Chapter 2 - The Click
Emma gripped the heavy plastic cylinder in both her small hands. She aimed for the thick fabric of the man’s dark suit pants, right where her mother always pointed on her own leg.
Blue to the sky. Orange to the thigh.
She pushed down with all the weight her forty-pound body could manage.
Click.
The sound was shockingly loud in the quiet study. Emma held it there. She counted to three in her head, the way the clinic doctor had taught her, her lips moving silently as the epinephrine shot directly into Alejandro Moretti’s failing bloodstream.
One. Two. Three.
She pulled the pen away.
For one terrifying second, nothing happened. The man lay perfectly still.
Then, Alejandro’s spine arched violently off the rug. He took a massive, tearing gasp of air, a sound like a drowning man breaking the surface of the ocean. His hands clawed at the collar of his shirt as oxygen finally flooded his starving lungs. The gray color began to recede from his face, replaced by the flushed, sweating reality of survival.
He rolled onto his side, coughing violently, his chest heaving.
When his vision finally cleared, the most ruthless boss in the five boroughs looked up.
He did not see a team of paramedics. He did not see his armed guards.
He saw a tiny, four-year-old girl with terrified brown eyes, holding an empty EpiPen in one hand and clutching a floppy-eared stuffed rabbit in the other. Beside her on the floor rested a small pink backpack.
Alejandro knew her face. It was the daughter of his new housekeeper, Maria.
"You..." Alejandro rasped, his voice sounding like crushed glass. He touched his own throat, realizing exactly what had happened. Someone had slipped a concentrated nut extract into his wine. An assassin’s trick. Clean, quiet, and impossible to prove as murder.
Before he could say another word, heavy footsteps echoed in the hallway outside the study.
Someone was coming.
Not the rushed, frantic footsteps of a guard responding to an emergency. These were slow. Deliberate. The footsteps of a man coming to check on a corpse.
"Under the desk," Alejandro whispered fiercely, his survival instincts snapping into lethal focus. "Hide. Now."
May you like
Emma didn't ask questions. She scrambled under the massive mahogany desk, pulling her stuffed rabbit and her pink backpack into the shadows with her.
Alejandro closed his eyes and let his body go completely limp on the rug.
