Elektra Read Online Free Page A

to read. “That is my point,” he said. He sounded like a teacher explaining something for the tenth time to a student who just didn’t get it. “I can’t teach you.” He paused. “I want you to go,” he finally said.
    She grinned with relief and stood up a little straighter. “On a mission? I agree, Sensei. Who do you want me to… uh, what do you do you want me to do?”
    He waited to answer until Elektra started to become uncomfortable a second time. “Not a mission,” he said softly. “Just… leave. Get out.” He gave a curt nod that seemed more to support his own position than anything else. With his back ramrod straight and his light-colored eyes still focused on nothing she could see, Stick might as well have been made of ice. His next words confirmed his sudden coldness toward her.
    She suddenly felt suffocated as she tried to fathom what he was saying. This couldn’t be true, it couldn’t. This camp—it was the only place she had now, the only place she belonged…or at least the closest she could come. To lose that on top of losing her father and Matt…it was devastating. What good was it to come back to life if the smallest of the things you gained by doing so was then taken away from you?
    Her hands twisted together hard, bruising her fingers, then she scrubbed at her face like someone trying to wake up from a bad dream. Finally, she looked at him again. Her mouth worked, but shock made it difficult for her to speak. “But, Sensei…I have no place to go. Is…is this a test?” Her voice was small, uncertain.
    “No, it’s not a test.” Stick’s voice was harsher than she had ever heard it. “Now go!”
    So with her soul swelled with rage, Elektra turned her back on her sensei and stalked out of the compound, determined to leave it behind forever.

3
    A SECLUDED MOUNTAIN SKI LODGE
IN SWITZERLAND
    I N SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE , THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN A picture-perfect evening.
    But as he swirled the fragrant, dark amber liquid in his glass, DeMarco could think of only the one thing in his life that made perfection impossible:
    Fear.
    The exquisite, snow-covered mountains that overlooked this multimillion-dollar vacation home were like implacable witnesses to the terror that was boiling inside him. DeMarco had the best of everything— this house, with its twenty-four rooms filled with the most tasteful of everything—a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes, a Hummer, and three other SUVs in the garage, a closet full of designer clothes so handsome that most movie stars would drool over them. Even the scotch in his crystal glass was sixty-year-old Macallan, the rarest and most expensive in the world, a treat for the richest of the rich, something in which even he rarely indulged.
    Of course, if he was going to die tonight, he might as well drink the stuff, the whole damned bottle. It wasn’t as if he was going to get another opportunity.
    DeMarco stared at the fire burning cheerfully in the stone fireplace, then let his gaze wander around the room. Did they have scotch in the afterlife? Was there an afterlife? He’d had a good run on this earth, so he didn’t have much to complain about there. Perhaps he should have taken pains to take it with him, like the ancient Egyptians. Even before he’d come into money, back when he was a very young man, his piercing blue eyes and slender good looks had made him a legendary playboy with the ladies, and they certainly hadn’t hurt him when he’d proposed to his first wife. She had been a millionairess who met an unfortunate end in a skiing “accident” only two years after their wedding on the slopes of a mountain much like this one (which actually had belonged to his second wife, Beverly, whom he laughingly referred to in conversation as one of my former wives ).
    Becoming a widower had given him the capital to get started and, of course, the marriage itself had launched him into the appropriately moneyed circles; from there, he had taken only a few short and