In For the Kill by Shannon McKenna Read Free Book Online Page A

so easy to rationalize, with alcohol in her system. A single girl had no business not looking her best, Paul had sternly lectured her. She should look smoking hot at all times, particularly at a wedding.
    And Sam would be there, looking at her. She’d been so busy not allowing herself to think that thought, it had filled her consciousness.
    The minute he’d actually seen her, she’d wanted to run and find a blanket to wrap herself in. The piercing intensity of his eyes, the vast heat blazing out of him. It crept insidiously into her secret places from across the room, making her shiver and melt. And yield.
    Sam looked different, with his hair yanked angrily back, his face so tense and thin. His jaw shadowed with beard scruff a shade darker than his hair. He looked grim, focused. Hard. But no less gorgeous.
    For God’s sake, why? This was a guaranteed disaster. Of course, her improbable friends had pulled it off. Even the more problematic ones, like Tam and Nick and Aaro, and the McClouds, too. All of them were beating the odds somehow. Happy, in their own weird, particular ways.
    But she was Svetlana Ardova, with a rattling crowd of skeletons in her closet. There was no more room in there. She was at capacity.
    Â 
    Josef rifled through the silky undergarments that lay on top of Svetlana Ardova’s open suitcase. The place had been stripped to nothing, furniture sold, books and pictures boxed up.
    He’d rifled through her boxes with latex-gloved hands and had found nothing of interest. No computers, tablets, or external drives. No photographs. Her electronics must be at Cray’s Cove, where she’d been holed up for days, to his jaw-cracking frustration. No matter. Tonight, he would extract everything she knew. He was a very good interrogator.
    Jason Kang, one of the Triad snakehead thugs he’d hired for this special job, was peering out the window. Cretin.
    â€œTaxi at the curb,” Kang said. “She’s getting out.”
    â€œGet your head out of the fucking window!” Josef snarled.
    Kang jerked his head down out of sight, his thick face sullen and clouded. He was not especially bright, nor was his colleague Chan Yun, waiting downstairs in the van. Both men were fresh out of prison and very much out of favor with their previous employer. But Josef couldn’t complain about their incompetence, since he’d specifically gone shopping for Triad-connected thugs who were expendable. Men whose former employers would be genuinely glad to see the last of them.
    Neither man would live out the night, once he had spread prints and genetic materials all over Svetlana’s apartment, and inside her lovely body. He had paid a hefty fee for this arrangement, but the men would die happy, he thought, philosophically. Out on a high note.
    And Svetlana had made it so easy, getting in everyone’s face, being a naughty, inconvenient girl who never knew when to shut her mouth. There would be so many fingers to point when she disappeared.
    And not a one of them would point at Josef or his boss. Seamless.
    He picked up a framed picture of her from the topmost box. Bikini-clad, on a beach, holding a laughing baby girl, her arm around a mop-haired child of ten or so. Beautiful smile. So like Sonia, but dewy and fresh. He indulged in a brief, vivid fantasy of sparing her life and running away with her. Of her, showing her gratitude for his mercy on her knees, with his cock in her mouth. Anxiously sucking. Mmmm.
    He shut the fantasy regretfully down. There could be no turning back. Too much money at stake, and women more beautiful than Ardova could be bought by the truckload at a fraction of the cost.
    Â 
    The cab slowed at the renovated Victorian house where Sveti had rented an apartment for the past couple of years. A strange, clawing desperation rose up inside her as she fumbled for the fare. Something precious was coming to an end. Her Sam fantasies, entering a new phase. Shifting