Page 18 of Her Billionaire Protector

And then I hear it. A sharp cry. Faint, far.

Her.

I bolt, and take the spiral staircase three steps at a time until I reach the top. The galleries surrounding me are all vacant. I listen, but the silence confounds me. Maybe I ran in the wrong direction. I hover near the steps, unsure whether the sounds came from above or below.

The scrabble of heels on polished granite and Harvey’s grunts give them away.

I run. Blindly, I follow the sound, until I burst into an atrium and find them: Mia’s back shoved up against a railing, Harvey struggling against her, the round of his belly pressed against her in a way that makes me sick, the fabric of her dress bunched up around her waist, his back to me.

Her eyes widen when she sees me. But she says nothing, doesn’t give me away.

Until I get close.

“No,” she shouts, and it shatters my heart.

Harvey turns, but it’s too late. I’m already on him, gun drawn. I crack it against his skull. He lands backwards on the granite, his shriveled dick in his hand.

I pray for his skull to open up, but of course it doesn’t.

“What the fuck are you doing?” She hisses at me, and I’d feel less pain if she stabbed me in the chest.

“Is that what you wanted?” I snarl back.

I know it’s not, I can see it in her eyes. She’s not fooling me.

“I can’t believe you,” she whispers. But she’s relieved. She pulls her dress down and smooths it with shaking hands. “What the hell am I going to—”

I notice movement out of the corner of my eye: slow, measured. Black trench coat. On the other side of the atrium. He opens his jacket and reaches inside.

I’m not the only gun somebody let in through the back door.

I grab Mia and clamp my hand over her mouth. I peer over the balcony, but it’s a long way down. “Assassin,” I whisper into her ear. Harvey was squeezing in a quick fuck before he had her shot. I grab her hand and run.

But I have no idea where I’m going.

We stumble past headless busts and other granite relics. I pull her into a side gallery full of vases and tear her shoes off her feet, then pull off my own. We hold each other, panting in the darkness, and listen.

A quiet footfall, and the cock of a trigger. Only a gallery behind, two at best.

I grab her hand, and we run, zig-zagging through the galleries, quieter now.

But he’s only a moment behind us. We can’t slow, can’t stop. We keep going until we’re spit out into a hallway.

I have a flash of inspiration and run back to tear a painting off the wall: an old man in blue, clutching his face in his hands. I pray it’s expensive. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, but it works: an alarm peals out, loud and piercing.

If only I’d thought of it before we started running. I throw it on the floor.

Of course, now we can’t hear him, either, which is a new problem I’ve created.

I grab Mia and shove her in front of me, down the steps, until we make it to the basement and I push through the door, running her ahead of me, the sirens shrieking in our ears. I can’t hear how far back he is behind us.

A bit of the wall tile explodes above my shoulder, telling me exactly where he is. We burst through the double doors into the makeshift kitchen, full of folding tables and long rows of vacant steam baths.

“Do you have a car?” I whisper.

“Yes.”

We make it to the end of the line. The door opens behind us.