Bone Deep(54)

“What is that?” Dmitry called out.

Blade stopped and her head drooped. She stood straight and proud seconds later and left him with a single word before she became the shadows and disappeared.

“Love.”

?●?

Two hours later and Dmitry was broken. He’d stood there for a long time once Blade left before the leather of the book he held in his hands reminded him. He’d walked back into his room, the room that still carried just a hint of her apricot fragrance, and opened the book.

It was a copy of the Torah, but in between each page was a single sheet of paper, dated and filled with a beautifully flowing script. For the last ten years of her life, she’d journaled. Most entries were innocuous though some held personal recollections of contracts she’d taken, almost as if she needed to go back and remember who she was—why she’d killed. The ones that had shredded his heart in the confines of his chest were the ones that began five years ago—when she’d initially been given the contract to kill Dmitry.

He read her observations about him and his heart bled because in every word there was a single theme…need. She had grown to need Dmitry Asinimov long before she stood behind him in London. She had researched him, written everything down day after day and even though she’d continued to kill, she’d returned each night to her journal and remembered Dmitry. She knew his strengths, weaknesses, his likes and dislikes. She knew him better than he knew himself.

Joseph would kill her, but it was Dmitry who had broken Bone. He’d thought her splintered and the truth was in her own words—from the moment she’d been branded by his heat, inhaled his scent and granted him life on a London street, he became hers.

Her strength had been used against her. Her need for him to remain alive was the thing killing her now.

He walked painfully downstairs, into the library where the voices of his friends led him. There was no Bullet or Arrow.

“Bullet is swimming and Arrow has locked herself in a darkened room,” Adam told him.

“They grieve,” Dmitry bit out. “Blade was here.”

Rand nodded. “We know.”

“You spoke to her?” Dmitry asked.

“We did not even see her,” Rand acknowledged. “But she told her sisters about Bone.”

“If I do not go for her, she will die.” Dmitry drew in a rough breath, and the rightness of his decision flowed through his veins. Already she had suffered too much because of him, might already be gone from him. He wouldn’t let Joseph have her. She was Dmitry’s.

“The plane is ready when you are,” Adam said firmly. “And of course we will be there with you.”

Dmitry nodded. “Thirty minutes,” he said and returned to his room, carefully stowing Bone’s journal under his mattress. He dressed in silence, not making a sound when the pain was nearly unbearable.

If she could be strong, he could too.

He did not pray. He hadn’t been raised in a loving, religious household, did not even know the rudiments of how to speak to God, but he went to his knees and he prayed.

He prayed he made it to her in time.





Chapter Sixteen


Bone was so tired. Weary of the struggle to live amongst death and so close to giving in, taking a deep breath and just…falling.

It would be easy. Joseph had used Minton’s ropes, stringing her up as he taunted her with reminders of how she’d failed. And he smiled. She hated him but he’d weakened her to the point that she could not defend herself. He’d drugged her and let his men have a round each with their fists. She’d fallen but only after she’d taken at least five of his guard with her. The ropes chafed, the rough braided hemp’s prickly fibers dug into her skin and burned.

She was dying, but she hadn’t failed. She’d saved Dmitry and she’d seen through her plays in the game to defeat The Collective and destroy Joseph. So while he’d laughed at her, mocked her pain and suffering, she had smiled too because that was what killers did.

The sun was shining now, sinking into her skin and warming the surface but not reaching her soul. It had all come to this. High up on this peak in Arequipa…she would die. The morning Ninka had been killed Bone acknowledged she would perish in these mountain. She would never again feel the hot sands of Jericho under her bare feet and she would never again know the poignancy of Dmitry’s kiss.

The fog came every morning without fail and Bone realized some things never changed. It seemed even the hawk that floated on the air currents above her was the same from that morning so long ago. She still hated him.

She wished she could see the boy once more. She would stroke his hair, hold him close and tell him that killing was not all there was. He could be more than his making. He could know love. Through him Bone, Blade, Arrow, and Bullet could be redeemed.

But Bone was about to be no more. She would hold on within the grip of these ropes until she could hold on no more, but she would end here. No one was coming for her and that was as it should be.

Her sisters would assure Joseph’s end and Bone would meet him as he passed over to wherever killers went when they died. She would be waiting patiently, as she’d waited for twenty-two years, and she’d make sure he suffered in death as he had not in life.

Her body hurt. She’d been shot before Joseph captured her and that had been on top of the beatings she sustained at Svetlana’s orders. Joseph had compounded her physical agony with more beatings, a few brandings, and a caning. “But I will not cut your hair, Bone Breaker. You remind me of your mother like this and I find I rather like it. The picture sustains me in the face of your betrayal,” he whispered in her ear. He’d been hoping for a response that would pit them against one another in combat. But Bone had known something he hadn’t—broken or not, she would kill him if they fought and he wasn’t only hers. He was also her sisters.’ She wouldn’t take his death from them.