The Devil's Beauty (Crime Lord Interconnected Standalone Book 2) (12 page)

Her concerns were met with a deadpan stare, then the careless lift of his shoulders. “Do you?”

Ava stilled. She considered his question.

“No,” she admitted. “But the movies make it look really hard.”

He hummed quietly, a pondering sound. “Are you hungry?” he said instead, clearly unconcerned about her concerns.

“Of course I am.” She folded her arms. “Last time you fed me, it was the wee hours of the morning. I’m not a bloody robot.”

He chose to ignore her sarcasm as he turned and started down the long, dark hall to the stairs. She followed him, nearly dying as the smell grew stronger at the bottom.

“Seriously.” She mashed a hand over her nose. “What is that? Do you not smell it?”

Maybe it was just her, like how people smelled burnt toast before a stroke. Christ, was she having a stroke? Maybe it was a heart attack.

“What are you doing?”

She kept both palms flat on her breasts, silently counting each heartbeat. It felt regular. But she wasn’t a doctor.

“How do you know if you’re having a heart attack?”

They stepped into the kitchen and her concerns were set aside as she took in the plastic bags piled high on the counter. There were enough items there for a week, which in no way built her confidence that she would be leaving any time soon.

“You haven’t heard from John Paul yet?” she guessed.

He walked to the bags and started taking items out. Most of it was food, but there was the odd dish soap, shampoo, men’s razors, and a box of dishes.

“He texted,” he said at last.

“So, when can I go home?”

“Not yet.” He shook out a stalk of celery.

“But when?” she pressed. “I can’t stay here forever. I need to call Robby. He’s probably worried sick, and work. I’m going to lose my job. Dimitri!” she shouted when he went on emptying the grocery bags and ignoring her rant.

“You can’t.”

Furious, she crossed her arms. “And why not?”

He pulled out his phone and held it out to her. “There’s no reception up this far out, that’s why. I had to drive nearly an hour to get even a bar.”

Ava snatched the device from him and checked for herself.

Nothing.

But she did notice the text exchange between him and John Paul. It didn’t tell her overly much. It was four lines.

John Paul: “You have my word.”

Dimitri: “You’ll get her after.”

John Paul: “I want to talk to her.”

Dimitri: “Tomorrow.”

“Okay, then take me there,” she said.

Dimitri shook his head. “Not tonight.” He turned to the fridge, arms laden with supplies. He yanked open the fridge door. “You can come with me tomorrow.”

Because he’d promised John Paul he could talk to her. He wasn’t doing her any kind of favor. It was right there in their texts.

“What about Robby? I want to call him.”

He took the phone from her and stuffed it into his back pocket. “Fine.”

“And my work,” she pressed on.

“Fine,” he said again.

With no choice but to believe him, Ava went to help him deposit a carton of eggs, a pitcher of milk, and a bag of green apples—her favorite —into the icebox.

“I’m trusting you,” she told him as he shut the door. “If you lie to me…”

He met her gaze in the dim glow of the room, but he said nothing.

It was growing bright outside the windows when the palm clamped over Ava’s face, jolting her awake mid sleep. Her eyes flew open, wide and terrified as they searched into the semi darkness.

“Get up!” hissed the voice.

“Dimitri?” His name was a muffled, garbled gasps.

The hand moved to her arm. She was dragged out of bed and onto her feet.

“What—?”

She was silenced by a sharp, “Quiet!”

He hauled her from the room, not even pausing to let her pull her pants or shoes on.

At the bottom of the steps, he motioned her back against the wall just next to the front door and scooted up next to her to peek sideways out the corner of the window overlooking the front porch.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“A car pulled up,” he said. “I heard at least three doors slamming.”

Ava frowned. “John Paul?”

Dimitri shook his head. “I never told him where we were. No one knows.”

“Someone does,” she whispered when they heard the faint crunch of footsteps moving up the path to the front door.

“Did you tell someone?” he hissed, gun already drawn and ready between his hands.

Ava’s frown deepened. “Who?” she cried. “How?”

