Page 1 of Dirty Gambit

Chapter One

LENA

“Once you do this, there’s no turning back.”

Angelena Ramos stared, transfixed by the sleek .38 caliber handgun resting in the palm of her hands, hands that may as well have belonged to someone else for all the attachment she felt to them. Everything from the oval nails to the long, slender fingers were alien, but they wiggled and curled inwards around the chunk of steel when she willed them to.

“Nothing to go back to anyway,” she murmured, snapping the safety into place.

She pulled out the magazine, checked the full clip before snapping it back into place and loading one into the chamber. Her insides roiled at the resounding crack. Her spine tensed under the march of a thousand invisible insects scuttling along her skin. She shuddered at the phantom assault and tightened her jaw.

Pablo sighed. “Don’t do this,chica.”

Bolting down her resolve and courage with the same iron nail, she raised brown eyes to his, lit with fierce determination.

“I have to.” She took a deep breath. “It’s only a matter of time before he shows up. I can’t leave her here with these people. They can’t protect her like I can.”

As though to prove it, she stowed the barrel of the gun into the waistband of her black trousers and pulled the black vest over top. She smoothed a quick hand over it, checking to make sure no bumps were visible before facing her best friend.

Her only friend.

The only person besides Lissa that had ever mattered to her.

“How do I look?”

Pablo studied her a long moment, his dark eyes sorrowful over down turned lips. “Like you’re about to do something incredibly stupid that’s going to get you killed.”

Refusing to be deterred from the plan she’d worked six weeks to put into motion, Lena squared her shoulders. She ran a quick hand down the long, straight length of her dark ponytail and exhaled.

“Is Marie ready?”

Pablo nodded. “Everything is in place.”

Lena gave a brisk nod. “Okay. Good.” She took in a deep breath. “Let’s go.”

Without having been fired, the gun burned through the soft material of her dress shirt with the severity of a block of ice. Its unforgiving weight leeched at her heat, draining her resolve, and reminding her just how out of her element she was. Her stiff fingers trembled around the tray of something that could have passed for cat puke. It must have tasted better than it looked because no one else seemed to be complaining. They couldn’t get enough.

Rich people,she mused bitterly. They’d eat dog shit if it came on a cracker. But she kept the thought to herself. She was only there for one reason and one reason only.

Her gaze scanned the room, moving over faces and furniture, searching for the only person that mattered. The playing field was too large, an open concept of a sitting room, dining room, and some even fancier sitting rooms divided only by a series of pillars. A lot of the party had spilled into the backyard and clustered around the pool. She’d memorized the floorplan of the three-story modern stone and glass structure, but all her studying hadn’t prepared her for the possibility that so many people would be loitering all over it. It was making locating the Westwicks that much harder. It also made executing the plan that much riskier.

She continued to mingle, holding the tray aloft as Marie had shown her. She smiled politely, but made no eye contact, nor did she stick to a single place for long. It was unlikely anyone there would recognize her — their circles being worlds apart — but she couldn’t have anyone remembering her face once she left, either. That was the risk. It would only take one nosy waitress, or a pervy guest or any airhead with a cellphone to put her at the scene, to remember her face.

`Lena tightened her hold on the cool silver. It was the real deal. No phony plated shit here. Even the glasses were legit crystal. That didn’t include the diamonds, rubies, and emeralds dripping from the ears and necks of the people floating around her in a colorful flurry of expensive silk. Thousands of dollars just waiting to be plucked … if she still did that kind of thing. In her golden days, that room would have been cleaned out before the hour was out and not a soul would have been the wiser. She was that good. But those days were behind her. She wasn’t reformed or anything stupid like that. She just didn’t have the time. Plus, she was there for a much bigger job, a job that was proving to be a challenge when the guest of honor seemed to be missing from her own party.

“Where the hell are you, Jessie?” she muttered under her breath, closing yet another circle around the room, then another.

She was on her sixth tour through the house when Lena finally spotted her, a tiny, smiling figure perched in the lap of a man Lena only knew from her notes — Jaxon Westwick, the only child of Nicole and Chief Justice Richard Westwick, heir to a multibillion-dollar corporation on his mother’s side and New York Time’s most eligible bachelor three years running. The guy seriously had it all, including the one person Lena needed back.

The object of Lena’s entire purpose was tiny for her age, a doll-sized creature in a beautiful, satin dress the shade of ripe plums. A matching ribbon looped around her head, containing a dark pixie cut that was so much like Lissa’s the last time Lena had seen her that it momentarily tore her from that moment and pitched her into a time when she’d watched Lissa blow out her own candles. It hadn’t been fancy. The shithole they’d been calling home at the time hadn’t been full of people. It was just the four of them around a melting ice cream cake their mom had gotten half off due to it having expired the day before. Lena had been five, but she remembered watching her mom peel the yellow sticker off before putting the box down in front of Lissa.

“Happy birthday, baby!”

The memory was shattered by a riotous cackle from some woman in a blue dress. Lena sucked in a breath and focused on the Westwicks, shoving her past where it belonged — in a dark box tucked deep in the recesses of her mind.

The entire family was crammed inside the library, perched around a leather fainting chair while a man barely out of his twenties rushed around them, tweaking and adjusting postures to snap photos. Jaxon and Jessie sat in the center with his parents on either side, leaning in, everyone beaming. Lena kept out of sight and studied the group, assessing the possibility of making her move ahead of schedule. She took an unconscious step forward, her feet having already forgotten the plan in lieu of her urgency and impatience. Her brain caught on just in time to stop the rest of her from grabbing the child and running. She dared a glance at the milling crowd trespassing around her, expecting someone to have noticed her misstep, but they resumed their drinking and dancing as if she didn’t even exist.

Taking the win, she slipped carefully into a corner and surveyed her opponents from the shadows.

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