Page 6 of Belgian Betrayal

Catya: Get Mom and leave. Now.

As she ended the call, a text came through.

She almost sighed in relief when she saw it was from her mother’s number.

Her blood froze in her veins at the message.

Mom: TOO LATE

A video popped up on her display, buffering as with the beginning image chilling her to her very bones. Her parents were kneeling in their living room, hands tied behind their backs. Their faces were bruised and bloodied. Men wearing black ski masks stood with guns pointed at their heads.

Another man in black stepped in front of the camera and spoke in English with a gravelly voice. “Bring that disk to Bruges in forty-eight hours, or we’ll kill everyone you give a fuck about.”

Her father stared straight at the camera and shook his head. “Don’t do it. They’ll kill us anyway.”

The man who’d voiced the threat turned and punched her father in the face.

“No,” Catya whispered in horror.

Her father slammed his body into the man holding a gun to his head, knocking him to the ground.

The man’s ski mask fell off, exposing his face.

Catya’s father lunged to his feet, bent and rushed at the one holding a gun to her mother’s head.

The man raised his pistol, aiming at her father.

Her mother shifted, blocking the barrel of the gun with her head.

The gun went off.

Blood and brain matter splattered over Catya’s father. Her mother pitched forward into her husband’s chest.

He bellowed, the sound so visceral it ripped through Catya, gutting her.

Unable to look away, Catya watched as her father staggered to his feet and charged the man who’d killed her mother.

The man stepped backward, unloading every bullet left in his handgun into her father’s chest.

It didn’t stop him. He plowed into the man, knocking him backward until he hit the wall so hard his head cracked loudly.

Then her father and the man who’d killed her parents slid to the ground unmoving.

“Fuck,” the man who’d sent the threat turned to the camera. “This will happen to every person you ever gave a shit about. Be in Bruges in forty-eight hours with the disk or watch the next one die.”

The video ended, frozen on the carnage of her parents’ slaughter.

A huge lump lodged in her throat, blocking the air to her lungs.

Dead.

Her parents were dead.

Only one other person meant anything to her. She’d left him because of her chosen profession as an assassin, afraid the people impacted by her past hits would use him to get to her. She couldn’t care about him without putting him at risk.

At one time, she thought she could, even going so far as to move in with him in Athens. Her lapse in caution had almost gotten her and her lover killed. She’d left that day and hadn’t tried to contact him again.

Would whoever had killed her parents know about him?

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