Page 20 of The Enforcer’s Pawn

The men talk in Russian and laugh. I stop asking questions when my voice gets hoarse. The flight lasts forever. Sleep doesn’t come. My eyes stay dry. I count every risk still within reach, and the list runs out before we cross the ocean.

When the jet starts to descend, grey runway lights streak past the window. Snow clings to the edges of the tarmac. Moscow looks hard and flat under the night. Dmitri may not be here. Maybe his men used his name to scare me, and this is all a hoax played by Patrick.

The jet door opens as cold rushes in.

I step onto the stairs, one hand on the rail, and see him at the bottom.

Dmitri Antonov.

Older. Harder. Staring up at me like the five years between us have found a body.

5

DMITRI

Iwatch her come down the jet stairs, and for an instant I forget why she’s here.

Cara stops halfway down. Her hand tightens on the rail, and she stares at me as if Moscow has set a knife in front of her and called it a welcome. Her clothes are wrinkled from travel. Her dark hair is twisted up, with loose pieces falling around her face. She looks tired, furious, and more beautiful than memory has any right to keep.

That’s the first problem.

The second is that my body remembers her with the same ferocity it had in Boston five years ago. Her mouth looks the same, made for sin and argument, and the taste of her comes back so clearly, I have to lock my jaw against the want.

The night follows in pieces. Cara under me. Her nails in my shoulders. Her voice breaking on my name like the wanting was unacceptable. I don’t like how fast my body answers the memory.

She’s different now. Softer through the hips. Fuller at the breasts. My gaze moves once, from her mouth to the curve of her body, then back to her face. One look. One mistake. Then I lock the rest down.

She isn’t the woman from Boston. She’s Patrick O’Connell’s message.

“Come down,” I say.

Her mouth curves, and there’s no humor in it. “Orders?” She arches her brow. She looks sexy when she does that. “Comforting to know manners missed you.”

Good. Anger helps. Hers, mine, any anger at all. It keeps my hands at my sides and my mind where it belongs.

The soldier behind her lets out something that might be a laugh if he had more courage. I glance at him once, and he remembers his place.

Cara catches that. She has always watched exits, hands, doorways, and men who smile while reaching for something. Patrick trained that into her the way he ruins trust, then pretends his hands are clean. Very Patrick.

She descends the rest of the steps without taking her eyes off me.

We walk toward the waiting car. She sits in the middle of the back seat, flanked by two of my lieutenants, Nikolai on her left and Herman on her right. I take the front passenger seat, angled enough to see her through the rearview mirror.

The car pulls away from the aircraft and rolls across the service road beside the tarmac. Terminal windows glow in the distance. Ground crews cross between vehicles. Aircraft wait in lines, their tails marked in colors I don’t bother reading.

Cara doesn’t ask where we’re going.

The car turns away from the main airport road and takes a side route along the perimeter fence. The pavement gets rougher. Her shoulder bumps Nikolai’s when we hit the first break in the road, and she moves away from him immediately. My eyes stay on her through the mirror. Nikolai gives her more space before I have to say his name. Smart.

The car leaves the paved strip and cuts across a service track. Gravel snaps under the tires. After ten minutes, we stop in front of the receiving hangar.

It sits behind the public terminal, where freight moves through private channels and customs officers know which questions slow paperwork down. Volkov companies own the bonded storage, the security contract, and three bland offices upstairs where men in cheap badges stamp forms that never reach public systems.

The cameras feed into our servers. The guards wear corporate jackets over weapons. Everything looks legal. We keep it that way.

Nikolai gets out first, and Cara follows. Herman steps down on the other side. She stands between them with her arms folded, refusing to look smaller than she is.

The wind tears loose strands from her twist and throws them across her face. Her cheeks redden in the cold. She fights her hair with slim, stubborn fingers, and I let myself watch. She notices it.