Bullet to the Heart (22 page)

“There are going to be more. We work in teams,” Bullet breathed out at Rand’s back. He turned as cold slithered down his neck.

He hadn’t even heard her. She cocked an eyebrow, and a smile tugged her lips. He didn’t know what to make of that. She’d just taken a life and wasn’t even breathing heavily.

“We should hunt,” Rand said to Ken, ignoring the hurt that flashed through her eyes.

“I would like the opportunity to help.”

“No need. I got one, another fled on foot,” Adam called out as he gently placed a body on the marble floor.

“I got one but couldn’t get a bead on the one who took off,” Dmitry murmured as he appeared from the basement.

“No body?” Rand asked Dmitry as he bent over the body Adam had dropped and rifled through pockets. He ripped off the cap and felt more than heard Bullet’s response to what spilled out from under it. “Friend of yours?” He glanced up and wished he hadn’t.

The naked agony on her face punished Rand.

She shook her head and turned away, heading back toward the basement. “Bullet,” he called out.

She stopped but didn’t turn.

“Don’t do this,” he warned.

She looked at him, and again he was bruised inside by the pain in her eyes.

“I have no choice. But I will be back,” she whispered, and then was gone between one blink of his eyes and the next.

He looked at Dmitry and said, “Track her.”

Dmitry nodded.

Ken protested. “You’re just gonna let her leave?”

“I believe she’ll come back. If she doesn’t, Dmitry will tail her, and we’ll pull her back in.”

Ken shook his head and cursed. “You’re a fool.”

Rand stood and pointed at the body. “No, Joseph is. Whoever this is, their death hurt her. She’ll come back. Her word is her bond.”

“Two types you can never trust: whores and liars. Looks like you hit the jackpot, Rand,” Ken ground out and then turned to leave.

Rand let him go, unwilling to break his best friend’s nose when he himself had no idea if she’d come back. It had become harder to listen to his gut since his fucking heart had become involved.

“We need to do something with this body,” Rand said to Adam.

“The only thing I can do is put her on ice for now. Maybe Bullet will tell us where she needs to go?” In Adam’s voice were a million questions, but also a note of grief. Rand looked hard at him, but Adam’s gaze never strayed from the features of the child at his feet.

Death came to everyone, but for this child it had come brutally. “She had a bullet in her forehead before I got there. I took down a sniper at a hundred yards, and Dmitry took out the other one. Bullet got the first.”

“This wasn’t a shooter?” Rand asked.

“Nope. But she was with them, and then she wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t Bullet who killed her?” Rage whipped through Rand.

“No, it was the one I missed. Looked at me, turned, and shot her dead. Hell, she can’t be any more than thirteen, fourteen years old.” Weariness threaded through Adam’s tone.

Adam went to his haunches and gently closed the child’s eyes. “The others are where they dropped?”

“We swept the area. There were only four—these three and the one who evaded us. They tripped the wire, but I didn’t get the signal until after that first shot. And yes, they’re where they landed. I’ll get them right now.”

“Transport them all to Little Creek. Ask Commander Jones if he can have his guys work them up so I get a full report by tomorrow morning,” Rand ordered.

Adam nodded and picked up the child, holding the precious form close and moving to the basement. He’d take the child first, and then pick up the rest of the bodies.

He still had significant ties within the US military. Little Creek was a forward operating base for the Navy. Commander Jones would ensure the bodies were processed accordingly. Rand wanted answers, but he was going to do a little hunting himself.

He pulled out his phone and hit a number. Dmitry answered on the first ring.

“Where’s she headed?” Rand barked into the phone.

Dmitry grunted. “You didn’t just ask me that?”

“She’s headed for Hobbs.” Rand let out a deep breath, hoping he was wrong.

“Yes. She
borrowed
your Jag.”

It was Rand grunting now. “I’m on my way.” He rubbed his hand over his face and sighed. The woman had a death wish, it seemed.

And Rand had a nasty feeling he was going to be involved somehow.

Remi scaled the wall of the guesthouse with no problems. She was still barefoot, but clothed all in black, which matched the night sky perfectly. She’d stopped only long enough to smear dirt over her face, hands, and feet after she’d parked the car about two miles from Hobbs’ house. Then she’d made a beeline in the woods.

