Beauty & the Beast Read Online Free PDF Page B

chair beside the dining table. Heather half-fell down into the chair.
    “Put hands on lap,” the blonde said. “Keep them there. Do not move.”
    The woman put her gun in the messenger bag—Heather lurched but realized the man could still shoot her—and grabbed up a pair of lavender latex gloves. She quickly pulled them on with a thwack . Then she trained her pistol on Ravi as the man also donned gloves.
    Heather’s pulse pounded in her head. There was only one reason for latex gloves: They didn’t want to leave fingerprints behind. That was not good. So not good.
    The room spun as the woman zip-tied Heather’s hands to the back of the chair. For a second Heather was sure she was going to faint. Or throw up. She had to keep it together. If there was one thing she had learned from all of Cat’s years as a cop, it was that you couldn’t lose it. The people who gave up were the ones who wound up dead.
    Plus all the other ones who did other wrong stuff …
    Ravi looked over his shoulder at her with mournful puppy-dog eyes as his hands and feet were likewise bound with wide, white plastic straps. “I’m so sorry, Heather,” he said in a choked voice. “I didn’t mean to get you involved in this.”
    “But you did, didn’t you?” she snapped back.
    The short man laughed, apparently amused by her surprise and anger, and the depths of Ravi’s betrayal.
    The blonde’s full mouth compressed into a thin, red-lipsticked line. Disapproval? Heather wondered. Yes, definitely disapproval. Perhaps a little nervous? Yes, almost twitchy. She looked like she could have been a model in her younger years. She had the figure and the face for it. Big blue eyes with a slight slant to them. High cheekbones. But there was nothing feminine or alluring about the way she handled the square-ended automatic. She knew what she was doing, and she had done it before.
    “You will give it to us now,” the man said to Ravi. “And we will forgive small inconwenience.”
    Yes, he was Russian and so was the woman. Heather looked at the kneeling Ravi and the man looming over him with a gun. How could someone so smart be so stupid to get caught up with the Russian mob?
    “If you make us wait,” the man went on, “give us trouble, it will be painful for you and her.”
    “Where is chip?” the woman asked. Unlike the man, her tone was not twistedly playful; it was businesslike and cold.
    “I don’t have it,” Ravi said.
    The woman glanced at the Russian man. “Where is ?” she asked.
    “I hid it.”
    The pistol in the man’s hand arced down in a gray blur. Ravi let out a groan as his head snapped sideways from the impact. Heather could see blood trickling through his hair and onto the back of his shirt collar.
    “Stop!” she cried. “What is going on?”
    “You making me angry,” the man said, once again twisting a hand in Ravi’s hair. Ravi gasped.
    “I parked it.”
    The pistol rose up again. Heather cringed. But before it came down Ravi blurted out, “I put it in the pocket of her black jacket at the party we went to last night. The left-hand pocket when she wasn’t looking.”
    “ What ?” Heather cried.
    “Where is jacket?” the woman said to Heather.
    “It wasn’t m y jacket…” The admission just seemed to pop out of her mouth. She bit her lip. She didn’t want Cat involved in this mess. She was on her honeymoon. Too late now.
    “Who has jacket then?” the woman said.
    Her sister and Vincent were en route to the other side of the country. Soon they would be on the other side of the world. For the moment at least they were out of reach, safe from harm. She wasn’t. She realized if she didn’t manage to survive she wouldn’t be able to warn them about the danger they were in.
    “It’s my sister’s,” she confessed.
    “Where is it?” the man said.
    “She took it with her. I just borrowed it because, well… I have this awful rash and…” She looked down at her front. Her top had been yanked down when