The Devil's Beauty (Crime Lord Interconnected Standalone Book 2) (16 page)

Ava opened her eyes to the sweet scent of jasmine and honeysuckles. They drifted around her in soothing waves that made her want to sink into them and go back to sleep. Instead, her eyes opened and she found herself in a beautiful room painted a robin egg blue. White curtains hung from a bay window at the foot of a chestnut brown bed. A fan circled overhead in lazy loops, swirling the calming scent.

She recognized the room. She recognized the smells.

“Robby?” A quiet movement pulled her attention to the left. “Robby?”

“Sorry,” said the woman in the chair. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

In the still shadows of Robby’s guestroom, it was practically impossible to make out more than the fact that the woman had an insane amount of hair. It cascaded around her shoulders in a riot of curls that reminded Ava of vines taking ownership of her face. The rest of her was dipped in darkness until a pale hand extended and snapped on the crystal lamp on the bedside table. Ava winced at the flood of light that illuminated parts of the bed, but more importantly, the woman.

At first glance, she resembled someone’s hippie mom with her endless mane of gold and chocolate curls pinned back on top by a silver clip, the layer of beads slung around her throat, the plastic bangles clattering from her arms. She wore a long, flowy dress littered in fat flowers and a jean vest pulled over top. Silver earrings swung wildly when she pushed to her feet and came around to stand next to the bed.

She was a large woman, broad and tall. The kind of woman that took no shit from anyone and could take down a grown man in a fight if needed. Even her aura pulsed with a wild, dangerous hue that made Ava want to skitter back, if she could.

“Hello Ava,” she said serenely, but with a cold edge that swept through the room. “I’m Elena Tasarov, Dimitri’s mother. I thought it time we meet.”

There were no resemblances to suggest this woman was in anyway related to Dimitri, except her word and Ava’s head was too fuzzy to think clearly.

“Where’s Robby?” Her voice rasped around the question. “What have you done with him?”

Elena seemed unperturbed by the accusation. “Your friend is currently safe. I wanted time to talk to you without interruption.”

Terror knocked against her ribs in an erratic patter that made her chest hurt, but she willed herself to remain calm when she spoke.

“If you’ve hurt him…”

The woman smiled and it was the most terrifying thing Ava had ever seen. “Good,” she purred in that impossibly thick accent of hers. “I like feisty. Weepy women get on my nerve and don’t live very long.”

It had taken Ava ages to understand Dimitri properly and his pronunciation was far less severe compared to Elena’s. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking anything she said.

“Where’s Dimitri?” she asked instead.

“Busy.” Elena reached for something on the nightstand. She returned with a glass of water. “It is only you and me.”

Ava ignored the cool rim brought to her lips, no matter how her raw throat screamed for its soothing contents.

“What do you want?”

The cup was taken away and returned to the table.

“To meet this girl who has so many lives.” Her earrings jingled with the shake of her head. “To see if she is as impressive as she seems.” Cool, blue eyes fixed on Ava. “To see why she won’t die.” She snorted. “I should know my son is involved.”

Ava swallowed. “You sent those men after me.”

Elena chuckled softly. “Men. My mistake. I know to do something correctly, a woman does it herself. Hmm?” She raised an eyebrow as though asking Ava’s opinion on the matter. “Men, they fail and make mess women clean.” She sighed heavily. “This time, I say,
Elena, only you must do this.
” She spread her fingers open, palms up. “So, I come.

“What do you want?” The anger in her own voice surprised even Ava, but not nearly as much as the realization that she couldn’t move anything from the neck down. “What … what’s wrong with me?”

Elena glanced over her with calm interest. “Morphine … to calm you, make you easy to talk to, yeah? And pain.” She touched her own left arm. “Sometimes, a graze is more pain than actual bullet hole. I give you extra.”

That explained the odd fog clouding her head and the dull edges of her emotions. But she couldn’t see or feel her arm to judge the severity of the bullet’s damage.

“Are you going to kill me?”

Elena frowned, not in annoyance or anger, but contemplation. “Maybe,” she said at last. “I am determining your worth.”

She lowered herself gingerly on the edge of the mattress, close enough that her heat crept through the blankets to burn Ava’s hip. It was infuriating that she didn’t have the power to at least move away.

“Why are you doing this?”

Maybe if she kept the woman talking a while longer, Dimitri, or someone, might come to rescue her.

“I have many reasons,” she said. “I am concerned mother, maybe.” She didn’t seem to believe that either when she shook her head. “Maybe I waited long time to meet you.” She tugged on the blanket, tucking it almost lovingly around Ava’s shoulders. “Is hard, you know, I always see you like little girl.” She smoothed back a lock of hair off Ava’s brow, her fingers oddly soft. “I forget even little girls grow.” Her hand moved away and rested with the other one in her lap. “It hurts me that this will hurt Dimitri. But he will forget the loss. I will see to it.”

“Please don’t…” She hated the plea in her voice, but it came out before Ava could stop it.

Elena studied her, expression almost regretful. “It is the only way,
zajka
. The tree must be brought down.”

Ava blinked through the blinding terror and panic. “What?”

Elena shook her head. “Rest.” she stroked Ava’s hair lovingly. “It will be over quickly.”

She rose. Ava struggled against her own body, hating it for being so useless when she needed it most. Tears welled and spilled down her temples to soak into her hairline.

