Page 23 of Her Fearless Warrior

If you know everything, you wouldn’t be questioning me, you asshole.

Leila had just the smallest amount of restraint to not say those words out loud, although she could feel her cheek swelling up and her ears were ringing.

He pushed at the office chair with the tip of his wingtip shoe. It slid further across the floor. “I’ll ask again. What other languages do you speak?”

“Russian.” Her voice was garbled by the hit. “Portuguese.”

“There, was that really so hard?”

He grabbed the rope that lashed her upper body to the chair and yanked. Leila’s head flopped from the sudden move, and pain seared down from her head to her neck, then down her spine. She couldn’t help but groan.

He picked up the paper from the desk.

“What did you do when you were with the CIA?”

This time, she told the truth. “I sat in a cubicle and translated documents. It was a boring job.”

“Did you ever go out into the field?”

“Can I have some water?”

“After you answer my questions.”

Leila started to cough. What started out as just a little playacting soon turned into a real coughing fit. He stared at her dispassionately.

The coughing aggravated her injuries and her eyes began to water.

I will not cry in front of this bastard. I won’t.

Finally, she stopped coughing and she choked back the tears.

“What is it you want with me? Where are the others?”

This time, he rephrased the question and it sent a shiver down her spine. “Tell me about your mission with the CIA.”

There was no way he should have known about that. No way. She’d never even told her dad, and he was FBI. Obviously, they had a traitor in the CIA, and that’s why this entire operation had gone to shit.

“Leila, I asked you a question.”

Her cheek throbbed. “I only went on a mission one time. After that, I quit.”

“What happened?”

“I was just supposed to be the translator for a meeting in Kazakhstan. It was supposed to be a pre-meeting before we sent out our diplomats; instead it was an ambush. As we were getting off the train, three of our men were shot, and if it hadn’t been for Agent Perkins getting the two of us back onto the train and hidden in a sleeper coach, we would have been killed too.”

“Do you know why this happened?”

“Nobody ever told me.”

The man nodded.

“So, eight years later, you decided to blindly trust someone from the CIA when he asks you to act as a translator for a job in Syria. Do you expect me to believe that?”

“He’s a friend of my father’s. They went to school together. He’s also my godfather.”

“That wasn’t my question.” He put the paper down on the table again and took a step closer to her. Now he was standing over her and she had to lean her head backward to look into his face.

“A woman who was almost killed on her first mission with the CIA would not go out on another mission without all the facts. Tell me what you know about being here in Syria.”