Bullet to the Heart (9 page)

“Go ahead, do it,” she taunted him.

He closed his eyes, struggled for sanity. Seven years he’d waited for this opportunity. Seven fucking years. “It would be too easy, wouldn’t it,
Bullet
?” he mocked, then stepped away from her as if she’d burned him.

She shrugged. He closed his eyes. How could a woman who looked so damn vulnerable be so deadly? So callous and cold as to take the life of a child?

He opened his eyes and stared at her, trying to assess her clinically. But all he could see were the freckles across the bridge of her nose, the delicate arch of her brows, the crystal blue eyes that tried to hide her emotions but couldn’t quite do it. He let his gaze travel down over her cheeks, both suffused pink from some unidentified emotion, one smooth surface cut from a sliver of wood. Further down, her fragile neck flowed into a chest that was much more womanly that he would have ever anticipated on such a small frame. She wasn’t over five feet two inches, maybe a hundred and five pounds soaking wet, but her body was lush. Breasts that plumped nicely and hips that rounded perfectly.

He shook his head and she smiled. She’d noticed his perusal and cocked her head.

“It would be easy, Mr. Beckett. You’d solve so very many problems for me. Come,” she urged him, her soft voice a siren’s call to everything male in him. “Ease my pain.”

He moved to her again, leaning down as he whispered, “You would have to hurt first, and I think that I should take care of that now, don’t you?”

She didn’t respond, smile still in place as he removed the blanket from her, leaving her exposed to his gaze.

“Dmitry?” he called, and the man entered the room. “Tell Ken to meet me in the courtyard.”

“Rand—”

“Now.” He’d known Dmitry would protest. The man had made his feelings clear within a day of tending her. The hardest of them all had a soft spot for a killer.

Rand had no understanding of this, but it was fact. He searched for the numbness he’d need to complete his coming deeds.

“So you are Bullet.” He received nothing in response but that same serene smile.

White hot and intense, his anger was readily accessible. But he needed ice, not heat. He planned to hurt her, and to do that to this woman, with her splash of freckles and vulnerable eyes, he’d need to be numb, immune.

What would Lily think of what he was about to do?

His silence must have gotten through to her where his threatening tone had failed. She licked her lips, and his eyes followed the path of her tongue. Irrationally, he wanted to taste her.

More anger. He needed the freezing deadness.
Think of Lily and Anna
, he told himself. Think of your beautiful daughter’s white-blonde hair colored red with blood. Think of Lily, head blown almost completely off as she lay over your daughter.

But in that moment, the only thing he knew was the blooded velvet of
her
red hair. The creamy skin of
her
body. The luscious curve of
her
lips.

“I hate you. There is no part of me that does not hate you,” he pushed out between clenched teeth. In that moment, he meant every word. She was alive, and his precious wife and child were gone.

She had killed them.

“It wasn’t her, Rand,” Dmitry said at his side.

Rand turned the force of his gaze on his man. “It was her. She admitted it herself.”

Dmitry shook his head and there was a mournful quality to it that confused Rand.

“You said she killed your brother. . ." Rand trailed off, ignoring the woman for a few seconds.

“I did. He deserved killing. She is not the one you’re looking for, Rand,” Dmitry intoned in a soothing voice.

She interrupted then. “I am the one he seeks, Dmitry. I am The Collective. The truth is I am everything he has searched for, everything he wants to destroy.”

Rand turned a startled glance to her. Something in her words had a part of him urging caution. The part that wanted vengeance ignored it. “You see? By her own admission she is the one at fault.”

Rand reached for her, unlatched the cuffs, and pulled her roughly to her feet. Her eyes closed and a grimace contorted her features, but he pushed his instinct to soothe down deep, pulling back up the welling grief and anger.

“Walk,” he ordered her in a gruff tone.

She tried but couldn’t. She’d been out of it with a raging fever for nearly a week, and her legs were limp noodles. He looked over at Dmitry, who grabbed her other arm, and between the two men they literally carried her up the stairs.

She never made a sound.

They walked outside, the late afternoon sun shining. She winced and dropped her head. They pulled her another thirty feet out to an empty courtyard that had once been filled with Lily’s flowers. They’d not gotten to live here, but she’d planted flowers once they’d framed up the house.

