CHAPTER 14
ALESSIA
The city lights outside the heavily tinted window blur into long, jagged streaks of dirty neon, slicing through the dark like open wounds.
I sit perfectly still, staring at the reinforced glass, feeling like an absolute fucking phantom.
An hour ago, Trenton pushed a button from his cozy, secure office and scrubbed my entire existence off the map.
My credit cards are declined. My social security number is flagged.
My digital footprint is wiped clean. I am literally a woman without a name, sitting in a five-thousand-dollar suit that feels like a burial shroud.
Beside me in the spacious back seat of the armored SUV, Leon is the only thing taking up actual space in reality.
He exudes this cold, dominant control, a heavy, dark gravity that pulls relentlessly at my center.
My federal training tells me to hate him, to fight it, to figure out an angle, but my brain is completely short-circuiting.
I am mourning the absolute death of a version of myself that no longer exists, sitting next to the man who is casually constructing a dark, unhinged new one for me.
I obsessively pick at a microscopic loose thread on the hem of my expensive silk skirt, my thumbnail digging in, working the tiny fiber back and forth until my fingertip is raw and stinging.
"You're staring at the glass like you expect to see a stranger reflected back," Leon says. His voice is a low rumble, devoid of pity, slicing right through the hum of the tires.
I don’t look at him. I keep my eyes on the shifting city lights. "My father used to say that a man is only what's in his pockets. Right now, I'm empty."
"You aren't empty, Alessia," he fires back smoothly, his tone bordering on a dark kind of amusement. "You're just unburdened."
The leather of the seat creaks as Leon shifts his massive frame.
He doesn't ask for permission. He reaches out, his large, scarred hand dropping heavily and wrapping around my thigh.
It isn't a gentle, comforting touch; it's a possessive, territorial claim that forces my nervous system to acknowledge him. He squeezes just enough to ground me, his rough thumb tracing the exact line where my nylon stocking meets bare skin. I bristle at his bluntness, my muscles tightening. Everything in my past screams at me to recoil from his dominance, but I’m fucked up enough right now to realize I can’t deny the raw, grounding heat of his palm.
I am actively becoming addicted to the way he dictates the rules of my reality when my own has been completely burned to ash.
He uses his free hand to reach up, his fingers catching my jaw.
He tilts my chin aggressively toward him, forcing me to break my dead-eyed stare with the window.
The rough texture of his perpetually bruised knuckles drags against my skin, sending a jolt of heat through my neck.
His woodsmoke cologne mixed with the subtle scent of expensive fabric practically suffocates me.
"Stop looking back at ghosts," he orders, his ice-blue eyes locking onto mine, refusing to let me spiral. "They can't follow you where we're going."
I swallow hard, my voice laced with venom. "Is that what I am now? One of your projects?"
"You're my asset," he says simply, his gaze dropping to my mouth for a fraction of a second before meeting my eyes again. "And I don't let my assets go to waste."
I hate the fact that his touch is the only thing keeping my chest from caving in under a full-blown panic attack.
I jerk my chin out of his grip and look forward just as the SUV turns off the main arterial route and dives onto a narrow, industrialized access road stretching beneath a massive highway overpass.
The shadows down here are long, jagged, and entirely too deep.
The rhythmic thumping of the tires rolling over the expansion joints echoes against the concrete, and the light instantly dims.
My internal radar, honed by three brutal years of undercover surveillance training, suddenly spikes.
It hits me like a bucket of ice water. The civilian traffic is completely gone.
A delivery truck is parked at a harsh, unnatural angle three blocks back, effectively siping off the flow of normal cars.
My eyes dart to the passenger-side mirror, tracking the reflections.
I start counting the seconds between the blips of headlights from the car trailing us. One, two. One, two. Perfect pacing.
I have to make a call. If I say something and I’m wrong, I look like a paranoid, broken former agent jumping at shadows. If I stay silent and I’m right, we are both dead in the next thirty seconds.
"Leon, the white sedan at ten o'clock," I say, my voice flattening out, stripping away the grief and leaving only cold calculation. "It's been there since the bridge."
Leon glances back lazily, completely unbothered. "Drivers in this city are erratic, Alessia. Don't be jumpy."
