Cian’s on the ground grappling with the bodyguard and he’s losing. As Cian punches him and sends him backward, he rolls to try and get back on his feet but the bodyguard lunges down and grabs Cian by the hair, then he drags him up and swiftly gets him in a chokehold.
“Cian!”
The bodyguard suddenly freezes and his eyes slide to me. “Cian?” he repeats.
My gun snaps back to Hawk. “Let him go or I’ll blow your boss’s brains out!” I yell, shoving the barrel of my gun into Hawk’s cheek. “Let him go!”
The bodyguard merely smirks and casts his attention back to Cian.
“Tell him to let him go!” I yell at Hawk who, for some strange reason, is still laughing.
“Should I tell you to let him go, Boss?” Hawk laughs, then blood catches in his throat and he coughs harshly.
Boss?
Wait a second…
Coldness grips me from the inside and I slowly raise my gaze back to the bodyguard as he kicks Cian’s weaker leg and forces him to his knees. Our eyes lock and a chill grips my heart in a frozen fist.
Boss…
“Cian Gifford?” The bodyguard gazes down at Cian and twirls his gun between his fingers, then presses it to the back of Cian’s skull. “Well I’ll be damned.”
It hits like a ton of bricks.
The broad-shouldered bodyguard with the scar down his face and the slight Australian twang to his words isn’t a bodyguard at all. Hawk isn’t bleeding at my feet.
This chatty bastard is only a decoy.
Fuck!
16
CIAN
It’s him.
I had him the entire time.
FuckingHawk.
“I’ll kill you,” I snarl, wrestling against his hold on my collar. He presses the barrel of the gun to my temple and leans over me.
“Will you? I’m surprised to see you, Cian. I thought the last of the Giffords had crawled into a hole and died. Instead you’re here with me in Greece. Weird how things work out, don’t you think?”
The cold press of metal keeps me down but white-hot fury burns through my veins. I want to kill him. It surges through me like a need, like there’s no chance for anything else. I want tokill.
“But the hotel,” Faina gasps, her face twisting with horror. “You blew up your own people?”
Hawk chuckles deeply. “I wouldn’t have thought a Russian would be so surprised. My lines here are broken. No one can betrusted. They should be thankful I wined and dined them before killing them. No one here is worth the cost or effort to protect, proven by how swiftly the two of you have been cutting them down.”
So I was right. This entire thing was his way of gathering the last people on our list and killing them before any of them had a chance to flip and tell us what we wanted. My shoulder rolls as I test the firmness of his grip and Hawk nudges his knee into my back.
“Easy,” he warns. “I wouldn’t want the last Gifford to die so quietly. It’s something that should be celebrated!”
Faina’s gun immediately locks onto Hawk. “Kill him and I’ll kill you.”
“You don’t want to bargain?”
