Page 28 of Ballistic

“We? There is no we. If it’s Dmitry, he’s trying to kill me. So I’ll leave. You said he’s protective of you, right? You stay, I go.”

“He knows I won’t go with him.” Hands on her hips, she swung around, somehow looking less vulnerable than yesterday. In fact, her short-cropped hair and the small bit of blood on her cheek had her looking like a Femme Nikita, or some shit. “Look, you want Tesarik, right? No one knows his schedule better than me. I know exactly where he’s going to be two weeks from today. You help me, I help you.”

“I already helped you. No deal.”

“Then you can continue to play cat and mouse. Either way, I’m not going back to Dmitry. Not until I find the men who killed the girl. It’s only a matter of time before the others show.” She crossed her arms with all the stubborn fixings of a girl who refused to take no for an answer. “So, are you in, or out?”

“You’re a real piece of work, sweetheart.”

“It’s this, or I go, and Dmitry comes after you, anyway.”

Pinching the bridge of my nose failed to hold back waves of frustration slamming against my skull in a mocking tempo. “Be grateful I don’t hurt women.”

“And you’ve seen that I’m perfectly capable of hurting men, so consider it in your best interest to help me.”

“Before I agree to anything, you’re going to tell me everything, including where you learned the knife shit.”

11

Nicoleta

“What’s this?” Dmitry studied the purple markings I already knew had fanned out from my eyeball.

I turned my head to break his grip of my chin. “It’s nothing.”

“Who did this to you?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody packs quite a punch. This bruise is fresh.”

With a frown, I shoved my hands into the pockets of the new jeans he’d bought for me—ones I’d have to explain to my mom when I got home. “What are you, a doctor?”

“No. Just taken my fair share of punches.” Leaning back against his desk, he crossed his arms over his chest. “You know how to defend yourself?”

I shrugged and gave a half nod. “Sorta.”

“Sorta? I’m afraid sorta doesn’t cut it.”

“I fell. It happens. Can we just forget about it?”

He pushed off the desk and nudged my arm on the way toward his office door. “Come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“No questions.”

I followed Dmitry through the house toward the back, through an area I’d not been before. The giant I’d met on my first day sat kicked back in a button-down shirt at a small table. Dmitry silently flicked his fingers, moving like a shadow through the room, and as if the big guy could read his mind, he shot to his feet wordlessly and followed behind us.

I looked back at him, noticing that he didn’t so much as spare me a glance, his chin high in the air, like a true giant failing to acknowledge an ant.

We reached the back of the house and pushed through a door to a backyard vaster and more expansive than any I’d ever seen.

“Unload,” Dmitry said, and again, like a mind reader, the guard set out two guns, a knife, and a piece of metal with four holes onto the patio table beside us. “Aleksey is going to teach you to defend yourself.”

Aleksey’s eye merely twitched in response, but he neither agreed, nor disagreed.

“Choose your weapon.”