I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

My mind would not stop. It circled back to the deposition the way a tongue returns to a cracked tooth. Kazan’s voice on the recording, flat and rapid. The name I had translated. Mercer’s pen moving across his notebook. The sedan on the street corner. Gerald’s voice on the phone. Yevgeni Kasan.

Can you develop a heart-throbbing crush on a man you’ve only seen once and never spoken to? Never actually met? My clit throbbed in response, and if my soaked panties were any indicator, I had done just that. 

I rolled onto my side and watched the clock on the nightstand. The red numerals ticked forward. Ten o’clock. Ten-thirty. Eleven.

At eleven-forty, my body gave in. Sleep pulled me under in slow increments, dragging me down through layers of anxiety until I reached something close to rest.

At eleven-fifty-eight, I woke up, and at first, I didn’t know why. Then, I heard the door, a click, electronic, the mechanical whir of a keycard being read by the lock.

My eyes opened. The room was dark. For a moment I thought I had dreamed it. Residual anxiety playing tricks on an overtired brain.

Then I heard the door handle turn stopped by my portable door lock. I sat up. My pulse was already climbing. The security chain was also on, and I had checked it twice before I turned off the light. The door could not open, could it? AceMining hotel deterrents were guaranteed. Only a person with the size and strength of a gorilla could get through that thing.

There was a gorilla on the other side of my door, and shortly a sliver of hallway light fell across the carpet. A hand came through the gap, thick fingers reaching for the chain, feeling along the metal links the way a person feels along a wall in the dark.

I did not scream. Later I would wonder about that. I would turn it over and try to understand what happened in my nervous system in those two seconds between seeing the hand and reaching for my phone. Something in me went cold and flat, the way it went during high-pressure translations when the room compressed to the size of the next word and nothing else existed. Survival dressed as professional calm.

My fingers closed around the phone on the nightstand.

The chain snapped.

The door swung inward. Two figures. Large. Male. Moving fast enough that the hallway light strobed as they passed through it.

I was off the bed before my brain caught up. Bare feet on hotel carpet. Phone in my right hand. The bathroom was three steps away. If I could get inside and lock the door and dial 911, if I could buy sixty seconds.

A hand closed around my upper arm. Fingers digging into the muscle hard enough to send a white jolt up to my shoulder.

I twisted. My left elbow drove backward and connected with something solid. A grunt. Hot breath on the back of my neck. But there were two of them and one of me, and the grip on my arm did not break.

A second hand grabbed my hair. Fisted it. Yanked my head back until I was looking at the ceiling. Pain bloomed across my scalp. I felt the scream building in my throat, building and building, and then the hallway behind them came apart.

Noise. The crack of something hard hitting bone. Bodies moving through the open doorway, but these were not the same men. These moved differently. Faster. Controlled. Movement born from training, from repetition, from men who had done this so many times their bodies no longer needed instructions from their brains.

The hand in my hair released.

I dropped. Hit the carpet on my knees and covered my head. Violence moved above me. Grunts. The dense thud of a body slamming into drywall. Russian commands, sharp and clipped, and the accent was wrong for the men who had grabbed me. A different Russian. A different origin. Professional.

Then silence.

I raised my head.

The room looked like something had been detonated inside it. The lamp from the nightstand was shattered on the floor. The nightstand itself was on its side. The two men who had broken in were down, motionless, their arms pinned at wrong angles. Four other men stood over them, armed, faces covered by dark balaclavas. Their breathing was controlled. Their weapons were level.

One of them turned to me.

“Miss Benson.” His Russian was Moscow-clean. Trained. “Are you injured?”

My mouth opened. Nothing came out. My throat had locked around the words the way a fist locks around a key.

He crouched beside me. Through the eyeholes of the balaclava I could see his eyes. Calm. Steady. The eyes of someone who had been in rooms like this before and did not find them remarkable.

“Miss Benson. Are you hurt?” He spoke in English now.

“No.” The word came out raw.

He nodded once, touched his earpiece and spoke in rapid Russian.

“My yeyo zabrali. Ona tsela.”

We have her. She’s unharmed.

He took my arm and helped me to my feet. My legs were shaking. My hands were shaking. My jaw was clenched so tight my teeth ached.

“Who—” I started.

He held up the phone. Pressed it into my hand.

“Someone wants to speak with you.”

I lifted the phone to my ear. My fingers were numb around the case.

“Miss Benson.” The voice was low. Controlled. I recognized it the way you recognize a sound that has already gotten under your skin. My pulse, which had been running on stark terror, tripped over itself and found a new gear. “You translated something today that made you a target. I am the reason you are still alive.”

Yevgeni Kazan. On the phone. In my ear, not in my dreams. While I stood barefoot in the ruins of my hotel room wearing my father’s sweatshirt and flannel pajama pants, surrounded by armed men and the bodies of the men they had stopped..... 

Read A Legacy for the Billionaire Mob Boss, the latest For The Billionaire Mob Boss series now.