Page 47 of Indecent Proposal

“We’re not rivals in the sense that we’ve met,” the woman replied, laughing. “But we all know each other in this small world. He thinks he’s the best… and there I was, sitting right across from him in a café and he had no idea who I really was.”

“You’ll be pretty recognizable now,” I replied with a sneer. “With that nasty scar on your face.”

She stared at me. “What scar?”

I grabbed the fireplace poker—one of the real ones—and flung it at her face as hard as I could.

The woman cursed and ducked, and I ran for it, trying to dart around her to get outside. If I could just run through the woods, that would give me the chance to lose her. Maybe I could cycle back around and then get into the security room without her realizing.

My hopes were dashed when the woman—an assassin, I remembered—recovered faster than I had hoped and leaped on me, tackling me to the ground, knocking the breath out of me. Her hand found my hair and gripped tightly, wrenching my head back—and where my head went, the rest of my body followed.

I shrieked instinctively in fear and pain and hated myself for it as I was yanked back.

“You little shit,” the woman spat, hauling me back over to the couch while I reached back blindly, trying to scratch at her face and kicking out behind me.

She flung me to the ground instead of the sofa, hard enough for me to hit my head, and I winced as the room temporarily went blurry and off-kilter.

“You’re more trouble than you’re worth,” she said furiously. “Maybe I should just kill you after all.”

She planted her boot hard in the middle of my back, forcing me down using her body weight. I heard the click of her gun and my whole body went cold. Fear gripped me, and my heart hammered so loudly in my chest I felt like it was going to climb up into my throat and strangle me. I couldn’t hear anything over my own frantic breathing and the pulse pounding in my ears.

My thought—probably the last thought of my life—was that I wasn’t going to go out begging. She wouldn’t get a single ‘please’ out of me, no matter what happened. I’d die defiant. I’d die with dignity.

I twisted to glare up at her with all the hatred I could muster, and waited for the—

Bang.

CHAPTER18

Vaughn

Idrove as fast as I fucking could, breaking all speed limits, but I didn’t park at the cabin when I got there because I wasn’t going to take the chance of giving myself away. I drove further, up another mountain path leading to the backup I hadn’t told Claire about: the second entrance.

If all else failed, there needed to be an emergency exit from the cabin. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I hadn’t told Claire about it. I hadn’t felt it was necessary, and in case of an emergency, I’d figured I would need to keep one final secret to myself. Something she couldn’t inadvertently give away to anyone who attacked her.

Now it looked like I’d been right to follow my instincts.

I parked the Jeep and remotely checked the security system. It was disarmed and static, as I’d feared. It was fairly bold of Ace to keep it static instead of trying to do some kind of feedback loop to fool me. But this was probably on purpose. It was a shot across the bow, a way for her to point out to me that she was attacking my client and that there was nothing I could do to stop her. She was being brazen and giving me a middle finger, daring me to try and stop her.

Well, I could fucking rise to that bait.

I leapt out of the Jeep, grabbed my gear and strapped up, taking the safety off my guns. Usually you wanted to keep the safety on no matter what, because the single twitch of a finger and you could have a real mess on your hands. Not today, though. Today, I had to be ready to shoot the second I emerged, and that split-second could mean the difference between saving Claire’s life or winding up with all of us dead.

I tramped through the woods, my heart in my throat, making me feel like I couldn’t get a full breath. I’d been on plenty of life-or-death missions in my life. Usually, it felt like I was sinking into a pair of well-worn shoes. It was comfortable and familiar. It was something I had made so much a part of me that even the adrenaline was welcome and par for the course. I was no longer on edge in a way that made me jittery. It just made me deadly.

But now… now I was nervous. I couldn’t understand it. The adrenaline, the racing of my heart, was getting to me in a way that it hadn’t in years. I felt like my hands might start shaking at any moment.

What the hell was happening to me? Why would I be so fucking nervous? I had done infiltrations with a hostage situation before. I’d even done it as a one-man mission before, when a team would carry too much risk of detection. There was no reason for me not to treat this as any other mission.

I did my best to ignore the nerves and moved through the woods until I got to the tree I had chosen as my marker years ago. It had to look like just another piece of nature to any lost hiker or suspicious person who might come by. Nobody could come across this and think, “hey, is something going on here? That’s weird.”

To that end, I’d found a tree that had been hollowed out, and around the trunk I had planted a circle of mushrooms native to the area so that I could make doubly sure it was the right one.

To the right of the tree was a fallen log that I had purposefully dragged over here, and had it pointing in a particular direction. It was now covered in moss, lichen, and all the rest, so it looked like it had naturally fallen here.

I followed the log, then reached down and felt along the forest floor, my fingers sinking into the dirt until I found it: the concrete trapdoor that led down into the earth and the secret passage.

I had put a layer of topsoil and grass over the concrete, almost like a small flower bed, so that if anyone walked on top of it, they’d just feel the same dirt and plants as everywhere else. You had to literally dig your fingers into the soil to find the small metal ring that would allow you to lift the trapdoor up. You had to know the trapdoor was here to have even a hope of finding it.

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