“If you did, you better tell me now, because I’m about to blow their heads off.”

“How would I tell anyone?” she snapped. “Smoke signals?”

He didn’t ask her again. Instead, he peeked out the grimy window.

“Eight,” he muttered to himself. “Heavily armed.” He cocked back the hammer on the Glock. “Definitely not friendly.”

“Is it the same guys from the hotel?”

“No.” He spared her a sidelong glance. “They’re dead.”

Ava rolled her eyes. “I mean one of them.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t understand how they found us.”

“But they did, so what’s the plan?”

Dimitri seemed focused on their guests and didn’t answer. When he did, it was to take her hand in his, in the one not gripping the gun.

“Come on.”

They abandoned their place and ran into the kitchen. The wobbly table was shoved aside to reveal a square box cut into the linoleum. Dimitri took the steel ring and yanked open the hatch.

Eerie darkness greeted them from the bottom. Ava had seen enough horror movies to recognize a bad idea, but Dimitri shoved her down the slanted steps and followed her.

The smell was astronomical. It plowed into them with a ferocity that had Ava retching. Every inhale burned in her chest. Tears blinded her. She was sure this was how it would all end when Dimitri dragged the table back into place and shut the hatch on top of them, sealing them in with the dead thing in the dark.

Unaffected by the animal rotting in his cellar, he took her hand and led her through the passageway with the agility and night vision of a cat. His precision would have amazed her if she wasn’t more preoccupied with her supper making a reappearance. Her stomach roiled and brewed up in her chest. Throwing up was an inevitable fate, but she found herself scrambling after Dimitri, struggling to keep up with her bare feet.

They must have walked for at least twenty minutes before coming to a stop. His hand slipped from hers and she heard him rifling around a few feet away. The air was thin and oddly moist. It smelled of earth and rotting leaves. It was unclear how far underground they were, but it was apparent that they were beneath the wilderness in some unknown direction.

Rusty hinges squealed. There was a groan and a glowing half-moon appeared against the black. It widened the harder Dimitri pushed against it. Fresh, clean air rushed through the opening, bathing her damp skin and making her shiver.

“Where are we?”

Rather than answer, he helped her up and through the hole that opened into the side of a trench. The ground beneath her feet sank a little, moist from the early morning dew. Above their heads, leaves rustled wildly with the crisp breeze. Somewhere beyond that, she heard the faint hum of traffic.

Dimitri climbed out behind her and unfurled to his full height. He closed the iron hatch, twisted the lever that locked it into place and then took her hand. He led her up the incline to the other side. The breeze swept up beneath the hem of her t-shirt and toyed with the thin bit of cotton covering her crotch. She tried not to yelp at the invasion.

“You could have let me get pants,” she mumbled, holding tight to the bottom of her top and keeping it firmly over her backside.

“Didn’t have time,” was his answer.

Maybe, but she was certain they could have found two seconds. Nevertheless, it was too late to think about it now anyway. Instead, she focused on the climb and the view once they reached the top.

They were surrounded by trees, but not as densely populated as the cabin had been. Each one was spaced further apart and the ground was more pine needles than grass, a sure sign they were closer to the road.

Dimitri marched to a clump of bushes and reached inside. Ava watched in amazement as he tore the shrubbery up in a clump and tossed them aside. But the awe died when she realized it was a green tarp with bits of hedging glued around it. Underneath it was an old model Jeep, topless and the same green as the tarp. Dimitri climbed in and reached for something beneath the visor. It dropped into his lap and she caught a glimpse of a remote.

“Get in,” he called to her.

Not needing to be told twice, Ava darted around the hood and crawled into the passenger’s side seat. She watched as Dimitri put the keys into the ignition and turned. The engine sprung to life almost immediately. Its low rumble vibrated beneath her bare thighs. She expected him to put it into drive and make a speedy getaway, but he turned in his seat and aimed the garage door opener over his shoulder. She heard a click. Then nothing. For a full second, the world was quiet. Even the winds had calmed. She studied the direction he was aiming, searching for signs of change and finding only the subtle sway of treetops.

