AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Kadyrovic scanned the area around us, and I did the same. We were in an industrial sector of the city, with wide warehouses on all sides. I felt a trickle of hope.
“Listen to me, you little shit,” Kadyrovic said.
Everything happened very quickly.
As the last word left his lips, a rifle fired in the distance. At nearly the same instant, Kadyrovic’s leg exploded with blood. He fell to the ground, screaming. The other bodyguard raised his pistol, searching all around. The faraway rifle cracked again, and the bullet hit him in the chest.
Novak was quick. He darted to the ground as another crack sounded. A bullet hissed through the air and struck the ground somewhere nearby. The trained part of my brain told me that meant the shooter was elevated, probably on the roof of one of the nearby warehouses. Novak slid across the ground and came up next to me, wrapping one arm around my neck and placing the pistol against my temple.
“I’ll shoot!” he shrieked. “Surrender, or I’ll kill him.”
The stereotypical thing people said when they were about to die was that their life flashed before their eyes. That didn’t happen to me—not now, and not in the two other times when I thought I was going to die in my life. My entire body relaxed. An overwhelming sense of calmness came over me. I was totally comfortable with my fate, because I wasn’t in control. There was a kind of peace in that. In totally surrendering to whatever the universe threw at you.
I love you, Kaylee, I thought. And then, a second later, Trish pushed her way into the forefront of my mind alongside my daughter.
A gunshot fired, but it didn’t come from the rifle on a surrounding warehouse. It came from behind us. There was a pinching sensation in my shoulder blade, immediately followed by a dull ache surrounded by numbness.
Novak let go of my neck and collapsed to the ground. I turned to look, though I knew what I would see. Jordy was standing with the other bodyguard’s pistol aimed down at us. And Anton Novak, the man who had gotten away in Prague all those years ago, was stretched out on the pavement like Christ himself. One of his eyes was a bloody mess, where the bullet had exited his brain and then hit me in the upper back.
As if thinking about it could conjure up the pain, my shoulder blade suddenly felt like it was on fire. I groaned and fell forward, putting my weight on my left arm.
Jordy was there in an instant, tearing open my monogrammed tour guide shirt to get at the wound.
“Nice shot,” I groaned.
“Hey, I did my best!” he replied. “I only had a split second to decide what to do.”
“That. Wasn’t. Sarcasm,” I said through gritted teeth. It felt like my nerves were being dipped in lemon juice. “It was. A good. Trade. How does it look?”
“It’s not deep. I think I can see the bullet. But it went into the bone.” He looked around. “Who the hell saved us? Harrison?”
“Not him,” I said. “Different voice. And we don’t. Have any. High caliber weapons.”
Jordy pointed. “There.”
Across the open area, at least a football pitch away, a man with a rifle slung across his back was climbing down a ladder attached to the wall of a warehouse. He discarded the rifle on the ground, drew his sidearm, and then approached at a jog. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.
“You!” Jordy said. “You work at the hotel. You’re the bellhop behind the desk.”
The man ignored him and bent to check Kadyrovic’s pulse, then the other bodyguard. His movements were careful and with military precision. He didn’t bother to check Novak. “The hotel job is my cover.”
“Then who…”
“I’m an auditor with Mathos Company.” There was a medical kit in his hand, and he began unrolling a length of gauze. “The contract you took here in Baku set off a few red flags at the home office, so they sent me to monitor the situation. To make sure it was all legitimate.”
“Clearly not,” I said, wincing as he dabbed at my wound.
“I knew something was up with you,” Jordy said. “The way you were looking at us this morning.”
“I’ve called for a full clean-up team,” the faux bellhop explained while bandaging my wound. “They’ll take care of this mess. For now, let’s get you to a hospital to clean this up.”
A dirt bike came roaring around the corner in the distance, shooting through the alley between two warehouses like the world was on fire. Rubber burned as Harrison skidded to a stop in front of us, leaping off the bike and letting it clatter to the ground as he rushed to my side.
“You’re alive.” He took in the scene with one sweep of his gaze. “You. I know you. From the hotel.”
“He’s a Mathos Company auditor. They thought the contract was fishy, so they sent him to monitor. Good thing.”
Harrison bristled. “I knew you were watching us. That’s partly why I had my guard up all week.”
