Kissing My Killer by Helena Newbury Read Free Book Online Page A

were wild.
    I shook my head again, trying not to look at the body.
    He pressed in closer, his abs hard against my stomach, his thighs forcing mine back against the wall. He grabbed my wrists and forced them up and out, pinning them beside my head. “This is your fault!” he yelled. “Why did you have to do this? Why did you have to steal from us?”
    I felt my eyes widen. “ Steal? I didn’t steal from him! We don’t steal!”
    “You try to empty bank accounts!”
    “No! I was looking for evidence!”
    He frowned at that. “You’re CIA?”
    “No! I’m—” I was sobbing as I said it. It sounded so fucking stupid, saying it out loud. “I’m a...vigilante. I hack to get evidence against human traffickers!”
    He frowned even deeper, then shook his head. “We don’t do that.”
    “Yes! You do! Nikolai does!”
    He thumped the wall beside my head, hard enough that I flinched. “You stupid—” He put his face right up to mine. “I work for Nikolai and Nikolai works for the Malakovs!” he told me. “They sell guns, not women!”
    The size of him was terrifying, but, weirdly, I didn’t fear violence from him the same way I’d feared it from the other guy. It didn’t feel as if he wanted to hurt me. So I didn’t back down. “Then Nikolai is doing some backroom deal,” I panted, “because he’s connected with a guy called Carl and he is a trafficker—one of the biggest.”
    He shook his head. But I stared right back at him. There were tears streaming down my cheeks but I lifted my chin defiantly. My whole life had changed, tonight, and I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen, but I knew I was right about this.
    He studied me, watching for any hint of a lie. I stared right back at him. After a few seconds, I saw in his eyes the first faint traces of doubt—doubt about the story he’d been told. He shook his head again, but he released my wrists and stepped back, cursing under his breath in Russian.
    I figured he needed a moment, so I kept quiet and glanced around the apartment. That was a mistake, because I finally got a good look at the dead body.
    Most of one side of his head was missing.
    I turned and ran for the bathroom, reaching the toilet just in time. When I’d rinsed my mouth and come back into the living area, the big guy had just finished dragging the body out of sight behind the couch. I didn’t know if he’d done it for my benefit, but I was insanely grateful either way.
    “What happens now?” I asked when my stomach had settled enough to speak.
    He looked at me with great sadness. “They kill us both.”

 
     
     
     
     
     

     
     
    Alexei
     
    I felt...lost. As if someone had pulled not just the floor but the whole world out from under me and I was falling through an endless black void.
    I’d had the army, friends who felt like brothers, men I’d die to protect. My life had had structure and I was good at what I did. When I left the army, I’d been lost.
    Nikolai had found me. He had work for a guy like me, he said. Work I already knew how to do. And so I found new brothers. A new family.
    And now all that had been ripped away. After this, I wouldn’t just be out of the Bratva, I’d be their target.
    I looked at the trail of blood that led behind the couch and nausea rose up inside me. Lev had been an asshole but I hadn’t wanted this.
    But he’d been going to kill her.
    I looked at the girl. She was white-faced and shaking and looked as if she might throw up again at any moment. And even in that state, she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on.
    I knew I’d been wrong, when I’d had that momentary fantasy of the two of us together. I’d forgotten what I was—a monster. I didn’t deserve her.
    But right now, she needed me. Or she wouldn’t last the night.
    Staying close to her, but being unable to be with her, unable to make her mine...that would be pure torture. But to see in the headlines in a few days that her body had been found in a