Page 89 of Coach
Of course, Irina wasn’t there.
I’d told the brothers that she’d stolen from them.
My heart lurched, imagining her in that bunker, chained and ball-gagged, but with no hope of walking away.
The guy too, whoever he was.
I’d done that.
I’d turned them in.
Sold their lives for my own.
A strangled cry bubbled up and burst out of me as my head whipped around to look at the brothers.
“You killed them,” I said, spotting the split lip, the bruised jaw.
“Killed whom?” Ice Cold Konstantin asked with a sort of bored look in his eye.
“The guy and… and Irina.”
“Don’t be silly,” another voice, feminine this time, said.
I turned, finding a woman moving out from the back room.
She was tall, slim, but slightly curvy, wearing tight black pants, a black tank, and black combat boots.
Her hair and eyes were also inky.
And she had the most striking face I think I’d ever seen. Her bone structure was very feminine, but a little sharp in the jaw and cheekbones.
Lethallybeautiful was the term that crossed my mind upon seeing her.
It was the same kind of gorgeousness that had become very familiar to me.
The family resemblance was uncanny.
This was a Novikoff.
A sister, I would bet, by her age.
“Konstantin and Mikhail are far too moral to murder a woman,” she said. Her accent wasn’t as thick as her siblings’. But I would guess she was five to eight years younger than them, so maybe the family immigrated when she was still young. “I, however, have no such hangups.”
“Stas,” Konstantin said, the name holding a warning.
“But you were going to…” I started, looking at the brothers.
“Hold onto you while I drove into town?” Stas asked. “Yes, they were.”
“Anastasia,” Konstantin barked.
“What? She’s been bought, hasn’t she?”
Wow.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever met anyone as cold as Konstantin before. But his little sister took the ice cream cake.
Konstantin barked something in Russian.
