness in his voice.

My eyes flipped up to his, startled.

“Just not for the reasons you think.” His smile
made my insides clench.

I raised a shy brow in question.

“Neva. The moment I set eyes on you in that
audition, the rest of the room disappeared. You must have known. I couldn’t
look away. I couldn’t help myself. Against my better judgement, and out of pure
selfishness, I chose you for the demonstration. I wanted to touch you, to feel
this beautiful, soft skin against mine.” His thumb brushed the corner of my
mouth, grazing my lower lip, and I struggled to calm the urgency that crept
into my breathing. “Your defiance stirred something in me. And then we danced,
and it was physics, chemistry and biology all rolled into one mind-blowing addiction.

“I felt it too,” I said, breathless. My head was
light, like I was floating.  

“But I was an asshole,” he said, frowning. “I shot
you down in front of all those people, because I thought they’d seen my
weakness for you. The more I tried to deny the attraction, the more you became
a dangerous obsession. I could think of nothing but the next time I’d get to
dance with you. But then, when I recognised you in the club, I resented you
seeing me like that.” His jaw tightened. “Prostituting myself.”

“You weren’t. Not really.”

“Da, but you didn’t know that, and it could be no
coincidence you were following me. The best agents employ seduction as a
weapon. That explained it. You were sent to bewitch me, and I had to cut you
loose. Except after I kicked you out of the auditions, I found I couldn’t let
you go.”

“I’m glad you chased me.”

“Yeah?”

I bit back a smile. “Yeah.”

His hand found the nape of my neck, burrowing into
my hair, drawing my mouth down onto his, and we kissed with the raw passion of
survivors. His tongue demanded access and I opened myself up to him, relishing
the burn of his stubble on my chin. He claimed me with rough dominance, hauling
me up his body until I was straddling his hips, only the thin cotton of our
hospital gowns separating the hard press of his erection from where I so
desperately needed him to be. No apologies. No holding back. We’d danced with
death and come out with our hearts synchronised to the same desperate beat.

The rumbling bubbles of the chest-drain barely
registered as he groaned and his rough hands yanked at the hem of my gown. He
weighed my naked breasts in his palms, and as his thumbs grazed my hard
nipples, a whimper of need spilled from my mouth into his. I tugged at his robe
and felt the short hairs on his thighs tickle my ass. He rolled his hips and I
swallowed his moan as the underside of his cock kissed the lush wetness of my
lower lips.

The heart monitor kicked into a frenzy of bleeps,
a fitting soundtrack to the wildfire lust consuming our bodies. Just one small
shift of my pelvis and he’d be inside me –

The sound of a throat clearing was the audio
equivalent of a bucket of ice-water. Breaking the kiss, my head whipped round
to the door, even as Konstantyn hurriedly yanked the crumpled gown back down my
body.

“Your heart rate set off an alarm at the nurse’s
station. I thought your lung might have collapsed again.” The buxom nurse’s
scrubbed cheeks flared so hot that bacon would have sizzled on them. “I ah, I
see I needn’t have worried.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my heart,” Konstantyn
growled, ripping the leads off his chest, “and nothing has deflated.”