Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 145091 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 484(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145091 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 484(@300wpm)
He needed to ease out of bed and find a weapon. He wasn’t about to underestimate his opponent. The fact that she was a woman meant nothing. Some of the deadliest people he knew were women.
He shoved thoughts of his sister out of his head.
Kyle would never let him live it down if he got shot and taken out because he crashed a car. It wouldn’t matter that the accident had been something most people wouldn’t survive.
Not that Kyle would know. Kyle was happy. Kyle was surrounded by family members who would never choose their careers over him or evil, for that matter. Julia had chosen literal evil over him.
Was he using the word literal right? His mom complained about the overuse of that word by his generation.
What the hell was he doing?
“Be safe. Ya tebya lyublyu.”
Russian. She was speaking Russian. I love you. She’d told someone she loved them in Russian, and her accent had been perfect. He could often tell a native speaker from the accent.
He was in serious trouble. His heart rate ticked up, adrenaline starting to flow through his veins.
He heard the slight clatter of the phone being hung up. Was she using a landline?
Maybe he should question what century he’d landed in.
He slipped out of the bed. He still had pants on, but his shirt was gone and so were his shoes. There was gauze wrapped around his waist holding a big bandage to his side. Whoever had taken him obviously wanted him alive. Where was the drive? Had it been lost in the crash? Surely a crash that bad had caused enough damage that the drive might have been ruined.
Drake stood, the pain still there but a minor thing in the face of what he needed to do. The door to the small, utilitarian room was slightly open. He needed to get the upper hand and quickly. She could be walking in here any moment. He arranged the pillows under the thick blanket he’d slept beneath. It wouldn’t fool her for long, but he only needed a moment.
A creak let him know she was coming his way. He moved to the door, stepping to the side where she would have trouble seeing him until she turned.
He didn’t intend to let her turn.
This was going to hurt.
The door came open and she walked in, gingerly moving toward the bed as though trying not to disturb him. He had a glimpse of blonde hair in a ponytail and a feminine figure in a sweater and leggings. She was roughly a foot shorter than he was, but that didn’t mean a damn thing if she was well trained.
She stopped, and that was the moment he pounced.
Drake moved in, wrapping an arm around her neck and the other around her waist, dragging her back and close so she wouldn’t have room to fight. “Hold still or I’ll might hurt you, and I don’t want to do that.”
Her whole chest moved with the force of her sigh. “I’m not going to move because if I do, I’ll reopen that wound I spent so much time fixing. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t all bullet. Did you tear it at some point?”
She was calm. He would give her that. “I had a fight with one of your agents before I managed to kill him. He got a couple of good hits in.”
“One of my agents?”
“Na kovo vy rabotayete?” His Russian was excellent. As was his Mandarin and Cantonese. His father had started to teach him when he was barely old enough to speak English.
Don’t ever let anyone know how fluent you are in Russian. They’ll forgive you the Chinese, but question the Russian. It could hurt your mother’s career, but it will help yours. You’ll see one day. I know I push you, son, but one day you’ll appreciate it.
“You heard me speaking Russian and now you’re convinced I’m a Russian agent. It might be a good time to point out you seem to speak it well.” She was completely relaxed. “Drake, I’m with the Agency. My name is Taylor Cline. I’m here at 124 waiting on my father. You would know him as Alpha.”
Lev Sokolov.
He was a legend. He’d left his job as a Russian operative nearly twenty years before and had become one of the Agency’s most dangerous operatives. He was a deep-cover guy and out in the field most of the time.
He was also one of the operatives every other intelligence agency in the world would like to kill.
“I serve as my dad’s handler. He’s the only operative I work with, and for obvious reasons I do it from remote locations like this one,” she explained in a steady tone. “You’re at a safe house in Romania. I received a call at five forty-two this morning that you had an accident roughly one kilometer away. I found you in your vehicle and got you back here. After I stitched you up and gave you pain meds, I called back to base and updated them. I then took the drive and uploaded it. You’re free to use the landline to call base and verify everything I’ve told you.”