Page 65 of Kept in the Dark (Hitmen of Ulysses #2)

Nicole

A couple that stabs together

One time in New York, I got clipped in the eyebrow by a patient’s elbow when he was fighting being sedated.

I remember the crack of pain—how the sound registers long before the feeling of the impact—and how my vision swam.

Even a glancing blow makes your ears ring, blinds you, and makes it hard to think through the agony.

Before today, that’s the closest I’ve come to being intentionally hit in the face.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I started crying as soon as I could get a full breath in after his first blow landed on my cheek.

The pain was white-hot. Unreal. Even now, moments later, it throbs and burns, too sharp to ignore.

I can feel blood trickling down my cheek from where he broke the skin with the butt of his gun.

The cocaine seems to be making Kyle strong, but wobbly and imprecise—while painful, he didn’t break more than just skin.

The second blow to my stomach didn’t hurt quite as bad, but it did knock the wind out of me and cause panic to set in when I couldn’t draw a complete breath for several long seconds. The fear that instilled hasn’t dulled. My heart is going to explode out of my chest.

I don’t want to die.

Luckily, that was as far as he got into his interrogation before the elevator dinged. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like I’m going to like who I find behind that door .

“And here they are,” Kyle announces to me with a horrible, smug smile as the penthouse elevator arrives at the top floor. “My backup. You’re not going to like these guys. They know exactly how to make a bitch like you—”

I never gave much thought to what the Grim Reaper would look like.

They sell you on this idea of a hooded figure—a skeleton, usually, with a scythe—but after everything I’ve seen in the ER and years of trauma cases and the messy, awful sides of humanity, that image always felt a bit too clean .

And now I know why. Any personification of Death that I’d believe in would have to be… bloodier.

The elevator chimes and the doors part, revealing a single, enormous figure in shades of darkness and violence; a man, wearing black, covered in blood.

His skin is streaked with crimson, his face is splattered, and still more blood is dripping from the tips of two sharp knives—one in each hand—pointed down at the ground.

He’s surrounded by a ring of bodies on the floor, slowly and fatally leaking their insides into pools of ruby red.

He’s the Angel of Death. Justice with a blade. The reckoning of… Kyle.

God, that would have sounded so much cooler if the bad guy wasn’t named Kyle.

I know it’s Dimitri before I recognize him through all the gore. My soul sees him. My heart soars, and I nearly cry as relief swells and rushes out of me, taking all the ugliest feelings with it.

Dimitri barely waits for the doors to open all the way before he strikes, and the way he moves melts my brain. He bends the laws of physics, I’m pretty sure, because momentum and energy conservation and gravity… they just don’t seem to work the way I think they do anymore.

He takes a running leap that lands him almost all the way across the room, within reach of Kyle.

He drops to the ground and kicks out his leg with a spin, knocking Kyle off his feet before the man can even react to what’s happening.

As Kyle falls, Dimitri pops back up just far enough to drive one of his knives into Kyle’s stomach and smash him into the floor with it.

Kyle’s head slams back against the floor, and he screams in pain, but Dimitri doesn’t stop. He takes Kyle’s arm and stabs him through the hand, driving his knife into the hardwood through flesh and bone. He does the same thing to the other as Kyle writhes and curses and cries.

“Stay,” Dimitri growls as he rises to his feet.

If I weren’t taped to a chair, I’d probably be picking my jaw up off the floor. Did I just witness a real-life superhero in action? No one should be able to move like that.

He approaches me, chest heaving, eyes wild, fury still written into his features, and his face still dripping with the blood of I don’t know how many people…

Not the superhero. The supervillain.

In that instant, I’m afraid. He doesn’t look real, or human, or sane. He stalks towards me, and my body wants to shrink away. My stomach drops.

And then, when he’s within a foot of me, he falls to his knees. “Nicole,” he whispers, broken, hands hovering like he doesn’t know where to touch in case he hurts me.

It’s all I can take. I dissolve into tears, and he disappears in a blur of color behind the water. I want to reach for him, but my arms are tied. I want to scream his name, but I can’t speak through the choked noises my mouth is making.

Dimitri carefully slides his knife under the layers of tape.

With a series of short, loud rips, I’m free, and I fall from the chair right into his arms, sobbing.

Heavy, ugly, loud sounds escape me that I do nothing to try to control.

He wraps his arms around me, hugging me tightly, and I melt against him.

From the way his body shakes, I think he might be crying, too .

“You came,” I sob.

“I will always come for you,” he promises, the words coming out muffled in my hair.

“I knew you’d come,” I say, over and over, clutching at him in an effort to get as close to him as possible.

We find each other’s lips and pour ourselves into the union.

My cheek is pounding, my head aches, and my stomach feels like one giant bruise, but right now I don’t care.

I wrap my arms around his neck, and he cups a hand behind my head.

I want to stay here like this always, melding with him, connected and safe. I resent needing air.

Eventually, he pulls back, and his hand comes around to cup my jaw, thumb ghosting beneath what is probably a nasty cut and bump from the butt of Kyle’s gun.

