Fuck. Now I’m picturing Corrie on a pole in my bedroom.
That lasts to the moment I walk from the elevator around the corner to his door. It’s open enough to see the latch is broken and the frame is splintered.
God fucking dammit.
I pull the gun from my waistband and hold it down beside my leg as I push the door open. Then I raise it and survey the room.
The place is trashed—furniture sliced open and overturned, pages torn from Alek’s collection of books littering the floor. The art on the walls has been slashed and hangs crooked if it hangs at all. One of the kitchen cabinets is lying on the ground. Others have doors askew, contents shattered or broken open and leaking.
The first droplet of blood is on the floor beside the bathroom door. But a trail of the stuff leads to—or maybe from?—the bedroom.
I take one step to follow it—and a blow grazes my arm, knocking my gun out of my grasp so that it slides across the floor as another fist catches me on the jaw and the first guy bear hugs me from behind.
They’ve got the element of surprise. But I’m bigger, I’m stronger, and I’m very well trained. I use all my strength and fling us backward into the wall at the same time I throw my head back. Crack. Bone shatters. The air whooshes out of him and he lets go of me to grab his nose.
I turn and drive my fist into his gut then spin back as the bastard goes the rest of the way down. The second guy fills his space instantly. His punch grazes my shoulder as I dodge. I grab him by the shirt and jerk him down so his face makes solid contact with my knee.
“Eeeugh!” he bellows in pain.
But I don’t let go of him. Because I hear the metal click that can only mean one thing. Spinning, I put the second attacker between me and the son of a bitch charging out of the bedroom. This third man fires the gun he’s pointing at us anyways.
It hits his comrade, the one I’m holding as a human shield. The man twitches and falls limp.
The first scrawny guy is back up, and I don’t have any choice but to toss him like a bag of lard into the bastard holding the gun. Their distraction gives me time to retrieve my Glock and fire. The big guy goes down, blood leaking from the hole in his forehead, and I grab the scrawny guy, smashing him once in the face with the butt of my gun.
“Where the fuck is Aleksey?” I roar.
The tiny Italian is bleeding all over me, but I need answers. Now.
He’s holding his face, his probably broken jaw. Fuck. Even four floors up with the windows closed, I hear the squeal of tires. It’s either cops or Italian reinforcements. I don’t have time to deal with either. I hit the little guy again to knock him out, then it’s a two-second sprint to the door and a couple more to the stairs.
Fuck!
Fuck!
Whatever’s going on, the Italians clearly have Alek. And that shit isn’t going to fly. No greasy Italian meatball is going to get the best of the Bratva.
18
Corinne
Tomas has been stressed. He won’t admit it, but I can see it in his face, the slump of his shoulders, the way he rubs his temples when he thinks I’m not looking. He left my office with my ruined panties in his pocket and the kind of passionate hunger in his eyes that gets me all hot and bothered.
But by the time he returned to the apartment that night—so late I was falling asleep on the couch waiting for him—he was a different man entirely. He looked haunted. Furious. Every time I asked what happened, though, he just shrugged and shook me off.
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do,” I tell him again and again, but he doesn’t believe me. He just shakes his head, says nothing.
He spends hours locked in his office. I hear him speaking on the phone in a low, hurried voice at all times of day and night. Sometimes he leaves without explanation, storming out with his gun gleaming in its holster and storming right back in later with the fury in his face looking more and more intense.
After three days like that, I can’t take it anymore. I meet him in the hallway as he’s whirling back in after another one of his unexplained trips. He doesn’t even notice me standing there until I put my hands on his chest.
“Tommy,” I say as gently as I can. Something is tearing him apart inside. Is it Flash Bomb? The Italians? Me? Something else entirely? I don’t know and it’s driving me crazy. I wish he would share the burden with me. Maybe I could help somehow, in some way.
He doesn’t look up at me. “I told you not to call me that.”
I try to grab his chin to make him meet my eyes, but he lurches backwards. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “You can trust me.”
“Not this. This is different. Just…” Finally, he looks up at me. “Just let me handle things in my own way.”
I sigh. That’s as much as I’m going to get out of him. “When was the last time you ate?” I ask him. He looks gaunt, skeletal.
His stomach rumbles right on cue. He laughs mirthlessly. “I don’t know,” he admits.
I grab his hand and slip my shoes on at the door. “Take me to dinner then,” I say. He hesitates for a moment, looking at me. Then he sighs and his grip relaxes. Together, we walk out into the night.
When we arrive at Meritage along the harbor, we don’t even have to ask for a table. The maître d’ bows as soon as he sees Tomas and leads us through the dining room to a table set for two with a candle lit in the center and a bottle of champagne already chilling in a bucket next to the table.
Something about the ambience seems to settle whatever demons are torturing Tomas, at least a little bit. Neither of us say much as a fleet of servers brings over dishes without us ever seeing a menu. Just a shy smile here, a soft glance there. Tomas keeps sighing, and with every sigh, the slump in his shoulders eases somewhat.
After a while, I start to chatter. Anything to fill the silence. Tomas just watches me, a half-smile flitting on his lips.
“I know this is all serious and there’s a lot at stake, so I don’t want to sound like an uncaring bitch. But this is some of the coolest work I’ve ever done. We’ve reconfigured and redirected the entire structure of the virus and deployed it against the Italian systems. It looks like it’s still at work on your stuff, but it’s all smoke and mirrors.”
Tomas drinks his wine and keeps flashing that infuriating, mysterious half-smile at me.
“What?” I say finally, catching myself as a self-conscious blush rises to my cheeks. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
His voice is soft and low, so much so that I have to lean forward to hear it. “You are at your most beautiful when you care.”
I nearly choke on my wine. It’s such a strangely sensitive compliment that hits right at everything I’ve always been insecure about. Like he can read my mind perfectly. Like he understands me inside and out.
“Thanks, I think,” I mumble awkwardly. “Just nerd stuff anyways.”
“Don’t do that,” he lashes at once.
I do a double-take. “Don’t do what?”
His voice softens again. “Don’t minimize yourself. Your intelligence. Your drive.”
“Oh.” Silence takes over for a few minutes.