“We have this covered, bro,” Liam assured as he and Kieran stood guard outside the hospital cafeteria where Janina was currently eating lunch with her two friends. She was laughing and chatting as if someone wasn’t trying to kill her.
Instead of staying on the estate, as Kieran had requested, she’d again insisted she was carrying on with her life as usual, and that included going in to work her shift at the hospital today.
They had woken up this morning in Kieran’s bed and in each other’s arms after having made love once more during the night. Kieran hadn’t thought it was a good idea for them to make love again this morning, knowing that Janina had to be sore.
He instantly had reason to regret not enjoying that closeness when he could.
Because after Janina told him what her plans were for the day, the argument that followed had wiped away all feelings of intimacy.
Janina was angry with him for trying to, as she put it, control her and what she did.
Kieran was furious with her for putting herself in danger.
He had become even more outraged when he received a call from Leon mid-morning telling him that Nikolai Volkov had called him. The Russian had eliminated the person in Moscow who had hired the assassin meant to kill Janina. It had been a bastard son of Sergei Federov’s no one knew about.
Which meant the threat to Janina should have been over. Except it wasn’t. Because the assassin had taken exception to Volkov’s interference and now saw eliminating Janina as a challenge he intended to meet by continuing with the kill.
“Do we?” he returned glumly. “Zoe Carpenter and Paul Reynolds are two of the people whose movements for the past week aren’t yet accounted for. Liam?” he prompted sharply when his brother didn’t immediately reply.
The brothers had spent over thirty years together growing up in Ireland and then moving to and working in the US, and right now, Kieran knew Liam was more tense than he had ever seen him. His brother also looked guilty as fuck.
“Liam—”
“It isn’t Paul, okay?” his brother bit out, his gaze not quite meeting Kieran’s. “We were talking together on the phone when the gunman shot at Leon and Carla as they left the restaurant.”
Kieran knew his younger brother was gay, and it had never presented a problem to him and Jericho, or to Leon and Carla, or to anyone over here who worked with him. If it had, those people would no longer be in the lives of any of the Price family.
But it would be a big fucking problem if Liam was involved with Paul and unwittingly feeding his boyfriend information about Janina or Leon and Carla’s movements.
“You and Paul,” Kieran deliberately kept his tone even.
Liam winced. “Yeah. But only for the past three days. We connected when we met here that first day I took over from you as Janina’s personal bodyguard.”
“You connected?”
His brother frowned. “Yes, we connected.”
“How closely?”
“Very,” Liam stated precisely.
“Enough so that you told him the reason why the two of you couldn’t meet up yesterday evening and then took a call from him as you were leaving the restaurant with Leon and Carla?”
Liam’s hazel eyes darkened with anger. “I’m not some fucking amateur, Kieran, and I would never put the lives of the people I protect or care about in danger. Paul had no idea where I was or what I was doing when I took his call last night,” he continued as Kieran would have spoken. “Paul and I are…exploring a relationship, but he doesn’t ask, and I don’t say, what I’m doing when I’m away from him.”
“That’s very trusting of him,” Kieran drawled. “Very trusting of you too. Are you serious about him?”
“Yes.”
That was enough for Kieran. “Fine.”
His brother’s gaze narrowed. “He already knew from Janina that we both work for Leon Brunelli.”
There it was again, Janina revealing things that she shouldn’t to people who had been strangers to her just weeks ago.
Had she also unwittingly revealed to someone that she was babysitting yesterday evening while Leon and Carla went out to dinner?
Kieran glanced across to where Janina was currently enjoying having lunch with her two friends. All three of them were looking back at him with various degrees of curiosity and annoyance. The latter was from Janina.
His mind drifted back to earlier in the week to this exact same image. Janina had been relaxed and happy that day too. She—
She’d received and answered a text message that day!
Was it possible it could have been from Carla? Asking if Janina would babysit Marco the following evening while she and Leon went out to dinner?
An interruption to their lunch break her two friends would ask about and Janina would innocently have answered. Maybe not specifically, but enough so the assassin had been able to guess the rest?
It was a leap to have come to that conclusion, and yet Kieran knew instinctively it was the right one. “Jesus,” he breathed softly, instinctively checking that his gun was in its shoulder holster without taking his eyes off the three people seated at the table. “It’s either Paul or Zoe,” he stated with certainty.
“I told you it isn’t Paul.”
