Page 3 of Lethal Abduction

I know it isn’t fair to take out my fear on Dimitry, just like I know that my anger and confusion existed long before he came into my life.

None of this is his fault, no matter how much I want to make it that way.

Heads turn curiously as we head to the door. They always do when I’m with Dimitry.

We’re quite the spectacle, he and I.

The truth is that I’ve always loved the way Dimitry turns heads, particularly female ones.

His six foot five inches of rock-hard muscle, with some fine inkwork in all the right places, is enough to warrant a second glance from anyone. Combined with a square, almost brutal face, a white scar running the length of one jaw, and steel-gray eyes that stare straight through a girl, Dimitry is a showstopper.

By contrast, despite being raised nowhere near the Australian coast, I look like a classic blonde, blue-eyed surfer girl. I come from solid old-fashioned farming stock in outback Western Australia.

Which is a very long way from Dimitry’s world. And not just in air miles.

He holds the door open, and I step almost gratefully into the soft rain, ignoring the umbrella he opens over my head as I stalk off toward the Plaza Mayor.

“Abby.” Dimitry ditches the umbrella. His jacket is unbuttoned despite the cold, and rain darkens his black shirt and suit trousers to midnight. “We need to talk this through.”

I give a strangled laugh and keep walking. “What part, Dimitry? The part where you jump whenever Roman snaps his fingers? Or the part where I pretend like I have some kind of future in this life with you, some role to play?”

My boots slip on the cobblestones, and Dimitry captures me before I fall. “Slow down, for Chrissakes,” he says through gritted teeth, “before you break something.”

Like my own heart, for example?

I’m grateful for the rain that disguises the tears forming in my eyes.

I don’t want this ending. But the truth is that it’s been coming for us since the beginning.

I just kept trying to fool myself it could go a different way.

“Are you sure it’s my world that you don’t like?” His face is grim. “Or is this more about the fact that you refuse to face parts of your own?”

I try not to think of my bag sitting in the apartment across the plaza, or the e-ticket hidden in my phone.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” I say slowly.Understatement of the year, Abby.“But there’s truth to what I’m saying, too.”

Like the fact that you’re a criminal.

And not just any criminal.

Roman’s enforcer. His executioner. The man who takes the hard orders, then takes care of business.

“I don’t think this is about me.” Dimitry stares straight ahead as he talks. “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to face your past. And that means facing your parents, Abby. Even if you don’t tell them the whole truth about what’s happened to you in the years since you left Australia.”

If only it was that simple. If only that was all I’m afraid of.

“Even if you’re right,” I say, “whatever choices I’ve made in the past, or might make in the future, don’t change the truth of what I’m saying. My point is that you belong to Roman first. Above everything else. Even above yourself.”

Dimitry makes an impatient noise, thrusting his hands in his pockets as he walks.

But he doesn’t argue.

The hard part is that I know how much he loves his work.Especially since Roman made him the head of a Miami team dedicated to returning the priceless Naryshkin treasures, which have languished in a vault beneath Darya’s family home since the Russian Revolution. Now the pieces the old Russian nobility entrusted to her ancestors are being discreetly returned to their rightful owners.

Placing Dimitry at the head of the Naryshkin task force is a clear sign of how much Roman trusts and values his oldest friend. They’ve been like brothers since they were children.

But that’s also part of the problem.

---