"That's not erratic," I snap back, pointing at the mirror. "That's a pace-car maneuver."
The depressive fog evaporates from my brain entirely, replaced by the sharp, electric clarity of a live threat-assessment.
The adrenaline hits my bloodstream like a drug I’ve been craving.
I lean forward, pulling away from the backrest, my hand automatically reaching toward the center console to brace myself.
Through the windshield, I spot a second unmarked black sedan merging flawlessly from a blind side ramp, timing its entry to flank our rear-left quarter.
The trap is so obvious it pisses me off.
I snap into standard-issue Agent Heller mode, my voice dropping an octave into a hard, commanding bark. I click my seatbelt off to give my arms mobility, my hand hovering near the floorboards, ready to drop at a second's notice.
"They’re boxing us," I state, pointing at the converging vehicles. "They’re going to pin the front and sweep the sides."
Leon’s head snaps toward me, his eyes narrowing as he evaluates my sudden shift in demeanor. The arrogant mob boss vanishes, replaced by a calculating predator assessing a weapon. "You’re sure?"
"I’ve run this exact play on three different targets, Leon," I tell him, my pulse thudding a heavy, violent rhythm against my ribs. "Floor it or we’re sitting ducks."
Leon doesn’t waste a single second second-guessing me.
He trusts the read implicitly. He barks a harsh command in Russian to his driver up front.
Vanya slams the heavy gear shifter into a lower range.
The SUV's massive V8 engine roars, a primal, mechanical scream that vibrates right up through the floorboards into my expensive heels as we surge forward to break the closing gap.
The black sedans instantly drop the pretense.
They swerve aggressively, tires screeching against the oily concrete, accelerating to maintain the kill-box.
Leon grabs the overhead grab-handle with his left hand, muscles straining against his tailored suit, and uses his right arm to yank me hard against his side.
"Vanya, go! Now!" Leon roars over the engine.
"Brace yourself, Alessia!" he yells, tucking my head under his shoulder.
"They’re going for the tires!" I shout back, the violent jolt of the transmission throwing my balance off as the smell of burning rubber fills the cabin.
The first volley of gunfire rips into the vehicle.
It sounds exactly like massive hailstones hammering a tin roof, but deeper, faster, and infinitely more violent.
Heavy-caliber rounds tear into the rear hatch and the side body panels.
The ballistic glass of the window next to me doesn't shatter, but it instantly turns white with a blinding spiderweb of cracks, completely obscuring the outside world.
The three-ton SUV fishtails violently as Vanya fights the wheel, trying to keep traction under the relentless barrage.
I watch in hyper-focus as a hardened bullet core strikes the weakened glass just inches from my ear. It lodges itself deep into the thick pane, the heat of the friction radiating right through the glass onto my skin.
"Christ, they’re using sub-machine guns!" Leon curses, the sound of lead on steel deafening in the enclosed space.
"Stay down! Don't you dare look up!" he orders.
"The glass isn't going to hold another mag!" I yell, calculating the structural integrity of Level 7 armor in my head. I count the impacts. Thirty rounds. They're dropping empty mags. They're reloading. We have a three-second window before the next wave shreds the door.
As the second window along the passenger side begins to buckle and turn white, Leon acts with a brutal, terrifying efficiency.
He grabs me by the back of the neck and the waist, practically throwing my body onto the narrow floorboards between the front and rear seats.
I barely hit the plush carpet before he follows me down, his massive frame covering me entirely.
He pins me to the floor, becoming a solid wall of dense muscle and expensive wool, shielding my body from the inevitable hail of lead.
My face is pressed hard into the floor mat, my nose instantly filled with the distinct scent of his laundry detergent mixed with bitter gun oil.
The crushing weight of his chest compresses my lungs.
He is acting like a frantic husband protecting his wife, not a mob boss guarding an asset, and the realization confuses the absolute shit out of me.
"Get down! Stop fighting me!" he snarls right into my ear as I instinctively try to push up for a tactical view.
"You’re exposed, Leon! Get off me!" I yell, shoving at his shoulders.
"Shut up and stay small," he growls, his grip on my waist tightening painfully.