Read Online Bullet to the Heart by Lea Griffith - Free Book Online Page B

doorway.
    Rand vibrated with suppressed rage. He stood over the woman who had just admitted to killing his wife and daughter. He ran a hand through his hair, feeling defeated and worn. He ached with grief, but what he’d seen in her eyes, the eyes of a killer, had eclipsed anything he’d ever experienced.
    She knew pain firsthand. But nothing could prepare her for what he was going to rain down on her.
    “Rand?” The question in Ken’s voice couldn’t be answered.
    Because the truth was, everything in Rand rejected that this tiny slip of a woman, whose eyes made him lose his breath, had killed his hopes and dreams . . . his family.
    “She’ll be out for a while. It looks like she’s running a fever. Do we get her well or let her die?”
    Rand looked up at the rafters, but the answers eluded him. Wispy and effervescent, they stayed out of his reach. He’d once been so good at recognizing the truth, but now it toyed with him. His gut told him one thing, and his mind, hell her words , told him something different.
    “Have Dmitry hook her up to an IV. If anything kills her, it will be me,” he ground out, and turned away from the woman now knocked out on the ground before him.
    His heart clenched as he remembered her eyes when she’d whispered that Lily and Anna were a mark on her soul. Conviction had rung in her tone, yet her eyes had hinted at something intangible.
    “Rand?” Ken called his name again and Rand stopped, hung his head.
    “Yeah?”
    “We made a promise.”
    “And I intend to keep it, Ken. You don’t have to remind me. She was my wife.”
    “She was my sister and Anna my niece. You lose sight of the goal and we are lost. They win,” Ken pointed out calmly.
    But underneath that calm, Rand knew, was a suggestion of death. Visceral and true, Ken Nodachi was a death bringer. Politically correct and fair to a fault, the man would nevertheless kill without reservation.
    But so would Rand.
    As he walked from the panic room, he had to wonder, would he be able to kill a woman who’d reached inside of him and brought back to life a heart that hadn’t beat in seven years?
    It was a viable question, but Rand staggered under the truth of his mind’s response. Yes. Yes, he could kill her. But he wouldn’t be able to walk away from it. No, he’d be on his knees as he crawled away from that devastation, and the man Lily had loved, who’d loved her in return, would be dead. Dead and gone.

Chapter Seven
    Shadows moved behind her eyelids, and awareness sliced through her brain. Remi recognized she was still being held in the room with the stone floor. She was still naked, still tethered, but she was covered now and there was warmth.
    Her back remained cold, but her shoulder only ached as opposed to feeling like a hot poker had been pressed into it. She wanted to cough, ease the constriction in her throat, but didn’t dare.
    There was someone in the room with her, and as long as they thought her asleep, she had the upper hand. She’d made a mistake coming here, but had honestly felt to do so was the best option.
    She told herself it had nothing to do with bluish-purple eyes and a desperate need inside her to ease the pain housed within them. Her heart though, the organ she’d never acknowledged, mocked her with a slow thump.
    “You’re awake,” a man murmured. He had a faint Russian accent. Dmitry Asinimov, she was sure of it.
    This man, she owed a debt of blood. It had been Remi who’d taken his brother one sunny day in France five years ago. She remembered the sun glinting off Alexander Asinimov’s hair, the curls on his head so fair and perfect.
    Until her bullet had entered his brain and blown out the back of his skull. Then those flaxen locks had gone red and not so perfect. Not that the man hadn’t deserved to be dealt death. He’d done things to a small child in Bangkok Remi hadn’t known were possible.
    “You shudder. Remembering my brother perhaps?” His tone was deceptive.
    Out of all