Page 37 of The Mad Don
“You’re telling me what’s convenient. You must think that I am easy to fool.”
“I have nothing else to tell you.”
He clicks the safety off, and it echoes.
“I have a very good mind to blow your brains across that wall,” he spits between his teeth.
I look at him, and I know he is not bluffing. I have seen him do worse things to people who irritated him less. I have nothing to negotiate with him about; he wants to hear what he wants to hear. I have nothing to lose by pushing back because if he isgoing to fire, he is going to fire whether I make myself small or not.
I get off the wall and step into the gun.
“Then do it,” I say. “But don’t take your failure out on me. It is not my fault that you cannot keep your own sister safe in your own house. I went into a room and helped a woman drink a glass of water. That is all I did.”
He slams the gun against the wall beside my head. The sound goes through the room, and the wood splinters. My ears ring, but I do not flinch.
“Don’t think I can’t kill you!”
I look at him calmly. “You can.”
We are very close now.
The gun comes back up, and he presses the barrel into the soft place under my jaw. He angles it so it tips my chin up. My pulse is against the cold metal.
I am supposed to be afraid.
I am not afraid.
What I am is something else, and the recognition of it is more disorienting than the gun. The heat is moving down my throat into my chest and lower. The feel of him is this close to me — the smell of him and the shake in his hand. The barrel under my jaw is doing something to me it should not be doing, and the body that betrayed me last night is betraying me again. I can feel his familiar breath on my face, my head snaps back to his tongue inside my mouth, the hardness of his bites, and how my body reacts. My body is reacting similarly now. I can feel my nipples hardening just because he’s this close. My eyes fall on his lips, and I swallow.
I lift my eyes to his, hoping my face isn’t betraying what this is doing to me.
“Kirill trained the fear out of you, did he?” Giovanni says. His voice has dropped lower. “Hmm? Is that the trick? You don’t fear anything?”
I reach up and close my hand around the barrel of the gun.
I hold it where it is.
“Kill me,” I say, “and you get nothing from Kirill. Nothing. You start a war you cannot afford while your sister gets worse in a room with the curtains drawn.”
He presses the gun harder into my jaw. It is going to bruise.
“What makes you think I cannot get whatever I want out of Kirill without you alive?”
He leans in. His mouth is close to my ear. I feel cold shivers.
“Hmm? You’ve got a smart mouth, Russian.”
I look at him. I am close enough to count the dark in his eyes. Close enough to see the snake at his collarbone where the open shirt has shifted. Close enough to see the muscles of his chest and the tattoos on his body.
I snap myself back to reality.He might really kill me here,I think. I can’t die yet; I haven’t seen Christov.
The words come before I have decided to say them.
“I have a brother too.”
His eyes do not move from mine.
“I would kill anyone who laid so much as a hand on a hair on his head,” I say. “I would never want to hurt your sick sister. Only a monster would think that, and believe it or not, Don, I am not that kind of monster.”
