Infernal: Bite The Bullet by Jess Raven, Paula Black Page B

wall, bringing the gun up
quickly as I confronted the man slumped against my door jamb.
    It wasn’t the Detective.
    “How the hell did you get in?” I demanded.
    My hands shook and I was swallowing my tongue in a
bid to get some kind of threat out.
    He beat me to it, his accent rumbling through the
quiet of my apartment.
    “Put the gun down, Neva. I just came for my things
and I’ll be out of your life for good,” Konstantyn said.
    That’s what every murderer said, right before he
had his hands wrapped around your throat. But his voice did make me lower my
gun. It was broken and ragged, and I frowned, peering closer. I flicked on the
hallway lamp but immediately regretted it.
    “Oh my God. What happened? You’re bleeding.” The
man before me was badly beaten, his clothes torn, and he was dripping blood as
well as rainwater on my welcome rug.
    Shit.
    Konstantyn weaved on his feet, and that was the
decider. I set the gun on the hall table and moved towards him, one palm
pushing the door shut as my other hand gripped his arm in a paltry show of
support. He was clearly weakened, the strength that normally radiated from him
now puddling in a crimson stain on my floor.
    “Come on,” I said gently, trying to lead him
inside. It was like moving a bull, even weak as he was. He shrugged me off, and
my hand came away bloody.
    “It’s not safe for you with me. I take the stuff
and go.”
    “You won’t make it past the threshold. Now sit
down before you keel over.” This time when I tugged at him, he let me get him
as far as the living room before he put the brakes on.
    “I will ruin your couch,” he said. He held out his
hands to me and they were red, wet. I was probably insane, but my heart
clenched in sympathy for the pain he must be in, for the pain he was hiding.
    “Here.” I grabbed the throw from the back of the
sofa and flicked it out to cover the cushions. “I’ll use it to wrap your body
if you die on me.”
    That got me a smirk. It was a comforting sight. If
he was strong enough to be amused, hopefully he was strong enough to not die on
me. Moving his body would be a bitch.
    Reluctantly, he sat down.
    “Let me look.” I motioned at the blood seeping
through his t-shirt, the same one he’d had on from earlier.
    “It’s nothing,” he gruffed. “Superficial wounds.”
    My ass they were superficial. “Who did this to
you? We have laws in this country about police brutality, you know.”
    He shook his head and his soft smile told me I was
being stupid, like he’d dealt with this before. “Dante respects no law but his
own.”
    “And who is Dante?” I probed at a bleeding patch
and he hissed, batting me away.
    “An old friend.”
    Right. Most friends went out for drinks. “A
friend? So what, you decided to carve each other up for old times’ sake? We
need to get you to a hospital.” From what I’d seen, he needed to be
professionally tended, and I’d only caught a glimpse of what lay beneath his
shirt.
    “No hospitals,” he said roughly, twitching away
from my hands again. “He wasn’t trying to have me killed. They let me go with just
a reminder.”
    “A reminder of what?” I wrapped my fingers in a
shred of his shirt to hold him still.
    He glared at me, but didn’t move. “That I belong
to him.”
    “Belong? Like a slave?”
    He sucked in a breath as I peeled back the fabric
of his shirt. Crusting blood had made it stick to his skin in spots.
    “Oh my God.” I wished I hadn’t pushed him into
letting me see, because the damaged they’d done made my gorge rise. Carved in
his abs was that same symbol I’d seen on all the victims in those photographs.
An obscene, blood-drawn corruption of a symbol of peace. My mind flashed to
those pictures of my brother, and if I’d had anything in my stomach, I would
have lost it.
    Focus, Neva. This man is not your brother.
    Black bruising spread over his skin in blotches,
worse than I’d imagined, ink-blot stains on his ribs and stomach that