Blood Kiss - Ward J. R. (чтение книг .txt) 📗

In all the ways they could have crashed and burned … what a mess.

And frankly, she wasn’t sure she wanted to work it out with him even if that was possible.

Lust, she told herself. She had been in lust with him, not love. How did you fall in love with someone after six nights, anyway.

God, she wanted to vomit, she really did.

Twenty minutes later, she was dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a cashmere sweater. She put on her regular loafers, because although it was cold, there wasn’t snow forecasted yet; then she took out the coat she’d worn the night before. Putting the photograph back in the pocket, she snagged her wallet, her cell and her—

Over on the bedside table, the house phone rang. Going over, in case her father was calling to check up on her from his work, she picked the receiver up. “Hello?”

“You have a visitor.”

She frowned at the voice on the other end. “Anslam?”

“Yup, it’s me,” he said easily. “Peyton told me to come get you.”

“He did? But I’m not going to Sal’s yet. I’ve got to do an errand first.”

“I’ll go with you, then.”

“No, thanks. It won’t take me long—”

“Are you coming down?”

Oh, for godsakes. But she didn’t want to be rude. “Yup. Hold on.”

“Don’t hurry on my account.”

Hanging up, she double-checked her hair and then left her room. As she headed for the front stairs, she hoped she could get Anslam out the door fast. She felt like hell because of the fight with Craeg, and all that yuck was compounded because she couldn’t believe she’d spaced taking that Polaroid from the scene without telling anybody.

As well as the very real possibility the investigation was going to have to focus on the trainees.

Cresting the grand staircase, she saw Anslam standing down below on the black-and-white marble floor, his Saks Fifth Avenue clothes and his Gucci cologne announcing what class he was in as much as his even, rather unremarkable features did.

There was something just so … pasty about him, she thought.

How he’d gotten that reputation for being aggressive with females she had no clue.

When a step creaked beneath her foot, Anslam turned to face her. “Hey, girl,” he said. “You look good.”

“Thanks, so do you.”

When she got to the bottom and he opened his arms, she went to him and kissed him on both cheeks. “Listen, I’m sorry, but I’m really just going to—”

A strange sound let off in her father’s study, and she frowned, looking toward it. It was a kind of squeak, or a—

“You were going to go do an errand?” Anslam asked. “What kind of errand?”

She refocused on him. “It’s nothing important. I just … what is that noise?”

Turning away from him, she walked forward and glanced around the ornate jamb of the library’s archway—

“Oh, my God!”

Her father’s butler, Fedricah, and her maid, Vuchie, were tied up in front of the desk, their mouths gagged, their feet bound.

“What in the world happened—”

Anslam grabbed her from behind and spun her around, tripping her up and slamming her face-first into the floor. As the shock and pain momentarily stunned her, he flopped her onto her back. Putting his face in hers, he looked mildly annoyed.

“Where’s the photograph. What the fuck did you do with my photograph?”

While she tried to recover her bearings and pinwheeled her arms and legs, he roughly went through her pockets.

“Ah, good girl.” He put the Polaroid inside his suede jacket. “Goddamn it, Paradise—why the fuck did you have to find that? I don’t want to have to do this to a female like you. It’s not part of the plan.”

Swallowing, she tasted blood and realized that her lip was split. “You don’t … need to do this…”

With a quick surge, he hopped up on his feet and disappeared for a moment—and when he came back, he had a Louis Vuitton briefcase with him. “Yeah, I do have to do this. Because you were going to try to take that Polaroid to your father—that’s what you told Peyton. And you’re such a good little girl, so conscientious, that you’re not going to let it go and you’re going to start thinking about the connection—and sooner or later, you’re going to sneak into the cafeteria and you’re going to go through my shit because you’d realize that someone in the training center must have dropped that photo on the bus and also taken it out of your bag. Nice satchel, by the way. Love Bally. Good stuff.”

As he kept talking, Anslam took out a syringe. “See, because I’m attached to my work, I need to keep some part of it with me always, and pictures are the next best thing, don’t you agree? Just fantastic for spiking the memory. Anyway, that’s when you’d put two and two together—when you found more just like it in my bag. Then I’d be fucked—and I assure you, I am never the bottom in relationships.”

As he tested that the clear fluid was live in the thin needle, her brain threatened to recede on her, the pain, the shock, the confusion, twisting and tying up her neuropathways, making any significant thought patterns impossible.

Except then she remembered what she’d been trained to do in sparring class: You got focused, you stayed focused. Got focused, stay focused.

This was not a training exercise, though—in fact, this was precisely what those lessons were supposed to prepare her for.

Not a class. No one to rescue her.

But herself.

All at once her mind went super-sharp: She was as good as dead if he injected her with whatever that was, and she was going to have only one chance at an escape.

Making a show of being helpless, she surreptitiously looked around for a weapon, something, anything she could use—

“Think of this as a compliment,” he said as he looked down at her. “I’m really sure you’d eventually figure out it was me, because you’re pretty fucking smart, for a girl—”

With a powerful lunge, she reared up and head-butted him right in the face. It was her only move—and she nailed him dead to rights: Anslam howled with pain and anger and fell back on his ass, clutching his nose. And she was on him, pouncing on his chest, ripping the syringe out of his hand. Depressing the plunger so the drug emptied into thin air, she tossed it aside.

With no time to spare.

Anslam roared and punched her shoulders, popping her up off him. And his next move was to clock her so hard in the jaw with his fist, she literally heard bells ringing and her vision flickered. But she couldn’t afford to check out as he jumped onto her. Fighting through the pain and disorientation, she reached between the two of them and went for his ’nads, grabbing them and twisting her grip until he screamed and wrenched to the side.

Up on her feet, she went to kick him, but he caught her ankle and flipped her off her feet.

They began to roll, and in the back of her mind, she heard Butch saying that all hand-to-hand combat ended up on the ground; it was only a matter of time.

Torquing herself around, she prevented him from doing an arm bar on her, but she also failed to get him into a headlock with her thighs. A weapon, she needed—the briefcase. If she could somehow get them over there …

He was stronger than she was. She was faster than he was. Their bodies flopped on the hard floor, arms and legs straining, fists getting worked into torsos, more blood getting drawn on faces.

And then it happened. He somehow managed to pin her by the throat with both hands—and then he drove the back of her head into the marble floor once, twice …

Fuck you! she mouthed, because she had no air.

Reaching up to his eyes, she thumbed into their sockets—

He disappeared.

Anslam just up … and disappeared.

For a split second, she braced herself, ready for some pummeling to hit her. But then she heard a horrible scream.

Looking up, she saw Anslam … levitating off the floor, his face twisted into a horrific expression of terror, blood pouring out of his mouth in a gush, feet kicking uselessly as his legs twitched.