“I was so scared,” I confess, eyes filling back up with tears.

“I know,” he croons. “I told you. I take care of what is mine. That means I will always come for you. You are safe. He cannot harm you or anyone else.”

That phrase snaps me out of it, making my whole body tense with an urgent memory. I scramble to my feet, out of Dimitri’s lap, and he rises smoothly next to me. He opens his arms to receive me, but I shoot past him towards the other room.

“Nicole?” he says softly, confused as he follows.

The door of the bedroom slams against the wall, denting it, and I make a horrified noise. Just as I feared, there’s a dead body on the bed—a mostly naked woman with a bullet hole in her forehead, lying next to a small puddle of vomit. Kyle killed her for daring to throw up on him.

I sob again and feel Dimitri spin me and tuck me against his chest to protect me from what I can’t unsee.

I’ve seen death before. I’ve even seen violent death before, but this was… cruel, and senseless. I’m reminded of my conversation with Dimitri on the boat, which feels like years ago. I didn’t realize how much I believed what I said until this exact moment.

Not everyone deserves to die. Some people deserve to suffer.

I lean back against the arm bracing my back. “Give me your knife.”

Without so much as a questioning look, he takes a clean one from a holster in his belt and offers it up, letting it dangle by the circle cutout at the end of the handle.

I grab it, careful of the sharp blade, and step around Dimitri.

Kyle is still moving on the floor, though it’s clearly painful and taking a lot of effort.

He’s bleeding freely from the stab wound in his stomach, and he can’t do anything about it with his hands skewered like that.

I feel a little thrill seeing the fear in Kyle’s eyes as I come into view.

“Will it kill him, where your knife went in?” I ask Dimitri, gesturing to the wound in Kyle’s stomach. I could check for myself, but I don’t want to get that close yet.

“Fuck you both!” Kyle screams. “I’m going to fucking kill you—my family will kill you and everyone you love! Let me go and fight me like a real fucking man—”

I can feel Dimitri’s presence at my back. “Eventually,” he says softly. Surprisingly, it’s easy to hear him despite Kyle’s screams. “I wanted his death to be slow and painful.”

The words make me shiver, but there’s no horror in my body’s response to the remorseless malice. I look at Kyle and feel only hatred. I tune out his vitriol as I approach and nearly smile when he shrinks away.

“Do not straddle his leg,” Dimitri coaches from behind me. “Do not hesitate, just strike—and use more force than you think you have to.”

I swallow, gripping the handle. My hand trembles. I want to stab him so badly. I want him to sit in the fear he inflicted on me. I want him to suffer the same helplessness and hopelessness he made me feel using violence and sexual threats .

Kyle curls in on himself, even as he shouts obscenities at me from the floor.

I find my target, adjust my grip so the slippery, bloody handle of the knife won’t cause a problem, and strike.

I use more force than I think I have to, and I’m met with a sickening resistance that gives way to a satisfying yielding of muscle and skin.

His screams ramp up, higher and more fearful than they’ve been yet, then the noise cuts out. He’s passed out.

“Yes. She stabbed him in the cock,” I hear Dimitri say, and I know he’s not talking to me. There’s a deep chuckle, a surprisingly happy sound amid this macabre scene. “Wesley says that because we are a couple that stabs together, we should stay together. I like it.”

In my shock at the realities of how it felt to stab someone—the force, the smell of his blood, the sound of skin splitting—I released the handle of the knife. Now, I reach for it, jerk it upwards, and stare down at the spreading stain of blood in the crotch of his pants for an instant.

“We need to get out of here,” Dimitri says, laying a heavy, warm hand on my shoulder. Despite the blood soaking him, I can still smell his true scent. It stings my nose and feels like home. “What about Kyle?”

We stare down at Kyle. His chest is rising and falling, barely, and the blood has started soaking into the hardwood. I consider what Dimitri asked.

What about Kyle?

Will he die on his own? Should we leave him? I know Dimitri’s question is partially an offer to handle the situation for me. He might as well have asked, What part do you want to play, Nicole?

Well… what do I want to do?

I look up at my man. His eyes meet mine, fierce and proud, dipping to my swollen cheek and hardening in anger. That one brief look speaks volumes and lights me on fire from the inside .

I’m done with this shit—Kyle, the USB, all of it. I think I’d even like to kill him, but he might still have some value to us. Though I’m not sure it’s strictly necessary for him to be alive for this next idea…

“Let’s frame him for my kidnapping.”

His brows shoot up. “What?”

“We can… plant the drive on him. Anyone in his family that’s still alive will assume he took it, and it’ll be in police lockup before they realize the money was transferred away anyway, right?

And that way, I have an excuse for where I’ve been all this time that has nothing to do with you.

It’s a good idea, right? It protects all of you.

” And maybe one day I can even rejoin the real world here in Ulysses.

He lifts his hand, rubbing the backs of his knuckles against my unmarred cheek. “Are you certain, Nicole? It will not be easy. Lying to the police is not simple, and you will have to face them alone—”

I reach for his hand and hug it to my chest. “It’ll be worth it to stay with you.”