“I don’t think it—”

The explosion tore up from the ground in a deafening boom that ripped up whole trees from their roots. Flames plumed into the air, an angry, red fist punching into a flawlessly blue sky. Smoke bellowed, suffocating the fresh scent of pine with the stink of sulfur.

Ava cried out. Her hands flew to her mouth, but her eyes remained fixed on the destruction. The rumble washed clear across the distance in a hot, repressive heat that stung her cheeks. The Jeep rattled, but remained firmly situated.

“Oh my God!”

“Hold on!” he ordered, eyes focused on the narrow path ahead rather than inferno of the cabin as it was demolished.

Dimitri’s grip tightened on the wheel. He pushed harder on the gas and shot them the half mile to the highway, away from the blaze. The mushroom cloud of smoke and flames danced in the rearview mirror as they drove in the opposite direction.

“Where are we going?” Ava asked after an hour of driving in no clear direction.

Dimitri hadn’t thought that far ahead. His only clear objective was to get as far away from the wreckage as possible, regroup, and then find the bastards and kill them. But he knew he needed to stop. He needed to find a safe place to put a better plan in motion.

The highway was barren, an endless stretch of winding asphalt that lead nowhere but deeper into a tunnel of looming trees. He kept hoping they’d come across something, a restaurant, a gas station, maybe even another person, but all there was for miles was nothing.

He looked away from the phone he’d been trying and failing to pick a signal up with and peeked at the road before adjusting his arm further away from his body.

“How is there no reception?” he muttered to himself.

“Because some genius brought us out to the middle of nowhere,” Ava answered. “There are too many trees for the signal to pass through.”

With a grunt, he tossed the phone into the cup holder and focused on driving. He considered turning around, but couldn’t risk running into any survivors they might have left behind. Plus, he was nearly confident they would hit some form of civilization sooner or later.

That didn’t happen for almost two hours. Not until the trees had dissolved into wide stretches of farmland and the scent of pine was conquered by wet animals and heaps of manure. He found a motel out in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, surrounded by miles of endless nothing and despair. It could have been abandoned for the way it was falling apart were it not for the sign blinking lazily about its vacancy.

“This is where hopes and dreams come to die,” Ava muttered, eyeing the boarded up windows on several of the rooms, the door missing on another, and the strange smell that seemed to be doming the entire lot.

She was right. It was one wrong step from some infectious disease, but they only needed it for a couple of hours.

“Stay in the car,” he told her as he reached across her lap and yanked open the glove compartment. He pressed a Glock 36 into her palm. “Do you know how to use one of these?”

“Yes, but—”

“Use it,” he told her firmly. “Anyone comes near the car, shoot them in the head.”

Her jaw slackened. “Are you serious?”

He met her gaze. “We’ve nearly been killed twice in two days,
myshka
. Don’t miss.”

Terror turned her wide eyes glassy, but she curled her fingers around the weapon and sucked in a deep breath.

Dimitri started to push out of the car, he paused and glanced back at her. “Not me. Don’t shoot me.”

His joke got the effect he’d been going for and she laughed. It was strained and unsteady, but it loosened some of the lines around her mouth.

“It is tempting,” she said.

Snorting, he rolled out of his seat and slammed the door behind him. His gaze swept over the deserted highway, the absence of any other life, and he wondered if it wasn’t safer just to find a rattlesnake pit to hide in.

Senses on high alert, he stalked around to the trunk and popped it open. From beneath the felt hatch where the spare was kept, he pulled out a second Glock and a KP-90. Both were tucked into the waistband of his pants. His coat was tugged down over top. He locked and alarmed the vehicle before setting off in the direction of the office. He paused once to glance back at the car and Ava’s drawn, pale face watching him. Their gazes locked. He read the concern and fear in hers and tried to reflect his confidence back, his assurance that he would get them out of this. She said nothing and he ducked inside.