Logically, she knew this was wrong, outside of her intended plans, but when she’d seen Mother lying there, so still and pale against the dark marble of Rand’s foyer, something in Remi had ripped open.

“
Bayu-bey
. . ." she whispered as she settled on roof of the tiny cottage and popped up the scope on her rifle. “I see you. . ."

Her palms itched, fingers twitching with every heartbeat. Her head pounded, and the muscles of her right shoulder cramped, but she bit her lip and centered her thoughts. Inside the house, Hobbs’ oversized girth moved in the kitchen. The moron didn’t even have bullet-proof glass, a true testament to his feelings of invincibility.

Had Joseph not warned the man? Walking around freely in front of windows was just begging for one of Remi’s bullets. She slid one out of her pocket, the sounds of the night building in her ears. Mother’s tiny, beautiful face marred by a single bleeding hole in her forehead flashed across Remi’s mind, so it was Bullet who loaded the cartridge into her sniper rifle, and it was Bullet who took aim.

The wind stirred at her nape. He was there. She didn’t turn, everything focused inward. Black crept on the edge of her vision, insistent and demanding. Her muscles relaxed, and her vision constricted within the field of the scope. Hobbs pranced around his kitchen, lips moving. The strains of a song flowed from the house, a tune Bullet neither recognized, nor was concerned with.

Mother was dead. A bullet to the forehead in a manner only Minton had ever been responsible for, slightly off-center. He’d never been able to hit a target directly. He’d killed Rand’s Lily and Anna that way, bullet skewed slightly to the right.

Mother, Mother, Mother . . .
broken
.

“Don’t do it, Gretchen.” His voice was a wave crashing against the pounding need for vengeance. For a second the blackness of her rage parted, allowed in a glimmer of frosty light.

“You will never learn, will you,
Rand
,” she sneered.

His hand stroked her hair, dove into the heavy tresses as he gripped her head. “What, Gretchen? What will I never learn?”

She closed her eyes, his touch taking every desire to kill from her. Then sharp and rending, it bit back into her mind, the rage more potent, more volatile than anything she’d ever felt.

She allowed herself another few moments of his touch, and then she jerked her head from his grasp and focused on Hobbs.

“He kills them all—all the little ones. The weak and infirm. He breaks them until there is nothing left. I will not allow her killer to go free. Hobbs ordered his men there, Joseph sent Mother as a message to me.
Me
, Mr. Beckett. Perhaps—” she glanced at him beside her, wished she hadn’t. “Perhaps I should turn the gun on myself? Maybe I am to blame more than any other. So much life wasted, Mr. Beckett. She was twelve. A caretaker, a mother to the young ones.”

He stroked her cheek, taking the moisture that had fallen before she’d been able to check it. “Don’t cry, Gretchen, not here in this place.”

She hung her head. “You will never learn, Mr. Beckett, that I am Bullet. Only ever Bullet. Gretchen died on a mountain in Arequipa twenty-two years ago, and in her place I was born.”

He refused to relinquish her gaze. Her heart hurt. “She’s still there, inside you. That’s who I made love to earlier. Gretchen. Bullet wasn’t present in that bed.”

She smirked, fire racing through her veins at the memory of his body on, in and over hers. “No, Mr. Beckett. You
fucked
Bullet. Bullet is all you will ever have because there is no more.”

She hardened herself against him in that second. Nothing would deter her. Rand Beckett was a mistake . . . holding him deep in her body, sharing emotions and breaths, the worst mistakes she’d ever made. The memory of it would carry her to death, but it would haunt her every waking step.

She put her eye back to the scope and was surprised to hear a vehicle pull onto the property. A short, portly man exited a blacked-out SUV and walked directly into the residence. Hobbs seemed surprised when the man walked into his kitchen and leveled a gun at his forehead.

“Goddamn it, who is that?” Rand questioned in a furious whisper.

Bullet never pulled her eye from the scope, blood flowing sluggishly through her body, pulling in from her extremities as a very visceral reaction to the man who now stood in front of her target. It would be so fucking easy . . .

Slightly off-center to the right, Randolph Minton popped Griffin Hobbs, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in the forehead, and then calmly wiped blood spatter from his face with a pristine white handkerchief. Hobbs fell lifelessly to the ground, and Bullet tracked Minton with her scope.

