Violinist (CENTURIES series: Book #4)

21

Ice hit my veins.

Something I had never seen on Tony's face made my body flood with a sensation I couldn't determine as either fear or stone cold panic. I thought I was the only person he knew besides the homeless people he had met on the street, but as the voice behind me spoke, Tony's face painted a black color. I was wrong.

He knew this man.

As I slowly turned around, man became men. I hadn't sensed more than one person—hadn't sensed anything at all. As usual when I was with Tony, anything and everything, including myself, disappeared and was lost on me as I dove into his madness. Now, everything suddenly sharpened and turned too sensitive as I looked at no less than four men with carved faces that were staring hard at Tony and me with expressions that made my skin crawl.

The four men spread out, cornering us in inside the narrow alley. I automatically stepped back, bumping into Tony who remained more solid than stone. From wall to wall, we had perhaps fourteen feet to breathe, but the air was strangled when the four Russian men slithered up to us.

They were no ordinary thugs. Obvious foreign language aside, they were burlier than the average person, harsher molded and firmer cut. Larger. They wore nondescript clothes and the indents of their grimaces seemed almost carved.

"You thought there is such a thing as running," The man from before spoke, stepping forward with a stalk-pray approach. He spoke in a heavily accented tongue, but it was the tone of voice he used that made my stomach shrink and fill with ants. His eyes landed on Tony and pierced his oceans without a shred of fear. He wasn't scared of drowning. "You think you can run when you kill men of the russkaya mafiya?"

My heart stopped. I didn't understand Russian, but I understood one English word perfectly; Kill.

Something singed through me, and like a nauseous wave of nostalgia, it hit me.

The blood.

That night. The bloodbath. The night he showed up at my apartment. The answer to the question I had been afraid to ask, the question I had wanted to know... and thought I got my answer to.

Nobody died. Those were his words. Naïvely, I had believed them. Or had I simply chosen ignorance?

Staring up at the threatening man in front of me now, I knew either way Tony had lied to me.

Somebody had died that night.

Everything inside me screamed not to turn my back to the lethal man in front of me. Only an idiot turned their back to a predator. Still, my feet spun me around on their own, as if they couldn't stop themselves. My eyes needed to see him, needed to see the confirmation in his eyes. Was Tony a lethal man, too?

My eyes bore into his that wouldn't clip away from the man behind me, the man who had just called him a murderer. For the first time in broad daylight, I saw the soldier in him take place inside his eyes, inside his body. Gone was the tired man searching for a soul; instead there was a soldier standing headfirst in front of an enemy who was coming closer as the silence ticked by.

And I was caught in between them.

"Tony," I whispered, my heart beating frantically in my chest. So now it decided to work. The air was more taut than the men all gathered in the tiny off-sight alley, and my body was picking up on it. It was vibrating with energy and wound-up alarm bells that only grew louder as time expanded. Danger. Danger. Danger. I couldn't take it; I was succumbing to the one thing I had been trying to push through for weeks.