Page 40 of Filthy Dirty Dom
“Got your earpiece in?”
“Yes. Stay silent until I tell you otherwise.”
He slowed down, then flicked off his truck’s lights just before he got to the alleyway. Without hitting the brakes, just in case someone was watching the street, he whipped the car into the alley. He turned off the interior lights, then slipped out of the car, gun in his holster.
He stayed low as he made his way to the front of her brownstone. He pressed his body against a wall, then took out his phone and turned on the front facing camera. At the corner of the building, he held the phone out until he could see down the sidewalk that led past her house.
There was a body lying in the snow, but on the screen Luke was looking at, it probably did look like a pile of dirty snow. He pulled his gun out of the holster, scanned the area to make sure it was clear, then made his way over to the body.
Baylor.
His eyes were closed. A dark stain marred his dress shirt, and a viscous, dark puddle slowly grew under his chest.
Alex knelt beside him and checked for a pulse. Nothing.
Fuck!
Alex pressed his earpiece and connected with Luke. Speaking quietly, he said, “Baylor’s dead. I’m going in.”
“No, Alex. Wait for back up.”
“I’m fully loaded, with eleven in the barrel and one in the chamber. I’ve got thirteen and one extended magazine. Leslie’s in danger and I’m not fucking waiting for backup.”
“Damn it, Alex, you’d order your men to wait, and you left me in charge. So I’m ordering you to stand down until backup arrives. I’m on my way with two more men.”
“ETA?”
Silence met his question, then, “Traffic’s snarled in a few places. I’m twenty minutes out, and the other guys are at least fifteen.”
What Luke said about waiting for backup made sense. And Luke was right. If Alex were at the helm, he’d give the same order to his men. But Luke wasn’t the boss. Alex was. And this wasn’t any client. This was Leslie Duke. “I’m not waiting. I’ll call when it’s done. If I fail, you fucking save her, Luke.”
“Alex, no!”
He hung up.
He was about to move out of his crouch when something cold and hard met his temple.
A sense of surrealism swept over Leslie as she struggled to fight against the rising bile in the back of her throat. She had to stay alert, aware, ready to act at a moment’s notice. But the gun at the side of her head didn’t help matters much. Panic rose again, and again, she ordered herself to remain calm.
She had no idea who these men were, or what they wanted with her. All she knew was that her security detail, a nice guy named Baylor with a fiancée in nursing school and a propensity for bad dad jokes was probably dead. Because how else had these men gotten in?
Alex will be here soon, she mentally whispered. He’ll save me.
If he made it in time and got past these men, that is.
Trying to distract herself from Alex’s impending visit, she’d been working out to a new YouTube yoga video in her studio when three men had suddenly barged in, somehow getting past not just Baylor but her state-of-the-art security system. One man grabbed her and immediately carried her upstairs, as if they’d known the layout of her place ahead of time. The man shoved her onto her couch and held a gun to her head. He spoke in a foreign language to the two other men, then asked her in heavily accented English if she was Leslie Duke, which had seemed silly. If they knew the layout of her place, wouldn’t they know her face? And by the way, was that a Slavic accent she’d heard? But that meant the men could be speaking any number of languages: Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, Ukrainian, Slavic, Romanian…
Wherever they were from, maybe criminals were just extra cautious, she’d thought hysterically, wanting to be certain the person they killed was their intended target. Her shock was affecting her, and when her shock kept her silent, the man slapped her across the face.
Her eyes stinging and her ears ringing, she distantly heard one of the other men say something that made her assaulter back off. Or was this when he was going to shoot her?
Fear flooded her.
Oh God. Oh God.
She didn’t want to die.
Didn’t want to leave this world, her family, Alex.