A Silent Reckoning: Sinner's Empire Nikita Slater (smart books to read .txt) 📖

to know that there would be no coming back from this. Her insides were probably as much a mess as the streets around them, but he couldn’t bring himself to get up and leave. Even though she looked nothing like Shaun, when he looked at the woman on the ground, he saw his love. The possibility that this could’ve happened to her shook him.

He released her hand and cleared more of the debris, freeing her body. It was worse than he thought. Her pelvis was crushed and there was a gaping wound to her belly. Both of her legs were shattered.

Ambulances began arriving, their sirens drowning out the screaming child.

Jozef looked over his shoulder. He was twenty feet from the nearest ambulance.

He reached an arm beneath the woman’s neck and the other beneath her knees. She let out a grunt of pain as he lifted her, then her head lolled back against his arm.

He stumbled with her toward the ambulance.

She took her last breath as he passed her over to a paramedic. Before he could turn away and leave, he took one last look at her face, now slack as death took her. Her eyes stilled. He snatched the name tag hanging from the pocket of her scrubs and backed away from her.

The paramedic turned back to him, his gaze concerned as he took in the blood down Jozef’s front, the scrapes and the shell-shocked look that was written all over his face. The man spoke to him in Somalian. Jozef shook his head, turned and walked away.

It took him an hour to make his way back to the safe house. When he arrived, the place was in chaos. His men were on their feet, shoving things into bags and checking weapons. At first, he thought they were preparing to come get him, having somehow found out that he’d been caught up in a bombing, but then he realized no one was paying him any attention.

“Where’ve you been, man?” Havel demanded. “We just got word. The mission’s a go.”

Jozef shook his head, trying to shake the ringing and the horror from his brain so he could concentrate on their mission. His men would need a leader whose head was in the game.

“Is that blood on your clothes?” Havel asked, checking his sidearm before shoving it into the holster. “Who did you kill?”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Jozef had been gone for one week, and so far, it was one of the most nerve-wracking weeks of Shaun’s life. There was something especially terrifying knowing that the man she loved had walked willingly into a war zone to do something dangerous. The more she thought about it the angrier she felt. He was doing it for money! Was there a worse reason to do something so stupidly reckless?

Shaun knew she was overreacting, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She was also experiencing a particularly vicious bout of PMS, probably because she wasn’t sleeping or eating properly. She was laying on the couch with a hot water bottle pressed against her belly, Fitzy curled against the small of her back, watching the news. An explosion in Mogadishu had taken out one of their free clinics.

The Doctors Without Borders organization had lost three people: two nurses and a doctor. Twelve Somalians had died in the blast and countless others had been injured. The scenes depicted on the television weren’t new to Shaun, but they weren’t any less horrifying. After the blast, she’d checked obsessively until she was able to come up with a list of the dead. Jozef’s name wasn’t on it. Not that he would have been anywhere near the free clinic, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that her lover was in danger.

They were going to have a talk when he finally got back home. And when she could stand up again without the cramps crippling her attempts.

“Here you are.” Fatima set a steaming cup of tea on the coffee table in Shaun’s line of sight.

Shaun glared at it. Why did people think tea was soothing when someone was injured or depressed? Tea was tea. It was a weak version of coffee without the amazing coffee taste.

Shaun pushed herself up and reached for the hot beverage. “Thank you, mama,” she said politely. She might feel bitchy on the inside, but she would do her best not to take it out on the people she loved.

Saskia snickered and crossed her eyes from the end of the couch where she was curled at Shaun’s feet.

Shaun glared at the girl and sipped the surprisingly good tea. Her mother knew just how to make it, with a dash of heavy cream and a liberal tablespoon of honey.

Fatima picked up the remote control from the coffee table, turned off the news, and settled herself in the cozy leather chair next to the fireplace, opposite the couch. She sipped her own tea, a thoughtful expression on her face.

Finally, she turned her gaze toward Saskia and asked, “What happens if Shaun and Jozef have children? Will they automatically become part of the Bratva?”

Shaun wanted to protest that children were not in the picture yet, and wouldn’t be for a while, but she was curious too. Saskia had popped by the week before and met Fatima. The two had taken an instant liking to each other. Saskia had called Fatima badass for, “walking into a mobster stronghold with a suitcase and a cat.” Fatima saw Saskia as an under-loved urchin who needed a strong dose of mothering when she came around. Shaun had pointed out that the under-loved urchin had access to unlimited funds and resources and frequently used her intelligence for mischief.

When Fatima and Saskia had learned of Shaun’s conversation with Karl about the mafia, both had insisted on getting in on the action. Fatima, because she was an intelligent woman who realized that the more she understood how the mafia worked the more power she and her daughter would have. Shaun also suspected her mother might be reciprocating Karl’s crush