She never made a shot she wasn’t assured of. Minton remained in the shadows until he stepped onto the porch and looked up directly at her. He smiled. Remi’s finger tightened on the trigger but she hesitated.

A shot rang out, pinging off the roof in front of her, and she rolled.

“Get down!” Rand yelled, and returned fire in the direction the shot had come from.

The SUV’s door closed and tires squealed as Minton left as quickly as he’d pulled in.

Remi settled, put the scope to her eye, found that shadow of blackness on the roof of the enormous house across from her, and made a kill shot.

“Two more,” she spit out as she shimmied off the roof and made her way to the woods. She fell to the ground, rolled into a tiny depression behind a tree, and readied herself.

“Six o’clock, Bullet, six o’clock. . ." she murmured.

Rand fell in beside her and said, “One at two o’clock. I think I have a shot, do you have the other one?”

She didn’t respond, just took a shot and looked at him. “Kill.”

He fired at her two o’clock, glanced at her and replied, “Kill. Now let’s get the fuck out of here.”

He made to help her up, but she was already running deeper into the woods.

“Where’re you going?” he called out.

“People are coming, Rand Beckett. You better follow me,” she called back.

It took about thirty minutes to make it back to where she’d hidden his Jaguar. The sound of sirens wailed in the near distance. She slid into the passenger seat, watched with dazed amusement as he cursed and moved the driver’s seat back, and then put the car in gear and hauled ass away from Hobbs’ house.

“Why didn’t you take the shot?”

The question she’d been dreading and known he’d ask.
Damn it.

“Minton isn’t mine to kill.” She took a deep breath, wondered why she didn’t panic when she divulged that information.

“Whose is he?”

His voice never failed to move her. It rippled through her body like a tsunami wave of heat and light. Picked her up and rearranged everything inside her, burning her even as it tore her asunder. Left feeling shaken, she craved hearing it and feared that response more than any other.

She would leave him. One way or the other, she would have no choice. Once Joseph was nothing but a memory, Remi’s life would change. She would never be able to have a normal life. People would forever hunt her, attempting to enact retribution for the loss of their lovers, spouses, fathers and sons.

She laid her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. “He is Bone’s to kill.”

“Who’s Bone?”

“Nobody to you, Mr. Beckett.” She sighed.

Each life she took weighed on her. No matter that the ones in the woods had been seeking to end hers, it was life, and she’d not created it, therefore had always wondered at her ability to take it.

The feeling of death was nothing new. It smoldered in her bones, ravaged her blood, and tasted sickly sweet sometimes, but it was never easy.

“Who are you, Bullet?” Again, she had a physical reaction to his voice. Nipples peaking, legs easing apart slightly, lower body going boneless as liquid heat flowed through her abdomen.

“
Je ne suis personne
.” Truth. She was nobody.

He sighed now. “You will not give me anything, Gretchen. I cannot help you if I don’t know what, hell
why
, you’re fighting.”

“I am not Gretchen. My name is Bullet. Use it.” Hard demand layered with the coldness of her anger at him for using that name.

“You are both, I think. Gretchen and Bullet. A complete mix of the two. Tell me, Bullet, why didn’t you kill me in Seattle?” Command rode the undercurrents of his voice now.

She softened even more and cursed herself for it. What would it be like to lie with him again? She’d never known the depth of their connection, that elemental bonding of one person’s body with hers. It had been joyous on a scale she’d never dared hope for. He had worked her body so effortlessly. A masterful lover, a beautiful man, but he would never be hers.

“You were my target, Mr. Beckett. But I never kill good men,” she whispered in the silence of the car. “You were the beginning for me on this path to redemption.”

“You aren’t responsible for my family, Gret—Bullet. I know you didn’t kill them, and you haven’t killed me or Ken. In fact, every chance you’ve gotten, you been nothing but protective of us. Why me?” Deep, dark, and so warm she wanted to sink into him.
Goddamn
his voice.

She turned her head and gazed at him. He slowly brought the car to a halt in the middle of the deserted roadway. She took a deep breath. She would give him this, but nothing more. She gasped and brought her hand to her chest, pain slicing into her, making her eyes water. Remi had already given him the biggest part, a part she’d thought long gone.