“Berrirose,” the woman,
Bullet
, whispered. “She’ll love you forever if you plant berrirose.”

“You shut the fuck up,” he yelled, the rage taking over as he thrust her away from him. She teetered and crashed to the ground. He almost reached for her but stopped.

She lay there for long moments and finally glanced skyward. “It’s warm out here.”

She seemed confused, and that was not what Rand wanted. How dare she speak of berrirose and what they meant? How fucking dare she!

Ken stepped into the courtyard and nodded.

“Get up,” Rand demanded.

She shook her head, pushed wearily to her feet, lifted her shoulders, and looked every inch the warrior he knew her to be.

“Don’t do this, Rand. You’ll break her,” Dmitry was damn near pleading.

Before Rand could speak, she did. “I will not ever break.”

Rand saw her there, so proud and defiant, and part of him recognized this was wrong. That what he was about to do to her may well break her. She’d saved his life twice now, and come to him with some notion of—what? What had she expected coming to him? And she’d admitted she’d known he’d followed her after the beach episode. Why had she fucking come?

“Rand?” Ken’s voice was strident.

He glanced at his friend, his brother, and then back to the woman.

“I will not be party to this. It is wrong. She did not kill your wife and daughter,” Dmitry said in a cold, hard voice.

He looked at his man. “Then leave.”

What Rand had set into motion could not be undone. She’d suffer in some way before she died. He’d promised his wife and daughter revenge. This was going to be a step toward that. This woman known as Bullet wasn’t Joseph. But she was someone he prized.

He looked her over again as he pulled his gun from the holster at his back. She stared at him limpidly, accepting.

“I’ve heard that Joseph trains you in the mountains of Arequipa. I’ve also heard his favorite tool for punishment is the water pit.” And there it was, just a tightening at the corners of her eyes and mouth, a sudden rise and fall of her chest. “I think in order for you to know a measure of my pain, you should reacquaint yourself with the concept. And pain, Bullet, can be offered in many different ways.”

Her body shuddered. It was the one thing that betrayed her but she smiled again, defiant to the end.

He pointed the gun at her, and as he walked forward, she stepped back. Five more feet and they were at the hole he’d dug himself especially for her. Rand lifted a woven bamboo covering off the hole and stood up.

“You may think that what you’re doing is what it will take to break me. But know this: I survived Joseph Bombardier, and so too will I survive you, Rand Beckett. I was formed long ago out of bone, blood, death, and the tears of a small child. Nothing you do can break me.”

Her words ricocheted through his mind. He glared and in response she stiffened her spine. She lowered herself into the freezing water of the half-filled pit, and then she turned to look up at him as he pulled the rope ladder up and latched the top back down. Through the bamboo bars she stared at him, and his chest wrenched so hard he felt he was bleeding inside.

He couldn’t breathe, the tightness in his body coiling and recoiling, winding deep, and striking. Rand barely resisted the urge to rub his sternum. He stepped away, the numbness finally making an appearance, though he was unsure of the cause.

As he moved into the house, he told himself it had nothing to do with the betrayal he’d read in her sky blue gaze. Nothing at all.

The water was frigid. So cold mud hadn’t even had time to form; Remi went numb quickly. Her feet lost feeling first, and she dug deep into the sodden ground under her, wiggling in far enough that she would be able to keep her head above water when her legs failed. Though the pit itself was only filled halfway, it came above her waist.

She began to dig toe and hand holds into the sodden earth around her. Her legs shuddered, protesting the cold and freezing conditions as the sun fell in the western sky. It had been so warm when she’d walked out into the sun. Joy had rippled through her only to be crushed underneath Rand Beckett’s resolve for retribution.

She dug into the earth with her hands, ripping nails as she pulled clumps of rocks and dirt out, dropping them into the water beneath her. She’d dug a shelf out in fifteen minutes. It was big enough to pull herself onto and lift her legs and feet out of the water for minutes at a time. She’d be fucked if it rained, but for now, she could pull her frozen limbs out and give them a break.

The cold stung, but the only thing worse than that was the numbness. Tiny bites of pain meant she was alive, that her blood was flowing. Numbness, in her limbs anyway, meant death was approaching.

