“Don’t move!” She heard Amber scream it first and then the ting of metal against the carpet.
There was a sudden bright white light that filled the room—the familiar pop and gleam of a flashbang. She blinked. Asher squirmed. Her feet hit the edge of the window, the metal frame coated with small pieces of glass that crunched under her boots.
There was a gunshot and a scream. A slamming of someone against the wall or against the floor.
Diana blinked again, trying to regain her vision, trying to determine who had even thrown the flashbang in the first place.
Asher pulled his head back, bashing it against her nose.
Though her grip didn’t loosen on his neck, she lost her footing on the edge of the window, slipping.
It could have killed her. She could have fallen to her death from one of the executive offices of the MI6 headquarters with the whole world watching. News cameras would zoom in on her smashed brain on the roof. MI6 and SCO19 members would take off their hats to commemorate her bravery and stupidity. Her son and ex-husband would watch all of the life drain from her face as she fell, never able to erase that trauma after all that they’d been through.
But she caught herself with one hand. Her fingers curled around the edge, glass digging into her soft pads and palm as she tried to realign her grip.
She screamed out, each movement of her hand more painful than the last.
Her feet dangled in the air underneath her, kicking against the side of the building, trying to climb her way back up. The wind picked at the bottom of her boots and the back of her neck. The muscles in her forearm pumped up and out of her arm, clawing at the glass edge.
She threw her left arm up, grabbing on to the rim with both hands.
The helicopter hummed behind her as if it was considering coming to get her. But there was no way it could get this close to the building without smashing out the glass and the sides of the building with its blades.
A hand came down onto her wrist.
“Diana!”
She looked up to meet Amber’s dark eyes. He reached for her with both of his hands.
“Don’t worry. I got you,” he said.
But just as his other warm palm wrapped around her wrist, something hit him from behind, over the back of his head, and he went down like a rock. His body splayed out on the edge above her, out cold, his weight pushing down on the edge of her fingers and crushing them against the glass.
She tried to pull herself up again, Amber’s unconscious body acting as a counterweight. This time she managed to get up—thankful for all the pull-ups she’d done alongside her personal training clients in the last year. It took some maneuvering to get herself up, using Amber’s clothes as an anchor to get back into the office.
And as soon as Diana was up, she was down again. The same heavy thud that had hit Amber walloped against the back of her head. The last things she saw were both Amber and Rex’s unconscious bodies, and Wesley’s wide eyes. The last things she heard were the whir of the helicopter blades in the distance and a woman’s voice saying, “You will do what’s required of you.”
Chapter 27
Rex Tennison
London, England
When Rex’s eyes flickered open, his face was stinging. Wind was forcing its way into the open wounds that the broken glass had left behind all over his face. He was being gathered to his feet and when he resisted, the arms didn’t try to stop him. Was it not another enemy? Rex had gotten so used to constantly being surrounded by terrorists and bad guys that the sudden lack of resistance caused him to fall over onto his side, his cheek rubbing against glass once again.
“Fuck,” he growled.
“Mr. Tennison?” a voice asked. “Mr. Tennison, are you all right?”
Rex flipped over onto his back, groaning. He was looking up at a tiled ceiling, still in Amita Voss’s office. But the window was broken. The place was scattered with glass and blood and the sulfurous smell of gunfire.
A blonde woman with a braid was bent over him, looking down, shining a small flashlight in his eyes, one at a time.
“He’s lucid,” she said to someone he couldn’t see. “He needs medical stat.”
“Wesley…” Rex groaned.
“Your son is okay, Mr. Tennison,” she said. “You’re going to be okay too.”
“Dad!” Wesley called from somewhere unseen. “Dad! She took Mom! She took her!”
Rex shot up, almost colliding his forehead with the woman’s nose, but she deftly got out of his way. The office was destroyed. The armchairs were both flipped over, one of them with a bullet wedged in the back of it, splitting the wood and stuffing peeking out like a beer that was about to foam over.
“I’m Jillian Watts with SCO19,” the blonde woman said, reaching out a hand to him to shake. Just as he took her palm in his, two medics crowded around him, immediately tending to his back. Rex took in a sharp hiss through his teeth.
“We gotta go after her,” Wesley said, pacing behind Watts, rubbing at the back of his head and at his wrists.
“Where did they take her?” Rex asked, looking between his son and Watts.
“Took a helicopter,” she said.
“She took their helicopter,” Wesley said over her shoulder, and she shot him a glare.
“Yes. She took the SCO19 chopper but we have drones tracking them,” Watts said. “As soon as they land anywhere, we’ll be on them.”
“You’re on the ground following too?” Rex asked.
Watts nodded.
“Get me in one of those cars,” he
