Page 48 of Marked By the Devil

The intense terror that filled me when the car jumped the curb and rammed toward us. The gasp that felt like a chokehold on my throat as I tucked back out of the way. And the tightness of my whole body as I braced for impact.

Replaying in my ear came the screams of the pedestrians, the squeals of the tires, the gunshots from the Volkov guards.

“Go.”

That was all Viktor had to say to send out a man to hunt down whoever had tried to run us over.

He protected me.

He hadn’t hesitated to wrap his big arms around me and yank me to safety.

Viktor, the big, bad criminal I was supposed to want to take down and have arrested for all his wrongdoings, had wanted to save me.

That was his first instinct, to protect me. It wasn’t hard to imagine that he cared about my well-being. If he did that, he would not be treating me like a guest in this “stay”. The action of putting himself in between me and danger proved that my biases about him were faulty.

I came here and was set up with a stakeout where I was supposed to be shot.

Now, as I stayed here, I had a completely different experience of someone looking out for me, not subjecting me to peril.

The differences were staggering. And as I got up and began to pace through the room, I realized that first impression could be the biggest thing to hold me back.

Viktor wasn’t my enemy when he wanted to protect me.

Whoever had tried to run into us on the sidewalk was my enemy. And I had a sinking suspicion that it was another hit placed on my head.

Someone still wanted me dead.

And I grappled with why. I couldn’t have a long list of enemies from the fraud investigation that I did in Oregon. I couldn’t have any enemies who would want me dead here because I had only just arrived.

However, I had to consider that if my superiors suspected that I was with the Volkov family and cooperating with them, they might want me dead for that crime.

Or am I just a loose thread?

Something that had to be dealt with because the first hit failed.

I glanced up at the sound of Viktor entering the room. His footsteps sounded heavy only because he was such a big guy. But as he crossed through the room, his eyes locked on me, I saw how he moved smoothly like a predator on the prowl.

“Did your brother find anything? Does anyone know if that was a hit on you?” I swallowed with difficulty, my throat thick with emotion as he came to stand right in front of me in my space. Or was that another hit on me?

He looked at me with a sober sincerity as he lifted his hand and cupped my face. Staring at me like he wanted to commit every single detail about me to memory, he let out a heavy, deep breath.

“They are looking into it.”

He stroked his thumb over my cheek. The heavy moment between us was suspended with a type of intimacy that I had never felt before. It hit me deep in the heart.

I had never felt as connected to someone as I did to him at this moment. And it had nothing to do with how forbidden it was for me, an agent, to desire a criminal Mafia man like him. It had everything to do with how my body responded to his and how I was lured toward his touch.

“We have a team looking into it and trying to find the driver of that car. Regardless of whatever they discover, you are safe. No matter what, you are safe with me.” He meant it. The intensity of his gaze on me paired with the weight of his words.

He really meant it. Regardless of the fact that I had been found as an opponent to him, someone he would kidnap to bring into his life, he saw me as his responsibility. He saw me as a woman he wanted to protect. Me. The one who should be the enemy.

He didn’t need to tell me that he wanted to protect me. I was alive and not run over by that car because of his quick thinking and his instinct to shield me from danger. Standing here, I saw the proof of how our professional boundaries were blowing apart. The rigid lines that I thought I would always abide by were messy and blurred now.

I couldn’t in good faith look at him as a bad guy.

I could only gaze up into his chocolate-brown eyes and feel this conflicted gratitude that I couldn’t stop. A gratitude that I did not want to hide.

“Thank you.”