Now the reflection in the window showed a man straining for control. The cords in his strong neck stood out, his jaw was tight with tension, muscles bunching along the jawline.
His power struck her anew. Though he didn’t tower over her, his shoulders were almost twice the width of hers. Looking down at his hand cupping her, she saw the taut, thick, sinewy muscles of his forearm, wildly erotic against her belly. He slid his hand further, fingers stroking her labia, his hand rocking back and forth in a silent request for better access.
Of course. She didn’t even think twice, merely widened her legs further. Whatever Drake wanted, she’d give him.
He fit himself to her, big, blunt, hot. She braced herself because that first entry was always slightly painful, no matter how aroused she was.
He was watching her face carefully in the dark glass. He must have seen her slight wince. He didn’t move forward as she expected he would. He merely waited, poised at the mouth of her sheath, breathing so heavily against her that she could see her hair sway in the dark pane.
His jaw muscles worked. “Not yet,” he muttered, watching her eyes. “Press up against the window.”
Grace could barely understand his guttural tones. “What?”
“Lean against the window. Now.”
His voice was low, utter male command. She obeyed instinctively.
She sharply drew in a breath as the entire front of her body met the cold window, hands splayed, breasts, hips, legs meeting the icy pane. He crowded right behind her, like a huge hairy man-furnace. The two extremes of temperature somehow excited her, her nipples puckering with the cold.
Shockingly, he reached down and opened her with his fingers, nudging her forward with his hips. His fingers had exposed her clitoris, which was pressed against the freezing window. She registered the chill against her sensitive flesh in exactly the same second as he entered her, his penis a huge, hot column heating her up from the inside out. Her entire body went into overdrive.
She gave a cry as he started moving, hot and hard inside her, pressing her against the freezing window, a raging furnace at her back and inside her. His movements were hard, almost harsh, on the edge of being painful but…not.
She lifted her eyes to look at their reflection, his face grim as he moved in and out of her, the thrusts fast and hard. Their eyes met and she was shocked at her expression, eyes unfocused, mouth open, throat arching back against him. The very picture of a woman in sexual ecstasy, reduced to her animal nature.
A keening sound filled the room and it took her seconds to recognize it as her own voice. It was unlike any sound she’d ever heard herself make, an animal cry. She wasn’t even feeling the cold of the window any more, her entire body was suffused with heat, she was burning up alive.
With a thrust that drove her to her toes, Drake grunted and started coming, swelling even larger, his thrusts irregular and fast as his breath huffed in and out. It felt like he wanted to punch her right through the window. She looked down at the shops and people and cars, the busy street of a great metropolis.
Grace came with a cry, every hair on her body standing up, shaking with pleasure. Suddenly, her senses expanded. As she looked down, it was as if the window had disappeared and she had become one with the people she could see hurrying along the streets, one with the snow drifting down from the sky, one with the energy of the city, pulsing in her fingertips.
She was no longer Grace Larsen, separate and alone and somehow always apart. In one electric pulse, she became one with everything around her, as her body convulsed and shook.
Across the seventy-five feet of a Manhattan street and slightly to the north, giving him an oblique shot, Rutskoi watched the two figures through his thermal scope.
Drake and the woman. It could only be them. One slender, the other not much taller but much broader.
Naked.
Fucking.
He watched the fiery red-and-blue bodies writhing in the small circle of his scope, completely unmoved.
Rutskoi liked sex just as much as the next man, maybe more. He’d blown half his first paycheck as a newly minted lieutenant on whores in Grozny, celebrating staying alive for one whole month by staying drunk and with his dick in a prostitute for days at a time. But on the job, it all went away. He felt nothing on the job—not lust, nor hunger nor thirst nor exhaustion. All he felt now was the deep sniper’s calm, a oneness with the ground and the rifle and the scope.
The woman was now flattened against the window by the weight of Drake’s body and Rutskoi’s finger tightened slightly. Christ, she was in his sights. Right there, in the crosshairs.
A 4-kilogram pull on the trigger, double the pull on a beer can, and his.50 caliber bullet would travel at 2500 kilometers per hour toward the red and green and yellow outlines shimmering through the thermal imager.
But he had no way of knowing how thick Drake’s windows were and at this angle of inflection, he had no guarantee that it would penetrate or, if it penetrated, whether it would pass through the woman to Drake.
So he watched the fiery figures writhe and told himself to hold his fire, watched the woman’s hands outstretched on the glass like five-fingered flames as Drake fucked her from behind.
They would be in his sights at a straighter angle soon enough.
He could wait.
For 10 million dollars, he could wait for as long as it took.
November 24
Early morning
Blood. Blood and the bleak darkness of violence. Blood was everywhere. It came up to her ankles, deep red, glistening in the darkness. So dense it dragged at her feet.
Her heart beat fast, like a trapped animal’s. Danger was close, she could feel it, she could almost smell it. In the distance was a faint light. Not the white light of hope, but merely a slight lifting of the penumbral gloom. She could barely see. The darkness was oppressive, close and dank.
Her skin prickled in animal warning. Something was there. Something alive, something ferocious. There was cruelty here, vast cruelty and a love of death. Death was a thick pall in the air.
She looked down at where she was walking. Under the lake of blood, her feet bumped against obstacles, odd shapes. It was hard to keep her balance, though she knew she had to move quickly. The menace was close, coming closer. Her muscles screamed at her to run, but she couldn’t, it was like walking over stones barefoot. She tripped and almost fell. At her feet something rose to the surface, bobbing. As it rose, small pale points appeared, like a mountain rising up from the primordial mud. A white tip, then smooth waxen surfaces that resolved themselves in nose, lips, cheeks, eyes. Black blood-streaked hair flowed from the smooth pale forehead.
A severed woman’s head, bobbing in the red blood.
She tried to scream, but there was no breath in her lungs, no air to be found in this airless, soulless place.
He was coming. She didn’t know who he was, but she knew what he was. He was cruelty, he was death, with a vast gaping hole where his heart should be. And he was coming for her.
The blood at her feet stirred, started moving like a sluggish river. Whatever was coming was big—big enough to sweep everything before it.
There was no place to hide. The lake of blood stretched out to infinity. Now she could see broken bits of bodies rising to the surface. A hand, outstretched, as if asking for help for a body that was no longer there. A foot, still clad in a shoe. Another head, popping up like a balloon, then subsiding.
She was walking through a bloody river of death.
The blood was flowing faster now. Darkness fell suddenly, as if something behind her was covering the feeble light on the horizon. Whatever was coming for her was huge.