Elena never noticed. She retrieved a black pouch off the dresser and returned to the foot of the bed. Ava could only watch as the zipper was wrenched open and several items were unearthed. One, she recognized as a needle. The other one took a second longer.

It was a tiny bottle of clear liquid. Ava was no doctor, but whatever was in there had to be more than morphine, or it was so much morphine it killed her.

“This will not hurt,” Elena said. “You will sleep and then nothing.”

Ava tried to fight. She tried to struggle, to roll out of bed. But her body could only lie there as the woman approached. She wondered briefly if there hadn’t been more than morphine in the drugs Elena had originally given her. She wasn’t an expert but wasn’t sure morphine alone could keep a person locked in their own bodies.

“Dimitri’ll know,” she protested.

Elena paused, needle injected into the bottle. “Maybe,” she mused. “But you will still be no use.”

Couldn’t argue with logic like that, and Ava couldn’t bring herself to beg. She knew it would do no good and she couldn’t bring herself to give the women the satisfaction of it. Her last few minutes wouldn’t be spent crying to a monster.

“He’ll kill you,” she said instead with a confidence she felt all the way to her core.

“But you are part of a bigger plan,
zajka
. He will understand.”

Ava was about to tell her there was no chance of that when the door opened. The corridor beyond the room hung in darkness, obscuring the visitor. But hopes that it was Dimitri died instantaneously. The size was wrong, and when he spoke, it wasn’t Dimitri’s voice.

The two exchanged words in Russian that Ava couldn’t understand. But Elena looked back at one point and studied Ava a long moment. The man continued to speak, low, but quick, like there was a deadline and they were about to miss it.

She wondered if Dimitri was on his way back, or Robby. Maybe they needed for it to look like an accident. That was the only way Dimitri wouldn’t search for her killers. But Robby would know, unless they’d killed him.

Elena shut the door. She returned to the bag sitting open on the mattress and put away the needle and bottle, to Ava’s surprise. She sighed as she closed the pouch.

“It is your lucky day,
zajka
,” she said. “You get to live.”

Words that should have offered comfort fell short of their mark. Elena headed for the door and walked out.

Ava listened until the sound of her shoes on hardwood had faded before releasing the breath trapped in her chest. She gasped on a sob and closed her eyes.

Her moment of relief faded with the groan of wood beneath a large weight. Her eyes flew open, but all she saw was a hulking shape, then a sweaty hand smelling of stale tobacco slapped over her face, stifling her air. She tried to scream, but, by the time she found the breath, there was a sharp sting in her neck, and then nothing.

Ava came out of a foggy sleep to darkness, the foul stench of soiled leather, and the persistent chatter of an argument. It tangled with the muted hum of distant traffic, the low whisper of nature in the pre-hours of dawn, and scuffling feet on loose gravel. Her head was thrumming, a dull ache that made her brain feel numb and there was a dry, cotton taste in her mouth she couldn’t account for. Her shoulder hurt. The skin beneath the bandage itched and seared like a third degree burn. She was faintly aware of the cramped state of her knees and the prickle in her left arm from lying on it. She tried to shift and several things happened simultaneously; her neck gave a violent twang from being placed at an odd angle on a flat surface, the bottom of her foot slammed into a solid force that sang up her entire body, and she nearly toppled off a ledge.

She jerked upright, pains temporarily forgotten and tried to get her bearings.

The thing she noticed first was the nurse pants and white t-shirt someone had put her into. Maybe Robby. She couldn’t be sure when she’d been dressed, but something told her it had to be him. He wouldn’t have sewn her up without cleaning her up first. And she was all right with that. In the scheme of things, it was the least of her concerns. The more pressing matter was her current situation.

The world was a murky deep blue as the seam between heaven and earth tore to expose a sliver of light. She was in the backseat of a car, parked twenty feet from a cliff’s edge overlooking the grander of the city while it slept. The interior smelled of sulfur and burnt plastic beneath a more rancid stench of gasoline, copper, sweat, and week old garbage. The leather beneath her was cracked and sweaty from her skin.

It was a small car. She couldn’t tell make or model, but it was low to the ground, low enough so that when she raised her head to peer out the windshield, she could easily make out the group of men huddled in the low beams of the headlights.

There were five of them. None of them were Dimitri, or anyone she recognized. They seemed to be arguing. The bigger, burlier one kept waving at the car and trying to use his massive bulk to intimidate the other smaller four. It didn’t seem to be working. The man in front kept rocking his head from side to side, which further aggravated the giant.

He took a menacing stride forward, which brought him practically on top of the little guy, who surprisingly held his ground.

Ava didn’t watch the rest. She slipped to the edge of the seat and hooked a finger into the handle. She kept one eye on the group while gingerly popping the door open a crack and easing her body through the narrow slit. The attempt was clumsy and made more noise than anything she’d ever heard in her life, but she squeezed out into the muggy air and willed her heart to calm down and her breathing to slow. Both were a riot of noise drumming wildly between her ears. She couldn’t even hear herself think, never mind listen for any sounds she might accidentally make.

She kept low against the side of the car. The metal was cold through the material of her clothes. Everywhere it touched seemed to burn, but it was the least of her problems.

Behind the car was a solid wall of forestry. Trees loomed in giant force miles high into the brightening sky. There was a pale stretch of dirt winding through it all, but it was paved in stone. Somehow, she needed to make it to the edges and into the forest without getting spotted.