Page 89 of Intimately Faithful

She didn’t expect the dark laugh… no humor behind it.

“Do you think this is about Yelena’s bastard child? I do not want any mistake of hers. You women with your foolish emotions.”

He didn’t? Then what?

“You…you don’t want Misha?”

One slight incline of his head and she was seized by the two men and her purse ripped from her fingers. Without care that it contained tampons and other silly things girls carried, the bigger of the two men dumped it on the floor and things scattered all over.

It was pointless protesting, you can’t argue logic with the devil, so Aoife kept her mouth shut while her insides coiled and rolled with nausea and she thought desperately hard about Danny.

Her sweet man.

Her darling, loveable perfect, Galway boy, who she hoped she’d see again.

When the man waved her passport in the air and then tossed it on Grigori’s desk she had the overwhelming sense she was about to be sold into slavery or whatever the Russian equivalent was in this day and age. “That’s mine!”

“Yelena left something with you that I very much want back and then this whole messy business can be over.”

Sinister intent slid through that deep voice as he thumbed open her passport, checked out the picture four years old and then flipped to the back.

Huh. He peeled something small out of the plastic wallet. And didn’t you know, it was a micro SD card he held between finger and thumb, before slotting it into his inside pocket.

“Yelena had more brains than she pretended not to have,” ruminated Grigori, making Aoife wonder had he cared for her at any point in time before he’d put a gun to her temple and ended her life. The image still made her stomach roll and her heart constrict missing her friend, her only friend here. “Did she tell you she tried to blackmail me?”

Aoife shook her head. Even if she’d known, she wasn’t stupid enough to confess.

“My beautiful ballerina wanted more than she’d earned. She got greedy as all women do, they forget their place.”

It sounded like horses outside coming up the stairs and she pondered if this was her firing squad. Nerves and fear stole through Aoife’s vision.

One skinny girl against three beefy men.

Not even Hunger Games Katniss stood a chance with those odds.

She could pretend to faint. Would they kill a fainted woman? Probably.

She could scream but that would only bring more of his men.

She could offer herself on the desk to Grigori. She’d seen a spark of interest the moment she didn’t back down to him.

It was only sex, right?

Sex didn’t mean anything without love and she only loved Danny.

Without love it was just skin and bones being used.

Just the idea of giving herself to anyone other than the love of her life put vomit directly into her digestive tract.

She couldn’t, he’d just have to go on and kill her.

Her body was Danny’s alone.

She lifted her chin, prepared to face her fate head on.

Just as well a whole mass of Murphy’s walked into the office calm as you like and saved the day. Or maybe they’d come to get killed alongside her.

All for one … or so their saying went. And she’d always felt like a Murphy.