“You can defend your lover later,” Kieran told Liam fiercely. “Right now, we need to get the three of them out of this cafeteria.” Thank goodness it was between breaks and there were only a few stragglers left from the early lunch, and the late lunch people hadn’t yet arrived. “We need to do it as quietly and calmly as possible so we can go somewhere private and ensure no one else is harmed— Fuck!” he grated. He saw he was too late when Janina was grabbed and a gun was pressed against her temple as she was pulled to her feet and forced to stand in front of her attacker.
“What are you doing?” Janina gasped as painfully tight fingers dug into her forearm to pull her to her feet. “You—” She broke off as she felt the cold barrel of a gun pressing against the side of her head.
This couldn’t be happening!
Not here and now.
And not from someone she had thought of as a friend.
A glance across the cafeteria showed Kieran was walking determinedly toward them while Liam quietly went from occupied table to occupied table, asking and then ensuring that people quickly left before they even became aware of the scene playing out across the room.
By the time Kieran came to a stop a few feet away from their table, the cafeteria had emptied, even the cashier and the cooks from the kitchen having left, and just the five of them remained.
“You don’t need to do this.” He didn’t look at Janina as he spoke calmly to her attacker. “The person who hired you is dead,” he reasoned. “If you put the gun away, there’s no reason you can’t just walk out of here.”
“And what would it do to my reputation as a killer for hire if it gets out that I didn’t fulfill my contract?” Zoe scorned in a derisive tone Janina had never heard her friend speak in before.
Except Zoe wasn’t her friend. Instead, she was, to quote the woman herself, a killer for hire.
And she had been hired to kill Janina.
It was incredible, unbelievable, that a person she had thought of as a friend should also be the person paid to shoot and kill her.
“Besides,” Zoe continued in that calm voice, “I’ve already infiltrated the Brunelli estate and killed six of your men. Which you have somehow managed to keep quiet,” she said with admiration. “But that doesn’t mean you aren’t going to want retribution. A good way for you to do that without involving your dead colleagues would be to ensure the police connect me to the dead man found in an alleyway on the East Side early this morning.”
Kieran’s top lip curled back. “Would he be the same man who shot at Leon and Carla last night as they were leaving the restaurant, so that you were free to go to the Brunelli estate for Janina?”
“I don’t believe in leaving loose ends.”
“And yet you didn’t kill Janina when you had the chance.”
She sighed. “That’s because in spite of why I’m really here pretending to work in this hospital, she’s been a good friend to me these past few weeks.”
“Pretending to work?” Janina repeated.
The other woman shrugged. “No one questioned it the first time I turned up here and bought myself lunch and the three of us started talking. After that, it was easy as fuck to pay someone to hack the hospital employment records, get a fake ID, and then continue to act as if I worked on the main reception desk.”
Paul frowned. “You don’t really work there?”
“The hospital records say I do,” Zoe dismissed. “But if anyone had actually bothered to question the other receptionists, they would have told them they’ve never heard of me.”
“So, for all these weeks, you’ve been planning to kill me?” Janina winced. She was having great difficulty reconciling this cold-blooded killer with the woman she had been friends with for the past five weeks.
“None of this is personal, Janina,” Zoe assured lightly. “I’ve actually enjoyed being your friend. If things were different, we might even have become more than friends.” She gave Janina a suggestive smile. “But it’s time for the fun to stop and for the two of us to get out of here and go somewhere more private, because I really do have to kill you now. No hard feelings, I hope.”
Janina couldn’t breathe, let alone speak again.
No hard feelings!
What the hell…!
Who said something like that when they were about to kill you?
A psychopath, that’s who.
Why hadn’t she noticed something odd about Zoe before now?
Because psychopaths were capable of mimicking emotions even if they couldn’t feel them, Janina reasoned. The same way Zoe had mimicked being a friend to both her and Paul.
Although, her partiality for Janina didn’t sound fake either.
It just wasn’t enough liking to prevent the other woman from wanting to kill her.
Janina glanced sideways to where Paul had also risen to his feet and was standing on the other side of Zoe. His face was pale, eyes wide as he stared in disbelief at the woman he had also thought of as a friend.
He glanced sideways at Liam as the Irishman made his way stealthily toward them after clearing the room and shutting and locking the cafeteria doors.
A look seemed to pass between the two men, one that Janina couldn’t read.
Possibly because the blood had all drained from her head the moment the gun barrel was placed against her temple, and she was now seriously in danger of fainting.
Which was probably why, when Paul made his move of knocking into Zoe, unbalancing her, Kieran was easily able to grab Janina’s other arm and pull her out of the way. At the same time as two gunshots sounded loudly in the empty room.