Low, sultry jazz crooned from the ancient record player wheezing in the corner behind a low desk. The bit of space stank of grilled cheese, sweat, stale tobacco, and moldy cat fur. Flies buzzed around a cluster of plates stacked off to one side. A still burning cigarette in a glass ashtray sent twisted spirals of smoke into the air. Next to it, that morning’s paper sat open alongside a cold mug of coffee. Ava’s face peered back at him from the front page with the captions to call the police if seen.

Dimitri grabbed the paper and rolled it up. He tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat. He glanced through the open doorway leading into a living area across the desk.

“Hello?” he called.

There was no answer.

He was beginning to think they should continue on and find a different place when the door behind him opened and a large, squat woman wobbled in holding a bucket of dirty ice.

“That your Jeep out there?” she asked in way of greeting.

Dimitri went to peer through the grimy window, mostly to check on Ava; she was still there, looking anxious as the door closed behind the woman.

“Yes.” He turned back. “We need one room for a few hours.”

“‘course you do.” She tossed back the flap making up part of the desk and stepped through to the other side. “That’s a pretty girl you’ve got waiting.” She set the bucket down next to the dishes. “It’s fifty an hour. Extra twenty for the TV.”

Dimitri pulled out two hundred and tossed it on the counter. “Don’t need the TV.”

The woman gave him a toothless grin. “‘course you don’t. Room eight.”

Ignoring that, he snatched up the keys she tossed him and stalked out without giving any information. Places like that seldom ever asked for ID.

Gravel, bits of broken glass, metal, and what looked suspiciously like needles, crunched beneath his boots as he made his way back to the Jeep. He unlocked the doors and yanked Ava’s open.

She snapped the safety on the Glock before letting her hands drop down into her lap with the gun still cradled between her fingers. She started to climb out. Dimitri stopped her. He gave her the room key then leaned in and slipped one arm under her knees. The other went across her back. He hoisted her out of her seat gingerly.

She was warm and soft in a way that was disturbingly familiar. The subtle scent of her skin rushed over him the moment her slender arms encircled his shoulders. He tried not to notice how right it felt, having her there, cradled against him. He tried to focus on the mission, on the importance of getting her back out of his life as quickly as possible.

“You shouldn’t pick me up,” she whispered, face hovering too close to his. “Your shoulder…”

“It’s fine.” He wasn’t about to make her walk. Shoulder or not. Even if the ground wasn’t a carpet of torture.

“Thank you.”

Her breath kissed the side of his face. Its sweet coolness made him want to turn his head and nuzzle into the soft skin of her throat. It would have been too easy to get lost in her, to let himself drown in all the ways he knew how to make her come apart. It had been years, but he knew every trigger spot on her body. Her being in a t-shirt and white cotton panties didn’t help matters.

He said nothing as he took them to their room. The door was a garish color of dried blood, faded and chipped against the wood. The brass knob seemed out of place jutting from its side. Splinters rose where lock met frame, a sign that someone had attempted to get in at some point. He had to remind himself they wouldn’t be there very long.

He bent at the knees, bringing Ava level with the bolt. She used the key and let them in.

He eyed the bed with its stiff, paisley covers and slightly stained sheets, and just as quickly discarded the idea of placing her there with whatever was currently calling it home. He took her to the chair by the window, a simple bit of wood that creaked when he set her into it.

“We will find somewhere else in a few hours,” he told her, making his way back to the door and shutting it. He snapped the lock as an afterthought.

“Hopefully before we’re tortured and skinned alive,” she muttered, drawing her knees to her chest, a bad move, in Dimitri’s opinion.

The gesture left a visible gap between her ankles where he had a clear view of her lips perfectly shaped against the fabric of her panties. He had a clear image of them splayed beneath his fingers, held open to his darting tongue flicking between the swollen crown of her sex and the tight ring of her opening. His scalp gave a phantom prickle as though remembering the feel of her fingers fisted in his hair, urging him on, her back bowing, her hips lifting. The sweet, musky taste of her was an addictive mixture of woman and sex that he had yet to savor on anyone else. He could have lived on her for days. And had. Just a limitless melding of their bodies in a tireless marathon to see who begged for mercy first. Days had been spent being buried inside her, broken occasionally for the odd meal break or shower, but even then, if he could be inside her while doing it, he was. Her body had been his escape, his place of refuge, and he had spent every waking hour worshiping it.

