Chapter 3 - The Red Laser Dot|
Ten minutes passed.
I stayed behind the counter, my fingers scrubbing at the stainless steel surface long after the grease was gone. My pulse refused to settle. Every time I glanced toward the back corner, I felt his gray eyes tracking my movements.
He wasn't eating. He barely touched his coffee. He was waiting for someone.
Outside, the rain picked up, sheeting across the glass windows in relentless waves.
At 3:14 a.m., I picked up the glass coffee pot to refill a truck driver's mug in booth four. To reach him, I had to walk past Dimitri's table.
I kept my head down, staring at the worn pattern of the linoleum.
That was when I saw it.
It wasn't a sound. It was a tiny beam of red light cutting through the steam of the rain-slicked window. It flickered across the back of the vinyl booth, traveled up the dark wool of the guard's collar, and settled squarely on the center of Dimitri Vulov's chest.
My brain didn't calculate consequences. It didn't evaluate who he was or what he had done.
I dropped the coffee pot.
Crash.
The heavy glass shattered against the floor, hot liquid splashing across my ankles. The guards reacted to the noise instantly, their hands reaching inside their jackets.
"Get down!" I screamed.
I lunged forward across the table, my fingers clawing into the lapels of Dimitri's charcoal suit. The sheer momentum of my body threw his six-foot-two frame sideways off the vinyl seat.
Thwack!
A suppressed round punched through the double-paned window, showering us in glittering shards of safety glass. The bullet buried itself into the exact center of the leather headrest where his head had been sitting half a second before.
May you like
We hit the floor together.
The smell of rain, expensive bergamot, and iron filled my lungs as Dimitri slammed his body over mine, his heavy arm locking across my back like a steel beam.
