She always smiled at him as she came into the room, her bow of a mouth, lips full and red without adornment, curving into a soft smile that didn’t quite reach her blue eyes. He’d thought about her mouth far too much. The shape of it. The way her lips appeared satin soft, giving him one too many fantasies. Leaving him restless at night. He could sleep anywhere, any time. He’d learned it was necessary in his line of work, but nearly impossible with her haunting his dreams.
Small white teeth flashed at him, while her eyes studied him. Carefully. Taking in everything. He was tall, wide-shouldered, but lean. That was one of the many gifts he had. That leanness allowed him to gain weight overnight or shed it, depending on the role he played. His sinewy body was deceptive in that it hid the enormous strength he had. He carried not an ounce of fat on him and was athletic. He was all muscle, with long ropes of sinew below his skin.
He had scars. A lot of them. Not, strangely enough, from his profession. He wasn’t a man to get caught – most of the time. Most of the scars were from his training. It had been brutal, there in the schools he attended. He had been difficult. Defiant. He took to the weapons and hand-to-hand combat training with ease. Excelling. He was very good at his seduction training. But schooling, languages, that bored the hell out of him. Still, he learned, because if one didn’t, one died.
He had learned to torture and what it felt like to be tortured. He’d never forget the feel of knives slicing into his flesh. The burns. The electrical shocks. Sometimes, he woke in the night, sweat pouring from his body, his gun in his fist, the taste of blood in his mouth from biting down hard to keep from making a sound.
His parents had been murdered for their politics – they’d been too outspoken about the reforms that were needed in their country. His parents loved Russia and wanted to see the government work for its people. Instead, a hit squad had come calling. Casimir and his six brothers had been taken to the schools.
The man running the schools, Kostya Sorbacov, hadn’t wanted to take a chance on them being loyal to one another so had separated them. He wanted their loyalty to him, to his orders. He was the power behind the throne.
The brutality and sheer cruelty of the training methods employed had ensured that many of the students, most like him – sons or daughters of those killed for their opposition – had died during training. Others – like him – learned not to feel. Never to show emotion. He became exactly what they wanted, because if he didn’t, they would kill one of his brothers. He knew what kind of death that would be. Slow. Tortured. He’d seen – and learned – how to administer that kind of death.
Like their parents, each of the Prakenskii brothers had psychic gifts. Those gifts were strong and enabled them to survive and thrive in the brutal environment. He had survived, but sometimes, like now, he wondered at what cost. He had no home, no name, no past and no future. He moved through the world, slipping in and out of identities, and none of them were real. Not. A. Single. One.
He kept his gaze on his target while he went over the facts of his prey in his mind. The woman now called herself Lissa Piner. She’d been born Giacinta Abbracciabene and had fled Sicily nearly six years earlier and gone to the United States where she’d become Lissa Piner. She’d joined a therapy group for women who had lost a family member to murder and felt responsible for that murder. He didn’t understand why she would feel responsible – she’d been a child when her parents were murdered – but in a way he was glad she had.
During those sessions she’d met five other women she’d become fast friends with. In fact, they’d developed a family and bought a farm together. Lissa was a loner. She hadn’t allowed anyone into her life until she’d met those women. He liked that she had them. He knew what it was like to live completely alone, off the grid, living a lie. He would die that way, without friends or family. He was glad she wouldn’t.
She was coming toward him. Into the room. His body recognized the fact that she was in the vicinity, long before he actually saw her. She radiated heat. Maybe it was the hair, all that glorious hair, or the passion inside her she kept bottled up and contained. He saw it. He felt it. She could hide it from everyone else but not from him.
Lissa Piner walked right up to him. Close. So close his lungs filled with her scent. The fragrance was elusive, barely there, just enough for a man to want to get even closer so he could pull more of her natural perfume deeper. He couldn’t remember the name of the flower it reminded him of.
Her eyes, that vivid, vibrant blue, remained steady on his face. On his eyes. He wore contacts, of course, dark brown ones, to fit with his image of dark hair. She had to tilt her head up to look him in the eye. He kept the scars and his hair hidden from the world. Tomasso Dal Porto didn’t have those scars or that silver-streaked hair.