The Way He Broke Me (EBOOK)

He was sent to watch her. He was ordered to kill her. He did something far more dangerous.

He became obsessed.

Milo Scott doesn't feel things. He cleans crime scenes, erases evidence, and disappears bodies for the Russian Bratva—and he's the best there is. Feelings are a liability in his line of work. A death sentence.

Then a blind pianist walks through a back alley in a dead man's blood, and the world he'd spent thirty-something years building out of ice and bleach starts to crack.

Raven Oakley knows someone is following her. She knows it the way she knows everything—by sound, by scent, by the particular sensation of a dangerous presence in the dark. What she doesn't know is why. She stepped in something she shouldn't have and kept walking. That's all.

Except the Bratva doesn't believe in coincidences. And now the man assigned to surveil her is spending his nights in her shadows, doing something that will get them both killed.

He wants her.

What begins as obsession becomes possession. What becomes possession becomes something neither of them has a word for...

Someone is feeding the Feds. Shipments are getting intercepted. and suspicion has fallen on the only person who's been sitting ten feet from sensitive conversations for two years.

The woman behind the piano.

Milo is given a choice: torture her, break her, put her in the ground. Or watch Konstantin's men do it instead—and their methods make Viktor look gentle.

To save her, he'll have to become every monster she ever feared.

But Raven Oakley has never been what anyone expected.

Milo

The smell of industrial bleach hit the back of my throat like a shot of cheap vodka. It was a familiar burn, comforting in a twisted way. Most people associated the scent with laundry, or swimming pools. 

I associated it with erasing people's lives.

Reaching into my bag, I pulled latex gloves over my hands, snapping them against my wrists. The sound echoed off the marble walls in the eerie silence of the penthouse bathroom.

Beneath my boots, the expensive Italian tile was slick with blood. It pooled in the grout lines, the porous material absorbing it like a sponge. The man in the tub—or the pieces of him, anyway—hadn't gone down easy. This was messy, unprofessional work. Careless. Unplanned. Done in the heat of passion.

Pro work is clean. You put a drop cloth down. You wrap the head first. You don't let them bleed out on a white rug that cost more than a mid-sized sedan. 

Eyeing the area rug I'd rolled up and thrown in the tub, I cocked my head and studied it for a moment. Then I shrugged. Maybe it didn't cost that much. But I knew it was fucking expensive.

I didn't judge the killing. That wasn't my business. I honestly didn't give a shit who these assholes killed or why they did it. But I judged the mess they left for me. After all, everybody's got standards.

These were mine.

I sighed heavily, scratching my jaw with my shoulder to avoid smearing blood on my face.

Once again, I eyeballed the mess they'd left me. Italians were too hot-blooded for their own good sometimes.

Dad always said the hardest part of the job wasn’t the gore. It was the smell of shit when the bowels released. You get used to the blood. The brain matter. The age or sex of the victim. But you never get used to the shit. He told me that when I was nine, as I watched him scrub brain matter off a plaster wall in a Motel 6 after a suicide.

He was right about the smell and the gore, but he was wrong about everything else in life.

My jaw began to ache and I made a conscious effort to relax. Dad used to do the same thing—lock his teeth together so tight you could see the muscles jumping under his skin. It was his tell. The one thing he couldn't scrub clean. Now it was mine, and I made the conscious effort to unclench.

I reached for the bottle of specialized enzyme cleaner in my kit. The label was nondescript, but the contents inside could dissolve biological material in minutes.

As I carefully removed the cap, my cell phone buzzed in my back pocket. I ignored it. The client knew the rules. Don't call me while I'm working. I’d send a picture of the clean empty room when I was done. That was the receipt. Whoever it was would call back.

Moving my head from side to side to stretch out the tension in my neck, I caught my reflection in the mirror above the vanity.

Blonde shaggy hair fell over my forehead. Mossy green eyes stared back at me, devoid of anything resembling shock or disgust. The hoop in my left ear caught the harsh bathroom light. I looked like I belonged on a surfboard in Malibu, waiting for the swell. I looked like the guy who sold you weed at a concert and bought you a beer after.

I winked at my reflection. The guy in the mirror winked back, same easy grin he always wore. Same empty eyes.

Showtime, Milo.

I crouched, my knees popping. At thirty…something, the joints were already feeling the decades of kneeling on hard floors very similar to this one, doing the same thing I was doing now. I'd spent more time with the dead than the living in my short life. But that was okay with me. I tended to like the dead better these days.

