Total pages in book: 48
Estimated words: 46132 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46132 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
“Why risk it?” I say after a moment, the words coming out twisted with rage.
“You know the answer,” Andrei says. “It’s all for her. It’s always been for her.
I look at Dakota as my blood turns cold.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dakota
“Damian? What is it?”
He stands with the phone in his hand, completely and unashamedly naked, the phone looking like some twisted war-horn in the shadows of the night as he grips it tightly.
He growls and squeezes the phone like he wants to crush it in his paw.
The beast is out, oh, God, but not for that this time.
The monster inside of him flares in his eyes and for a second I see the same man who killed Dobry, the cold killer, the primal hitman.
“D-Damian,” I whisper.
“They’re here,” he snarls, snapping into quick movements as he paces across the room. “Get dressed. We need to get out of here. No arguments now, Popstar. Just do what I say when I say it. Understood?”
Here he is, clothed in semidarkness, each muscle rippling in the light and his entire being made taut with the need to protect me, protect our unborn child and Sparky and our future.
He’s not the murderer from my dreams.
He’ll kill, fine.
But to protect our family like the savage he is.
Suddenly this plush hotel suite – the scent of our lovemaking still lacing the air – has become a cave, and out there in the cave mouth, the outside, where a thousand dangers lurk. All I can do is cling to my cave-mate and hope he’s strong enough, fierce enough.
“Dakota?” he snaps. “Come on. Stay with me. Just calm down.”
“In the hotel,” I say, hardly recognizing the voice. “Jesus, Damian. Okay—this is bad. This is really bad. I thought you said they’d never do this.”
“They never have,” he murmurs. “But they said, he said—”
“What, Damian? Tell me. I deserve to know.”
My heart is thumping so hard it hurts. His eyes seem somehow even paler then normal, like cold ghost eyes gazing at me.
“He said all of this is for you,” Damian says. “Whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.”
“For me?”
Damian makes to say something, but deeper in the hotel suite Sparky lets out a high-pitched terrible yapping noise, and something wooden breaks loudly.
Like a door being kicked in and a little piebald Dachshund being grabbed.
“Sparky,” I yell, leaping to my feet in the bathrobe and flying across the room.
“Dakota, wait,” Damian yells behind me.
But I’m already running.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Damian
The bathrobe flutters behind her as she rounds the door, a flurry of night-shaded fabric in the night.
The barking, the wood shattering, the men’s footsteps …
I drift into the darkness of my mind, the state that Felix often talked about.
“The nothing land,” he told me once, his cigar tip glowing yellow in the night and his eyes fixated on the expanding darkness of the forest. “You go there, son, and nothing’s real. Not you, anybody else, anything else. You become a tool. A man’s got to act sometimes without thinking. It’s waking the beast up. Remember that.”
He was Uncle Felix and I always listened damn close when he told me something.
I learned it. I cultivated it.
I move on autopilot as I jog into the hallway, head bowed, sprinting full-tilt toward the sound of Sparky and my Popstar with her voice raised.
“Let me go, you bastard, you freaking—”
They see a naked seven foot tall man carved out of pure goddamn muscle – muscle that’s taken countless hours of hard work and grit and bone-deep steel – sprinting around the corner like a jungle cat.
They see something out of the Stone Age as I spin across the room.
One man – tattooed, Bratva – has Dakota by the arm, his other hand occupied with his gun. The other – Bratva, tattooed – is trying to wrangle Sparky into his arms, his gun wedged awkwardly against the pup as though any second he could drop it—or set it off.
“What the fuck?” one man growls in Russian.
“Ah,” the other grunts when I throw a vase at his head, moving so quickly he can’t even track the blur of my motion.
Already I’m airborne, leaping toward the other man as he tries to raise his gun. Sparky growls and springs onto the man’s forearm, a roar lacing the air, the gun clattering to the ground as good old Sparky latches on.
My fist connects with his throat and he sucks in a shivering gasp, his whole body flying backward against the display cabinet with the force of the blow. He coughs and then collapses, and all the shattered glass in the cabinet showers on him as it begins to fall.
“Sparky,” I snap. “Here, boy.”
I pace away, nodding at him to do the same. He pads over to my feet as the cabinet crushes the man, trapping him.
“Ah, oh, God …”
“Shut up or I’ll let him eat your face,” I snarl. “I mean it. One word. One fucking noise. You die. Understand? Nod. Don’t speak.”