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Attacked.
Captured.
I was heading to a bartending gig in Budapest when four men surrounded me in a dark alley, their eyes as cold as the weapons in their hands. I managed to disarm one and injure another, but there were too many of them.
Even strong and healthy, I was no match for all of them.
My memories after that are a blur. They either drugged me or knocked me out. I vaguely recall a sense of motion—a car, most likely—followed by a loud roar that reminded me of a plane’s engines. Did they fly me somewhere?
If so, why?
Fear presses in, the metallic tang of it bitter in my mouth, but I push it aside, forcing myself to concentrate. Think, Mina. Focus and think. I rake through the blurry recollections, looking for anything that might explain this situation.
Who would want to capture me and why?
A conversation comes to me, dim and hazy, as if from a dream. Amid the roar of the engines, men were talking—a mixture of English, Russian, and Spanish, if I’m not mistaken. What was it they said? There was some mention of someone named Esguerra, and also something about a captain or a general…
Oh, fuck.
My stomach tightens as it comes to me, the realization of what this is about. I should’ve known the clusterfuck in Chicago would blow back on me.
It’s the one time in my life I didn’t listen to my instincts.
The one time I took a job that didn’t sit right with me.
The sound of footsteps yanks me out of my thoughts.
Someone’s coming toward me.
My heartbeat jacks up, but I don’t let it show, doing my best to appear passed out. The newcomer is not fooled. He stops next to me—somehow, I know it’s a he—and sinks to his haunches, watching me with malevolent amusement. I feel the weight of that stare, sense the darkness in it, and an uncanny sense of familiarity washes over me as the subtle, masculine scent of sandalwood and pepper teases my nostrils. He laughs then, the sound low and cruel, and as his fingers tenderly graze my lips, a chill roughens my skin at the impossible realization.
“If it isn’t my little Mina,” Yan says in Hungarian, his smooth, deep voice straight out of my darkest dreams. “Or should I call you Mink?”
8
Mina
Lungs seizing with a mixture of shock and perverse excitement, I stare at the man I’ve tried—and failed—to forget over the past fifteen months. He’s as dangerously attractive as I remember, his hard features as symmetric as if they’d been carved by a sculptor and his blue button-up shirt perfectly tailored to his muscled frame. His mouth—the same talented mouth that had lapped at my sex with startling hunger—is curved in a cold smile, and his green eyes are filled with the promise of hell.
Fuck. He is connected to all this.
The possibility had occurred to me when Walton Henderson III, a former US general, reached out to me with the assignment. He wanted me to interfere during the arrest of a Russian assassin in the Chicago suburbs, a man who went by the name of Peter Garin.
The goal was to make sure Garin didn’t get taken alive.
The assignment sounded simple and straightforward, but the Russian assassin bit gave me pause. I wondered if the men who’d kidnapped me that night were somehow involved—if it could have anything to do with Yan and Ilya. But the picture of the target looked nothing like the twins, and after some deliberation, I took the job.
Henderson made my skin crawl, but he paid well and Hanna’s bills were due.
There was no way Garin was connected to Yan and Ilya, I told myself as I flew to Chicago with the US passport Henderson gave me. Russia is a huge country, one where criminals of all sorts abound. That my target shared a nationality and a dark calling with the man I’d slept with was a coincidence, nothing more.
Later on, when the clusterfuck happened and my target’s face and name—his real name of Peter Sokolov—were all over the news, I remembered Ilya mentioning someone named Sokolov at the bar. But it was too late by then, and besides, it could’ve still been a coincidence.
Sokolov is a fairly common Russian surname.
But clearly, it wasn’t a coincidence, and now I’m Yan’s captive again, in some wooden shed someplace warm.
“Where am I?” I ask in Hungarian, my voice cool and steady as I quickly survey my surroundings. He now knows what I am, so there’s no need for the fainting damsel act. As I speak, I become aware of a stinging pain in my lower lip and a dull throbbing in my jaw—likely from when I fought during my capture.
“Colombia.” Yan’s smile turns darker as I shift slightly, trying to relieve the pressure on my bound wrists. “Julian Esguerra’s compound in the Amazon.” He says it in Russian, mocking the lie I told on the night he’d taken me.
