Page 103 of Power's Fall
“No, but I’m headed that way.”
“Fuck. Who’s there right now?”
“No one.” There was no one else here. Normally there was one knight or security officer in her home at all times, but there had been yet another crisis, and she’d had to send out the knight who should have been here to deal with it. She’d activated the house’s lockdown and set all the house alarms, but still…she was the only one here.
Vadisk growled. “What the hell, Nik? There is no way Grigoris okayed this.”
She reached her bedroom door and pressed her hand against the security panel in the wall. It scanned her print in a split second, and then unlocked.
She hesitated. “If I activate panic room mode, I’m trapped in here.”
“Do it,” Vadisk demanded, sounding out of breath.
Nikolett took a quick breath, then activated panic room. A series of successive heavy thunks echoed as steel bolts shot out of the doorjamb into the steel-core door. Metal rattled as heavy shutters slid down over the windows. The air-conditioning system cut off for a moment before starting up again, except now it was a closed system that wouldn’t heat or cool the room, but would continually filter the air and test for chemical agents.
“Locked.” Nikolett turned back to her bed, moving without thinking, her focus on Vadisk and what was happening rather than her injury.
Pain shot up her leg, shocking and sudden, and she collapsed onto her hands and knees, dropping the phone. Alone and with no one listening, she indulged in a few whimpers before picking up the phone.
“Are you safe?” she asked, her voice tight. Hopefully Vadisk hadn’t heard her pathetic whimpering.
“No.”
“What do you need?”
“We’re about to… Yes, that will work.” Vadisk switched to English halfway through, clearly no longer speaking to her.
“What do you need?” she repeated.
“We need a ship waiting at the rendezvous point in the Black Sea.”
“You found a way out of Crimea?”
“Yes, but it’s going to be messy. We’re taking the Minister of the Interior hostage.”
Nikolett took a second to process that. “We’ll deal with it,” she said after a moment.
“I’m not going to kill him,” Vadisk offered.
“Good idea.” Nikolett started to crawl back to the bed, shoving the phone and IV pole forward with each step. “You think this Spaniard is behind the attacks here?”
It seemed coincidental to the point of ludicrous to imagine that the issue of the Crimean blackmailer, which had started long ago, could be related to her current assassination issues. Though the Spaniard hadn’t been the blackmailer, so maybe…
“I don’t know,” Vadisk said brusquely.
“Did you recognize anything about him? Is he a member of our territory?”
“No, he’s not a member.”
“How do you know?”
“He said he wasn’t, and he wasn’t lying.”
Nikolett finally made it to the bed, hauling herself up onto the mattress. She had to set the phone down to use both hands to help lift her injured leg, teeth gritted.
“Okay, we ready?” Vadisk said in English.
“Be careful,” Nikolett said in the same language.