“Dimitri.”

He jolted violently, his memories shattering like colored glass tinkling to the ground to reveal the dark reality he stood in. The foul odor of the room punched through the rest. He shook his head, but no amount of shaking relieved him of the rock hard erection cutting into his zipper or the clawing desire working up through him. He struggled not to glance at her again, knowing he’d never be able to contain himself a second time, but the weakness was too great. Her pull was too powerful.

His gaze slanted back to her, back to the patch of white taunting him from between her calves. It greeted him with a dark stain just in the center and the sight of it nailed him in the sternum.

It hadn’t been there before. It was now, and the longer he studied it, the darker it became, the wider it grew. The rich potency of her arousal filled the space, masking all other smells. It swirled around him, a beckoning call his cock refused to disobey. In his mind, he already knew how it would start. He knew he would take her by the ankles and pull them over his shoulders. He would draw her to the edge of the seat. Then he would feast on her until she was coating his tongue with her release.

That was the plan. That was what he needed to do. He even started forward, a single step that made all the difference, because that was all the space that had been separating them.

Her head tipped back, her eyes swirling with a dark hunger that mirrored his own. She made no sound. There was no other movement, except the rapid rise and fall of her breasts. He couldn’t see them behind her knees, but he knew the nipples would be hard and straining for his attention. He knew he would take them between his teeth while he fucked her, adding just enough pressure to guide her into her first orgasm. That was how she liked it, just the hint of pain leading up to the plunge.

But that would wait. He needed to taste her, needed to gather the rich cream being wasted. He needed to stretch her around his tongue while she pulsed and moaned his name.

“Fuck!”

He had no recollection of speaking. The word hung suspended in the thickening tension solidifying through the room. It should have been enough to propel him back to his senses. It should have been enough to remind him this wasn’t the time.

It started to. He felt the tug of reality working through the red fog, calling him back.

Her arms slipped away as though no longer wielding the strength to keep their grip. The gun and key dropped to the floor in a forgotten clatter. Her knees parted. Her pussy was in perfect display. There was nothing subtle about it.

He dropped to his knees, right there on the filthy carpet, right between her alabaster thighs. Control was a thing of the past, an inconvenience he no longer cared to exercise. His cock was a raging, throbbing force demanding immediate gratification of the one thing that had always felt like home. It didn’t care to recognize anything else.

His head bent, following her musk to the source. His mouth was watering even before he took a greedy swipe of his tongue through the fabric.

Above him, Ava gasped, a weak sound he ignored, because it wasn’t about her. Devouring her, making her come, it was for his pleasure. It was for his sanity. It was for the years of dying of starvation and finally finding relief.

He forced aside the bit of sopping fabric from the beauty he’d missed in the dark of night. Every dip, hollow, and valley of it was exactly how he remembered it in his dreams, but somehow wetter. She was a mess, a beautiful, delicious mess of pink, hairless skin and soothing promises. Her juices ran along the valley from one hole to the other, lubricating them both in a generous flood that reminded him all too well of how it felt to be balls deep in each. A sort of smug satisfaction came of knowing he’d claimed every inch of her, that he’d pumped her full with his come in every orifice and watched as it leaked out of her. He had dominated her in every vile and twisted way possible and left her in a sticky, sated mess across the sheets each morning. And it had never been enough.

“It’s not going to eat itself,” she breathed, voice trembling as hard as she was.

Dimitri allowed his gaze to lift, to move away from the object of his obsession and fixate on her face. He took in her parted lips, the dark flush of arousal on her cheeks, the plea in her eyes and inwardly grinned.

He lowered his face, extended his tongue and took a long, relishing taste of her from center to crown, all the while watching her expression as it twisted into a soundless gasp. Her pussy flexed against his mouth. He repeated the trail, cleaning her until there was nothing but his tongue filling her, stopping the flow.