She ignored the brutal cold of the air and hunkered into herself on the shelf for long minutes at a time. She was forced every few times to dig deeper into the shelf, but this meant standing in the water for longer and longer as she became sluggish, muscles refusing to cooperate.

She used the shelf every fourth time to lift herself up to the bamboo hole covering and despite the fiery agony in her shoulder, she would lift herself up and lower herself down, doing pull ups over and over until her muscles warmed. Then she’d fall back into the water, dig further into the shelf and repeat the process.

Eventually, she had a hole big enough to fit her entire body into. She lay there, feeling bugs and worms crawl over her, snatching a few here and there and shoving them into her mouth to swallow whole. She had to have energy to survive. That meant eating things left off most menus. The insects were pure protein, but they always gagged her.

She glanced up, knew she needed to do a round of pull-ups, and met the night sky. Line of sight broken by the bamboo bars above her, the velvet darkness of the night reminded her of him. Rand.

He’d returned every hour, on the hour by the seconds that ticked off in her head, and asked her the same two questions: Have you broken, and where is Joseph?

She shivered, felt wetness on her cheeks, and that curious tightening in her stomach occurred again. She’d experienced it earlier today and wondered at it. Anger? She turned the word in her mouth, felt the rightness of it. Yes, it was anger, but it was also betrayal. When had she begun to hope for something more?

So she’d named the emotions but had no one to blame for the cause but herself. It mattered not that she given him her breath, that she’d taken bullets meant for him, that she’d not blown him away.
She
mattered naught when all he really wanted was vengeance.

Remi couldn’t blame him. Wasn’t that what drove her? What drove them all?

She’d known nothing but this soul-squeezing emptiness for so long, yet in his dark gaze she’d found an ember, and it had lit a firestorm inside of her. She’d gazed at his picture a year ago and something inside her had been irretrievably changed.

She was nothing to him. But at some point, he’d become so much to her. That made this particular water pit different from any Joseph had made her work to survive in. That made this water pit
painful
. So in effect, Mr. Beckett had gotten exactly what he’d planned for—her pain.

Her breath stopped, and a sound was torn from her she’d never heard before. Her chest hurt as another harsh sob ripped from her, leaving her gasping for breath.

“Please,” she whispered. She was so cold, and her heart hurt so badly.

The pain was a tsunami, burying everything in its wake.

A shadow moved over the surface of the water in the pit, and she looked up. His eyes glittered in the glow of the moonlight, features set in a determined mask.

“Tell me, Bullet, have you broken?” he asked her in a hushed tone.

She steeled her spine against the look on his face. “I will never break.” She would not let her sisters down.

His faced hardened even more, the beautiful planes of it cutting a harsh relief against the velvet of the night sky. Her entire body ached, and she was so tired.

“You’ll kill yourself to defy me on this, won’t you?”

“You wanted me to feel pain. I feel pain.” A shudder wracked her body and she went to a knee, legs giving out. She coughed and spit water out of her mouth, tried to rise using the side of the hole to push off and up. She slipped, fell face first into the freezing water. She couldn’t feel her left hand anymore.

“I want you to suffer,” he bit out.

“I have suffered my entire life, Mr. Beckett. There is little you could do that hasn’t already been done.” She managed to get the words out, but they were slurred, and a sense of unreality hovered over her.

That worried her. She’d always been able to overcome her conditions, had trained her mind to conquer any weakness of her body. This cold, though, was more than she’d ever known. It had seeped into her soul and refused to let go.

She let her head fall back. There was nothing to be done for the defeat in her posture. Her body simply refused to cooperate.

This must be what death was. Her right hand clenched, and the fire he’d begun deep in her belly began to spread.

“Don’t leave me. . ."
she’d wailed as a child.
“It’s so cold. . ."
The black-eyed man had pulled her out of the pit, staked her to the ground, and left her without food for two days, her tiny body drying out and blistering in the sun of the high desert in the Peruvian Andes. He’d returned, thrown her a crust of bread, and then tossed her back into the pit, leaving her there for another full day. The nights had been so cold, and her body had wanted to give up.