Bone Deep(17)

“And I will be waiting,” Bone assured him.

“Go to hell!” Vadim yelled. His voice was hoarse, the knowledge he was about to perish written in the deep grooves of his face.

Bone smiled and it was an ugly thing. “Esli ja popadu v ad, ja vozjmu tebja s soboj,” she promised him in perfect Russian. “Or I could just send you to wait for me.”

Dmitry took another step forward but he wouldn’t be in time. She’d given him more in the last two minutes than he’d had in the last twelve years of searching. Ninka had been with the women of First Team and then she’d been no more. And Vadim was but a part of the scourge who’d sent his sister to her death. There was another, a woman head of the Bratva, and Bone knew who she was.

What happened next appeared in slow motion to Dmitry. She moved with such grace, such wicked beauty, that even when she murdered it was a dance. She twisted Vadim’s head, stepped back, and pushed his body forward.

Bone closed her eyes and lifted her face to the heavens as if praying for forgiveness, but Dmitry was well-aware she cared nothing for it. She had a duty and she’d seen it through. She cared naught for anything else.

Vadim fell in a dead heap on the floor and the sound of gunfire erupted. The doors to the study began to splinter as machine gun rounds ripped into the wood. The chair she’d wedged under the door handles fell into a useless heap and Dmitry glanced at her.

“It is time to run, Asinimov. I would not have another on my conscience.” Her tone was harsh above the sound of the men outside the door reloading.

“Fuck your conscience, ubiytsa. Stand and fight with me. If Joseph is on the other side, we can take him together,” Dmitry shouted above the renewed gunfire.

She shook her head. “It is not time. The empire he’s built is shaky, but it is not quite ready to tumble. There is more work to be done. Now let’s be gone from this place. You are injured and I’m tired of arguing with you.”

First Team was playing with Joseph. It was more than dismantling The Collective, it was about destroying their creator. He didn’t agree with it, almost opened his mouth to berate her, but gunfire littered the room, the furniture, and the walls, and finally the doors fell. He took off, and then they were through the window and headed toward the woods. She disappeared in the darkness, blending in seamlessly with the night and he thought that as it should be.

He was winded and his left arm was numb but still he ran. He hadn’t endured years of training to die so easily.

“You need to move, Asinimov. They are hunting with Vadim’s hounds,” Bone said from the shadows. “Follow me,” she urged.

Dmitry knew the land well, scouted it each time he’d visited Vadim, plotting the many ways he would take the man who sold innocents to Joseph Bombardier. Vadim’s property bordered the eastern edge of the Neva River and that was the direction she was headed.

“I don’t swim,” he murmured.

She stopped. “What the hell do you mean, you don’t swim?”

Anger burned through him, replacing the pain. “I f*cking mean I don’t swim.”

He would have laughed at the expression on her face but it wasn’t funny. The baying of Vadim’s dogs in the distance lent credibility to her assertion they, whoever the hell “they” were, were hunting them.

He huffed. “I’m from the Ural Mountains, Bone. We do not f*cking swim in the Ural Mountains.”

“Then I will pull you. Can you at least float?” she asked, impatience in her tone.

He didn’t answer and the sound of pursuit prodded him to move again. He passed her and took off running, calling on his reserves and hoping against hope he did not have to go in the cold-as-hell Neva River.

“I will divert them,” she said, not sounding winded at all.

“No! You will come with me,” he ordered.

“There is no time for this petty squabbling. They will find you and Joseph will kill you to spite me. Do not be another tool he uses to hurt me,” she pleaded.

Her words stopped him for a moment. “I’m not so easy to kill and I don’t know why you would care about my end either way.” He glanced at her, noticed her blank face and bright eyes and then he nodded.

He understood he would get no reaction from her, though some nameless emotion twisted her lips as if she was acknowledging he mattered but did not like it one damn bit. It would be the same for him if she were taken. He didn’t like being tied to her with these invisible strings of emotion but they were there, something he could not avoid. There was some satisfaction that she was in the same boat.

“Take the river, stick to the bank. I will find you.” She paused, and the growling of dogs rent the air. “Run.”

He would slow her down, possibly lead them straight to her. It went against everything he was but he ran, knowing Joseph wouldn’t eliminate one of his prize killers. At least he hoped not.

With the sound of hounds crying in the night, blood dripping down his arm, and fear for her life in his heart, Dmitry ran and fell into the loving embrace of the Neva.





Chapter Four


Bone climbed the pine with ease, using her legs to hold herself aloft, as the branches were too high to be of any help. The bark scraped her palms and the cold teased her face. The dogs had passed one minute ago, their handlers unable to keep up.