Page 2 of Kingpin's Secret Baby

“Back off, pal.” Barnes’s baritone booms over the crowd.

“Who the fuck are-” the man snaps, but Barnes cuts him off.

“Isaidback off.”

“Get out of my way-”

Skin meets skin in a blow I don’t see. Armstrong opens his jacket, revealing something within.

“Woah, hey-!” one of the men exclaims.

A gunshot explodes over the din of the airport. The crowd seizes around me, like the inhale of some enormous, startled beast, before all hell breaks loose.

I’m shoved by a man at my elbow who turns right into me, panic making his eyes bulge. I try to turn with him, but a woman backs into me, crushing my toes under her heel. I jerk, falling, only to be held up by another person’s body.

These people are going to crush me. They’re going to knock me down and run over my body, trampling me until I’m nothing but pulp. Panic surges, but something in the back of my mind tells me to move-to fight for space, to stay on my feet. I haven’t even seen this new land, and I’m already being taken back out of it.

And yet, there’s… some strange relief in that.

A hand grabs my wrist and tugs, jarring me out of my numb thoughts.

“This way!”

The familiar English accent sounds above the chaos, and I’m jerked through the crowd before I can even protest. I trip, but his hand tightens until it hurts, forcing me to stay on my feet and keep moving. My ears are ringing from the screams, more gunshots crack through the airport, my body is buffeted by other bodies- but the man who’s grabbed me doesn’t let me go. He has a duffle bag that he uses as a shield and plow, forcing a way through the stampede for both of us. His head is covered by a ball cap, showing me only the nape of his red hair.

In a shade I know all too well.

We make it to an exit door, but the press of people also trying to leave almost tears us apart. The bones of my wrist grind together as my rescuer clings to me, but it’s worth it. We scrape our way through the crush of bodies without losing each other, and burst out into the bright March morning. The people we just fled the building with are either still running toward the parking lot or condensing into a growing crowd of frightened onlookers. I try to suck in my first full breath in a minute- and almost lose it and my carry-on as Mr. English Accent pulls me into another run across the blinding pavement.

“Where-”

“The bus. We’re getting the fuck away from here.”

I spare only a moment’s thought for my bodyguards, who may or may not still be in a gunfight with two strangers in the middle of an airport. I have no obligation to them, not really. We met for the first time yesterday when they were assigned to me by Achilles, and it was clear from the first moment that there would be no friendship between us. They are loyal dogs of the Ashwood family, one of the two mafia entities in London that I nearly ruined, and I was their ward not by choice, but by necessity. During the entire ten hour flight from England to North Carolina, we exchanged only a handful of sentences, none of them pleasant. And now, separated in a chaos they helped create, it’s entirely possible I’ll never see them again.

Hardly a loss.

But now I have a new problem. I’m alone in Raleigh, North Carolina with no chaperone and no idea where the home Achilles arranged for me is. And this red-haired Englishman has decided we’re in this together.

“Who the hell are you?” I pant as we take the stairs down to the ground level of the parking garage at a breakneck pace.

“You don’t know?”

I’m beginning to think that I do.

Or at least, I’m beginning to think these hallucinations are becoming even more terrifyingly lifelike.

We hit the ground floor and turn right, toward a long stretch of sidewalk scattered with only a few benches. Buses come and go, filling up with still confused and frightened travelers. My rescuer pulls me into one just as it hits capacity. The doors close, the bus jerks into motion, and I finally manage to take a full breath.

My relief is short-lived.

“Goddamn,” Mr. English Accent sighs from beside me. “What even happened back there?”

His face is still turned away from mine, but now that I’m not running for my life, I can’t deny the shade of his hair or the smattering of freckles across the back of his neck- a constellation I’ve seen a thousand times, and even more in my dreams and nightmares.

I reach up and yank the cap off his head, startling a few nearby bus passengers and my rescuer. He whips around, and I snatch his sunglasses too, revealing his face for the first time. What I’d seen through the crowd before, without a cap or glasses and with a face dark with stubble- had been an illusion for sure. But the man who stands before me now is painfully, undeniably real.

Piers Warwick blinks down at me with dark green eyes. There are rings beneath them that weren’t there a year ago. When his lips quirk, they don’t form his easy, crooked smile, but something sharp and guarded. Is that because of me?

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