Pouring the solvent over the largest pool of blood, I waited as it foamed white, fizzing as it ate the proteins. I watched the chemical reaction with the same detached interest I gave a weather report.

The phone vibrated against my ass again. With a heavy sigh, I peeled off a glove and answered.

"You know my rules."

"We have a situation at Silver Table," Viktor’s Russian accent sounded in my ear. "Alleyway. It's messy."

The Russians, although not as hot-headed as the Italians, could still be a bit temperamental. Yet they usually booked me for jobs ahead of time. This must've been an unplanned hit. Which meant the pay would be double. "Be there in an hour."

I hung up, finished the Italian job and gave it a final spray of bleach, then took a picture of the clean bathroom and sent it to my contact. Grabbing the trash bag, I managed to make it out of the building and into my car without being seen, shoving the bag into the trunk of my car to dispose of later.

Parking as close as I could to The Silver Table restaurant, I walked the rest of the way, passing a couple arguing on the sidewalk outside a bar. She was crying and holding one arm gingerly against her chest like she was hurt. He was trying to hold her hand.

I kept walking.

Five minutes later, I stood in the damp alley alongside the upscale Russian restaurant. This time the coppery tang of blood was mixed with the smell of borscht. A pair of legs in black trousers and fancy shoes stuck out from beneath a large trash bag. When I pulled it away, a white guy in a suit sat slumped against the dumpster, throat opened ear to ear. Arterial spray fanned across the brick across from him like abstract art.

He definitely caught someone on a bad day.

I set my heavy duffel on the asphalt and sighed. Fucking Russians were something else. They didn't even have someone out here to make sure no one found the body. 

Before I could finish that thought, or unzip the bag, the heavy steel door of the restaurant creaked open and my head snapped up. 

A woman stepped out.

She was pretty, pale, with dark hair spilling over a heavy red coat. In her right hand, she held a white cane. She tapped it rhythmically against the concrete as she carefully stepped out of the restaurant and began to walk—clack, clack, clack—humming a low, haunting tune.

I froze for a moment before I slowly rose to my full height. She didn't look at the body. She didn't look at me. Her eyes were fixed on a point in the distance that didn't exist.

And I realized she was blind.

She was also walking a straight line toward me and the corpse. The blood had pooled wide, dark and slick under the dim yellow security light. A decent man would have let her know he was there. A good man would have blocked her path.

I crossed my arms and waited.

Clack. Clack. Squish.

Her white sneaker landed dead center in the gore.

She took another step, dragging a viscous red streak across the pavement. Then she stopped. The humming died. Her head tilted, nostrils flaring slightly, and I imagined what she was experiencing in that moment. She smelled the blood. She felt the change in traction beneath her soles.

I waited for her to scream. Or at the very least, panic or freeze.

But she didn't so much as flinch. She just adjusted her grip on the cane and kept walking. Her pace didn't quicken, but she also didn't hum.

I watched her figure recede toward the main street, leaving a trail of bloody footprints in her wake that gradually got lighter and lighter the closer she got to the end of the alley. A strange sensation tightened behind my ribs, invading the hollowness that usually lived there and rippling through my chest until I could barely draw a breath.

It wasn't fear. It was…fascination.

That was new.

The door banged open again. This time Viktor stepped out. He took one look at the red trail, and cursed. His hand flew to the Makarov holstered under his jacket.

"Who was here?"

"A blind girl," I said, leaning casually against the dumpster with my hands shoved into my pockets. "Didn't see a thing. Literally."

Viktor raised the gun toward the mouth of the alley, quickly spotting the woman about to step around the corner.

I stepped into his line of sight, blocking the shot without looking like I was trying to. "She’s a civilian, Vik. And she's not a threat." He didn't so much as look at me as I continued, "Besides, killing a blind girl brings heat you don't need. Cops love a handicap case. It’s bad for business."

Viktor hesitated, his finger twitching on the trigger guard. "She works here at the restaurant." He spat on the ground, then pulled out his phone, barking rapid-fire Russian. After a moment, he hung up and glared at me.

"Boss says okay. But you let her go, so you watch her. You follow. Make sure she talks to no one."

I flashed a lazy, easy grin. "Consider it done. I'll stick to her like glue."

Viktor grunted and disappeared back inside.

Once he was gone, I looked down the alley where the darkness had swallowed her whole. I needed to scrub the pavement. I needed to disappear the body. But my eyes kept drifting to the empty space she left behind.

I wanted to find her.

Turning back to the corpse, I pulled a roll of industrial plastic from my bag. Work first. Then the fun part.