Page 70 of Dalla's Royal Guards
“Who is that guy?”
Kyle looked up from his screen. “How am I supposed to know?”
She curled her fingers at Kyle’s disgruntled attitude. He sounded like some teens who had been in the café. She would have to ask Kramer how valuable the punk was because she might just have to kill him if he smart-mouthed her again.
This is why people shouldn’t have children.
Instead, she stood abruptly, her long, red coat flaring around her legs. She turned silently on her heel, pausing to glare at Kyle over her shoulder.
“Find out who he is,” she snapped.
Kyle blinked. “Wait—where are you going?”
“To kill someone other than you—for now,” she said without turning. “Tell me the second they leave the room.”
“But—”
Kyle’s voice faded behind her. The low hum of conversation, the ding of the elevator, and the music from downstairs faded. Her focus narrowed to a single exit strategy. If they were planning to leave tonight—and every instinct screamed they were—they would have to go through the parking garage.
That’s where she would be waiting.
She might have to shoot the woman to keep her from running. O’Toole wanted the woman alive. That was fine.
He never said she had to be whole.
The elevator doors opened onto the hotel’s underground parking garage with a hollow ding. The lighting here was different—colder, more metallic. It clung to the exposed pipes and gray concrete like condensation that never quite formed.
Stella stepped out, her high-tops muffled by the dull concrete. The garage stretched around her, quiet but never quite silent. A distant hum from a ventilation shaft and the mechanical roomwhere the elevator equipment was installed mixed with the traffic from the road outside.
Her hearing was attuned to every sound. The bang of a car door, the muted voices of excited visitors mixed with the occasional tick of cooling metal. Somewhere, a water pipe groaned like something exhaling in its sleep.
Her eyes swept the level.
The tan Land Cruiser with the bullet holes in it wasn’t hard to spot.
She approached it slowly, her gaze alert, calculating. The windows were tinted, but not enough to hide what was inside.
Her lips curled when she spotted a longbow, nestled diagonally in the backseat, the quiver tucked beside it. Sleek. Deadly. Barbaric.
A relic for a museum.
“Well, hello,” she murmured.
She crouched, fingers brushing the sidewall of the rear tire. The sharp gleam of her knife flashed as she pulled it from her coat. One press—one precise angle—and the SUV would be reduced to a sluggish crawl.
She hesitated. That would alert the two Princes who had obviously been more challenging to eliminate than Detri had been expecting. She tapped the tip of the knife against her knee and shook her head.
No, this would make it too easy. Too obvious.
She straightened, pivoted on her heel, and walked across the parking area to the sleek, black BMW M2 she had parked earlier—directly across from the SUV.
She unlocked the door, slid into the driver’s seat, closed the door with a quiet thump, and dropped her handbag onto the passenger seat. Her eyes remained glued to the vehicle as she tapped her finger against the steering wheel.
She wasn’t concerned about the security cameras. Those were easy enough to deal with now that Kyle had hacked into the security system. No, it was the busyness of the hotel that made this a bad—not impossible—but less than desirable spot to conduct an assassination. Raja Hadi’s new government frowned on the murder of visiting royalty.
“It’s a shame he came back from the dead,” she mused with a sardonic laugh.
Reaching over, she pulled out the matte black, compact M9 pistol, screwed on the suppressor, and tapped the cool metal against her palm. With an impatient sigh, she set it in her lap and rested one hand on the steering wheel and the other lightly on the grip as the minutes dragged on.
