Need your eyes on the Black Ember deck. Brand positioning section isn’t working.
The Black Ember pitch. Perfect. Apparently, finding out I was pregnant with twins wasn’t enough drama for one day.
We’d been working on this proposal for six weeks, ever since we made it to round two of Black Ember Distilling Co.’s search for a marketing agency. They were a heritage bourbon brand with an incredible story and virtually no digital presence.
They wanted a complete digital makeover. A multi-year partnership that could transform my agency overnight. The kind of opportunity I’d been working toward for years.
We had three weeks to nail this pitch. Three weeks while I was apparently going to be dealing with whatever the hell came next from this impossible situation.
I texted Chauncey back while my brain processed how completely my world had flipped upside down.
Everything I’d worked for, everything I’d planned, felt as shaky as those two little heartbeats on the ultrasound screen.
Two heartbeats that were about to change absolutely everything.
1
May, Athens
It wasn’t until I was wandering the back alleys of Athens that I realized how dumb this was. When I arrived that morning and dropped my bags off at my seaside villa, following the little blue line on my map app had seemed perfectly reasonable since it was a shortcut to the popular Greek café I was dying to try.
The alley had looked cute at first, with white walls, brightly painted doors, and flowers hanging everywhere. But the deeper I went, the less pretty it became.
Painted doors got fewer, and some were barely hanging on. The pleasant smells of grilled meat and salty ocean air turned into garbage and stale water.
I was halfway down when my gut told me something was wrong. It was a feeling I’d learned to trust from years of working night shifts as a nursing assistant.
Looking up from my phone, I saw a skinny man leaning against a wall, smoking. He didn’t seem to be aware of my approach, but something about the scene felt off.
I pushed down the worried feeling. I wouldn’t turn around like some scared tourist because a guy was having a cigarette.
There was light ahead where the alley ended. All I had to do was keep walking.
When I walked past the man, his hand shot out, grabbing my purse strap. The yank sent pain shooting up my arm, but instinct kicked in and I yanked back, holding the bag with both hands.
I could have let go, but losing that purse meant losing my phone, passport, and the keys to the villa. Losing it would blow my cover about being in Greece, and I couldn’t let that happen.
I’d learned young that if you didn’t hold onto what was yours, someone would take it and never give it back.
“Let go!” I shouted.
But the harder I pulled, the harder he did, and we were locked in this crazy tug of war while he snarled things in Greek.
I wouldn’t give up. I refused to be another victim.
“You picked the wrong woman today! I will fuck you up before I let go!”
His face got uglier when he realized I wasn’t backing down. The strap cut into my hands, but I held on and kicked his shins.
He yelped and almost dropped the purse, but I wasn’t done. I let go with one hand and grabbed his face, jamming my thumb right into his eye.
“Let go, asshole, or I’ll mess you up so bad your mama won’t know you.”
I caught a flash of movement in my peripheral vision just before the thief was yanked backward. His feet literally left theground as he was launched through the air so fast my brain struggled to process what was happening.
Someone had grabbed him, spinning him around before slamming him back-first into the old stone wall. The air whooshed out of his lungs in a gust.
A man with tattooed forearms now loomed over the purse-snatcher, pressing one arm into his windpipe. The thief made choking sounds, his eyes bugging out, before a quick punch to his gut doubled him over.
