His gaze is a dangerous caress. A .357 flashes at his side.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think there’s something familiar about him.
He moves onward, into the shadows, and I tell myself it has to be an illusion. This is a man you don’t forget.
I feel his power in my bones as he nears. I don’t like it, but I know to respect it, the way you respect a hurricane.
And the suit. With most Albanian mafia guys my age, the suit is a uniform, something put on in the morning. This guy wears a suit like a Hun might wear fur and leather. It’s part of him, molten with danger.
I raise the gun and aim at his chest. My voice is hoarse. “I’ll use this.”
His gorgeous lips quirk, and he just keeps coming. Is he that stupid? That brave? It’s like he knows I won’t use it.
He passes yet another shaft of light from a high window. We lock eyes, and again I’m seized with that sense of familiarity. Something about his dark curls and dark lashes. Or maybe his eyes, so big and deep and piercing. The line of his slightly scruffy cheek.
I can’t shake it…it’s like when you catch a whiff of something that transports you somewhere, like a half-forgotten dream that’s floating away. All you remember is a feeling. The feeling I have of him is happiness.
That can’t be right.
He’s on me in a flash, a massive arm around me, his face in my hair.
“Let’s have that, baby, and we’ll wait for Daddy together.” He rips the weapon from my hand and then yanks me roughly against him, holding me from behind so that I can’t look at him, hard body against mine.
He presses his piece to my cheek. My mind goes blank. One twitch of his finger and I’m dead.
My heart slams in my chest. “I’m not your baby.”
“You’re whatever I want you to be, starting now.” His voice is a velvet glove, the edge of the gun painful punctuation on his sentence. “It’s a new day.” He starts pulling me the way I came in.
I make out a pair of slumped forms in the corner of the boathouse. Ramiz. Jareki. “Are they…” I can’t bring myself to say it.
“Napping on the job?” he supplies in a vicious tone. “That is really terrible. Really outrageous.”
My knees practically vibrate as he walks me out of the boathouse to the bench next to the door. You can see the whole lawn from here. He sits us there and pulls me onto his lap, holding my upper arm in an iron grip.
“You’re hurting me,” I say.
No answer.
He’s cool. Competent. Focused. A killer.
I concentrate on my breath and tell myself not to freak out, but this is bad—really bad.
“Right now, you can still walk out of this,” I say. “Whatever you plan to do, you can’t get away with it. Just cut your losses.”
The killer says nothing, and it comes to me that he’s actually gotten away with a lot already. Planned carefully. Even sitting here is a well-made choice: Dad won’t see us until it’s too late, partly in the shade as we are. He’s positioned for maximum shock.
The killer has everything under control. Like he was born to this.
He’s hot and hard under me. Pure muscle and steel and man. My belly tightens. I shift, trying to minimize the places my body touches his.
He pulls me to him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
I swallow. Stay calm. Don’t let him feel your fear. I strain to hear the golf cart whir. Dad’ll take the golf cart down. But the green expanse of the lawn is empty. Is he okay? What about his heart? The lake sparkles on, soft waves, gentle breeze carrying the faint scent of seaweed. And I realize something strange: No boats.
It’s one of the last lovely fall days. Everybody who’s anybody comes up to Lake Geneva from Chicago on a day like this. “Where are all the boats?”
He gazes out—wistfully, almost. Dark hair caresses his cheekbone. “Looks like they took the day off.”
He’s different from the guys in Dad’s circle. Contract killer? Lone wolf? “People wouldn’t just not come out—”
He smirks. “Message from the mother ship?”
I swallow. This guy did something to make them stay away. I can’t imagine what. He has to be somebody, pulling all this off. That kind of thing takes men. Extreme choreography. “What is this?”
“Shhh,” he growls into my ear. “Take the strap off your purse.”
“You can’t—”
“Can’t what? Tell me what I can’t do, Mira Mira.”
Mira Mira. That’s the name of the fashion blog the PR person runs. The PR person with the greatest gig in the world, running around to Paris and Hong Kong taking pictures of clothes. Pretending to be me out there, freaking out over the latest couture.
“Tell me one thing I can’t do right now,” he says.
I can’t. He’s taken absolute power in a way no other man would dare. It’s strangely mesmerizing, the way impossible feats sometimes are. Because nobody is supposed to be able to do this.
“Good answer.” His breath is a caress on my ear. “Don’t you test me, Mira. You won’t like the result.” He moves his lips to my ear. “Now wrap the strap around your wrists.”
There’s something in the way he says it that gets me hot and cold all over my skin. Is he doing it on purpose?
“Make it nice and tight.”
With shaking hands I undo the strap and circle it loosely around my wrists.
He puts the gun aside and with a few twists he yanks it tight, tying the knot, so that my wrists are bound in my lap. He settles me in, then takes up his gun. You can see everything from here. Everything that matters.
I’ve met a lot of scary guys who are full of special mafia snowflake opinions on wine and weapons, but this man is in another class entirely. A barbarian in Armani. There’s a dark freckle on his right cheekbone, like a tiny dark jewel. That, too, is strangely familiar.
Heavy pounding on the stairs behind me. I don’t have to look to know someone’s coming down from the roof deck of the boathouse. The perfect place for cocktails after a boating party. Or keeping watch during a takeover, picking off the chess pieces.
The guy comes into view, huge and dark and Albanian like my captor, though this one is younger—early twenties, maybe—and has a more military look, with short hair and posture like a soldier. He, too, wears a suit and tie.
“Viktor, I want you to meet somebody. This is Mira Nikolla. Mira, this is Viktor.”
The man nods curtly. “Lazarus is still in the wind.” Viktor speaks with a Russian accent.
Lazarus was supposed to be here for lunch, but he ducked out.
My captor frowns. Whatever he’s doing, he wanted Lazarus under control for it.
He’s right to be unhappy. If there’s one person you don’t want after you, besides my father, it’s Bloody Lazarus.
“She agrees,” he says, reading my expression.
“You don’t know what I think,” I spit out. The last thing I’m willing to do is help these guys or offer any kind of insight.
“Have every possible resource scouring for Lazarus. He’ll be a problem.”
Viktor nods and puts his attention onto his phone, fingers flying.
I study the strong, familiar line of Viktor’s nose, so like my captor’s. Same with the cheekbones, the lips. Brothers. They both look Albanian, but how is one brother American and one brother Russian?