Page 7 of The Enemy Protector
“Sir?” He sits up a little straighter.
“I’ll take over.”
He frowns, then nods.
I’ve done this before. Nelson gets to his feet. “Call me when you want me back.”
He doesn’t wait for me to respond.
Nelson is one of three men I have following Sofia Baranova. He looks like any other average American guy. Some days he wears a suit. Other days he’s homeless on the street. I’ve chosen him and the others because they blend in. Sofia has no idea they’re there. She’s watched twenty-four hours a day.
Her men watch her. Mine watch her and all of them.
Mine are better. If one of them gets spotted, he’s punished for it. But the report still tells me something useful. Sofia is sharper than she used to be. She notices what her world trained her to notice. She just hasn’t learned yet that the best eyes never look like eyes at all.
Then I hear her voice, and my body answers before I can think. She’s coming out of the coffee shop she visits almost every day.
At twenty-one, she moves like she owns the sidewalk. Dark hair loose over her shoulders. Dark jeans today. And a blue sweater against the early spring chill. Ankle booties with a chunky heel. She always wears heels like that. No stilettos. Nothing she can’t run in. She hasn’t worn a shoe she couldn’t escape in since she was eighteen.
She’s carrying her coffee in one hand, laptop bag slung over her shoulder. To anyone else, she looks casual. But there’s a knife in that bag and pepper spray disguised as lipstick in the outside pocket. My girl wants the world to think she’s fearless. I know better. She’s ready. Almost as if she wants someone to try her just to prove she can handle it. She could have hidden behind walls and guards. Instead, she taught herself to survive the open street.
She took what was done to her and made herself harder to touch. I should not admire that as much as I do.
Her guard steps forward and falls into step as she starts down the sidewalk toward the library. I put my phone to my ear and follow.
She looks like her mother.
That is the part I never brace for.
Sofia’s got her mother’s dark hair. Her mother’s features. But those eyes are all Mikhail. Icy blue. I know her eyes. I see them in my dreams.
She walks with the confidence of a woman who knows she’s powerful. She’s filled out, not as thin as she used to be. I know she spends an hour in the gym every day. She runs. Trains. Three years of martial arts and she hasn’t missed a day yet. She has had to get a new trainer. When I was told the first guy touchedher, I dumped his body in the Hudson. She had clear rules: no touching off the mat.
He touched her.
He died.
She walks into the library, her guard taking a seat at a table by the door. I take a table across the room with a perfect view of her. The space smells like coffee. The university students drink it like water.
I watch her open her laptop, sip her coffee, then lick foam from her lips. My body reacts. I shut it down. I've been doing that for longer than I want to examine. The promise was never supposed to feel like this.
It still isn’t enough.
She scans every room she enters. Clocks every exit. Sizes up every stranger. I have watched her do it a hundred times from a dozen different angles. She has never once looked at me. I’ve made certain of that. Always staying hidden and out of sight.
But I want to be the one thing in her world she doesn't have to be afraid of finding.
She places her laptop bag on the table just like she always does. I know she’s going to turn it so she can slip her hand inside and grab that knife if she needs it. I also know her phone will go into her bra in three, two...and there it goes.
But she’s not done yet. She only studies with her hair up. This is the part I like. She pulls a clip from the outside pocket of her bag. Without thinking, she twists it up and clips it on top of her head.
Now she’s ready. She’ll focus on her screen. About every sixty seconds, she’ll look up and survey the room, but she won’t see me. I reach behind me, grab the first book I can reach, and open it with my head down. She lives by patterns now, and I know every one of them.
She has no idea a war is brewing. When her father Mikhail dies—and Mikhail will die soon—Sofia will be the primary obstacle between Yuri and everything he came for. She is the legitimate heir. She is the one standing between Yuri and the Baranov empire. He will not negotiate with her. He will not maneuver around her. Men like Yuri eliminate obstacles and take what they want.
The clean move for me is to let it happen.
Yuri taking the Baranov empire destabilizes an entire sector of the city. That kind of chaos creates opportunity. Assets become available. Alliances shift. A Baranov power vacuum could hand me power that I don’t have to kill to take. In theory, I wouldn’t have to do anything except take over.
