Daemon’s Mark by Caitlin Kittredge (web ebook reader .TXT) 📕

up by his ankles like the pig he was, and I’ll kill you, too, and anyone else who attempts to step between my family and our livelihood.

“Now, I’ve only paralyzed you,” Grigorii said. “Just a small working to keep you still, but completely reversible. Here are my terms.” He pushed my shirt up and caressed one of my breasts. “You allow me to fuck you raw, and I’ll let your big friend outside leave unharmed with the information he needs to find his child. Or I will have you both killed. What’s your choice?”

I pantomimed trying to talk, although everything above the neck seemed to be working, including my brain, which was clouded with rage to a screaming degree. Grigorii sighed. “Don’t struggle. Let me release the working. You’ll just burst a blood vessel and then it will be like having my pleasure with a coma patient.”

Charming. I’d run into plenty of witches, but not one who could paralyze with just a touch. Grigorii was extraspecial talented. Wasn’t I lucky?

The numbness eased, electricity retreating from my nerves, but Grigorii kept his hand on me, holding me down. I wriggled my hand under my body, hoping that he would be otherwise occupied.

“Speak up,” Grigorii said. “What choice have you made?”

My hand closed on the Walther where it was pinned under my body and I drew it, scraping a line along my own back. “Get your fucking hands off me.”

I struck with the pistol butt, but Grigorii was faster and leaped backward, making me miss his temple. The gun slammed into his nose and he screamed, blood spattering my face with the warmth of spring rain.

Dmitri banged the door open and came in, grabbing Grigorii in a sleeper hold before he could react. “Luna,” he said. “Get something to tie him with.”

My legs were quivering, and I was still freezing, as if I’d just stood outside naked in a snowstorm, but I jumped up and slammed the door before ripping the phone cord out of the wall.

Dmitri and I tied Grigorii up and Peter, too, just to be on the safe side. “You okay?” Dmitri asked me quietly. “I need to break anything off of him?”

I looked at Grigorii, who stared back at me calmly. He even smiled, blood flowing freely from his mangled nose, over his lips and teeth. “You and I both know that nothing happened you didn’t really want, Joanne.”

“What’s he talking about?” Dmitri snarled. I shook my head.

“Nothing.” Grigorii’s violation wasn’t something I needed Dmitri riding cavalry on. I didn’t want to spend another second in the compound, didn’t want to remember what I’d had to do to get away the first time.

There was a laptop sitting closed on the desk, and I booted it up. I was confronted with a blinking login screen.

“Password?” I said to Grigorii.

He smirked at me. “Perhaps I’ll trade it for a kiss.”

Dmitri grabbed the Walther and I grabbed Dmitri, trying to deflect his aim from Grigorii’s head. “No!” I snapped. “This is not how we’re doing things!” Not that the prick didn’t deserve it. My finger lodged against the trigger and the gun spoke, a shot going into the wall next to Grigorii’s head. It missed by maybe an inch. He flinched, coughing on plaster dust.

“Password?” I said, wresting the gun from Dmitri’s grip.

“That shot has drawn everyone in the building,” said Grigorii. “You should be less concerned about the password than about your dramatically shortened lives.”

Great job there, Dmitri. “We need to go,” I told him.

“Masha…” he started.

“We’ll find Masha,” I said, jerking the laptop’s power cord from the wall and shoving the computer into Dmitri’s hands. Shouts sounded from down the hall, running footsteps. I knew the cadence of a frantic pursuit all too well, seeing as I was usually on the other end of one.

“What about him?” Dmitri said, jerking his head at Grigorii.

“Yes, white knight,” said Grigorii. “What about me? Justice must be served, swift and merciless as a sword blade.”

“He talks too damn much, is what,” I said to Dmitri. “Now, move your ass. I’m not getting caught here again.”

We bolted down the hall, eschewing the elevator for the fire stairs. Outside, into the car, tires squealing as vertigo pulled against my stomach. Dmitri drove for a long time, through twisting back streets, past Orthodox churches with steeples flying like hot-hair balloons against the gray sky, fountain squares that could have been snapshots at high speed on a postcard, old Soviet blocks that had their own square, postmodern beauty.

“We sightseeing?” I asked. Dmitri checked his rearview mirror.

“Making sure that we don’t have a tail. The mob is tenacious, even more than American cops.” He gave me a pointed look.

“I’m not really in the mood for banter,” I said. Lola, Anna, Red, Deedee, even Charlie. “They’re all still in that place. Those girls.”

“And now we have evidence,” Dmitri said. “Isn’t that what you live for? The evidence?”

“You know, Grigorii and Ekaterina aren’t just going to let us have this,” I said. “We can’t go back to your pack house.”

“Kirov will meet us at a hotel room,” he said. “The Redbacks have a few safe houses scattered around.”

“And we need someone who can break into this computer,” I said.

“I’ll see if Kirov knows anyone,” he said.

“Trustworthy,” I said. “No one weird or fly-by-night. Chances are the Belikovs have some kind of dead man’s switch on the hard drive. If we screw up cracking it, the whole thing will wipe.”

“Always the optimist,” Dmitri said, pulling in to the parking lot of a small hotel.

“I do my best,” I told him.

CHAPTER 19

The hotel was a small pocket of civilization in the long parade of urban underbellies that had become my life. It was boutique and old, stuffy and full of velvet and Persian rugs, but it was clean, warm and didn’t smell like bodily fluids.

The old man minding the front desk passed over a key without a word, giving me the eye. I gave it right back, until he dropped