Chapter 2: The Assassin at the Gate
Enzo pushed Harper behind the bed as another shot echoed through the mansion.
“Stay down.”
She grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t leave me.”
It was the first time she had touched him voluntarily.
Enzo looked at her pale fingers wrapped around his sleeve.
“I have to secure the house.”
“He wants me dead.”
“Then he made a mistake coming onto my property.”
Enzo pulled a pistol from the drawer beside the bed and handed Harper a smaller weapon from the locked compartment beneath it.
She recoiled.
“I don’t know how to use that.”
“You point it at anyone who enters without saying my name. Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready.”
“You’re giving me a gun?”
“I’m giving you a choice.”
That word stopped her.
Choice.
Enzo left before she could answer.
Downstairs, armed men flooded the corridors. One of the east windows had shattered. Snow blew through the opening, carrying the sharp smell of gunpowder.
Luca stood near the staircase, blood darkening his white shirt.
“You hit?”
“Grazed.”
“Where’s the intruder?”
“Library.”
Enzo entered with two guards.
A man in a gray winter coat lay on the carpet, one knee destroyed by a bullet. A suppressed pistol rested several feet away. His face was familiar.
Graham Pike.
Preston Whitcomb’s former head of security.
Enzo crouched in front of him.
“You crossed three walls, fourteen cameras, and twenty armed men. Either you’re very brave or Preston promised to pay your widow.”
Pike spat blood onto the carpet.
“You don’t understand what you married.”
Enzo struck him once.
Pike laughed through a broken lip.
“The girl is poison.”
“The girl has a name.”
“She knows too much. Whitcomb’s accounts. Judges. Senators. Your people too.”
Enzo’s expression hardened.
“What does she know about my people?”
Pike smiled.
“Ask her about Nathan.”
The room seemed to lose heat.
Enzo grabbed him by the throat.
“You say my brother’s name again, and I’ll remove your tongue.”
“Whitcomb didn’t order the hit alone,” Pike rasped. “Someone inside your family opened the door.”
Before Enzo could question him further, Pike’s body jerked.
Blood spread across his chest.
A bullet had come through the shattered window.
Sniper.
“Down!” Luca shouted.
Everyone hit the floor.
Enzo rolled behind a marble column and fired twice toward the tree line. Guards rushed outside, but the shooter had already vanished into the snow.
Pike gasped once.
Then died.
Enzo stared at the dead man.
Someone had silenced him before he could reveal the traitor.
Luca pressed a hand to his wound.
“You believe him?”
“I believe dying men when someone kills them before they finish talking.”
Enzo returned upstairs.
The master suite door was open.
His heart stopped.
“Harper?”
He entered with his gun raised.
She stood beside the fireplace, still wrapped in his jacket. The pistol shook in her hands.
A man lay unconscious near the balcony doors.
Harper’s breathing came in broken bursts.
“He came through the balcony,” she said.
Enzo checked the intruder. Alive. A bronze Whitcomb family pin was fastened beneath his collar.
“You shot him?”
Harper shook her head.
“I hit him with the lamp.”
Enzo looked at the shattered lamp base.
Despite himself, he almost smiled.
Then he noticed what the intruder had dropped.
A photograph.
Nathan stood outside a restaurant, smiling beside Harper.
The picture had been taken six days before Nathan’s murder.
Enzo slowly picked it up.
“You knew my brother.”
Harper’s expression collapsed.
“Yes.”
“You stood beside me at the altar and said nothing.”
“I was afraid.”
“What did Nathan have to do with your father?”
Tears filled her eyes.
“He was trying to save me.”
Enzo raised the photograph between them.
“From Preston?”
May you like
Harper shook her head.
“From the man inside your family who helped kill him.”
