Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 246

Chapter 238: Six A.M.

DANTE

I had been getting up at six for solo sessions for fifteen years, before the protection detail. Before Chicago, and before Lincoln Park, before any of it. It started back when it meant nothing except quiet courts and a body that hadn’t talked itself out of training yet. The habit didn’t know about threat assessments or shift changes or the specific gap in coverage that existed between Reeve’s overnight team standing down and the morning team arriving.

I didn’t think t about the whole twice. Maybe I should have done. The facility lot was nearly empty at six. One other car, a maintenance truck near the side entrance. I parked my car, and grabbed my bag and alighted from the car. I walked toward the building.

There was a car I didn’t know the owner. It was pared near the back corner of the lot. A dark sedan, engine off, no one visible inside. I clocked it. Filed it. Kept walking.

This was the mistake. Not a large one, the kind of small dismissal anyone makes a hundred times a day, the brain deciding a thing is probably nothing because most things are probably nothing. I had fifteen years of early mornings telling me empty lots were just empty lots.

I was wrong this time. I didn’t hear him. I felt the impact first, something hard against the back of my skull, my vision going white at the edges, my knees buying before my mind had caught up to what was happening. I went down. Not fully, I got a hand to the pavement, kept enough of myself together to roll as the second blow came down, and it caught my shoulder instead of my head.

Then I saw the knife.

Quiet. Deniable. The thought arrived in some clinical corner of my mind even as my body was already moving, a knife didn’t make noise, a knife could be explained as a robbery gone wrong, a knife was the kind of thing that left an “accident” believable in a way a gun never could.

I got my forearm up.

The blade went across it instead of into my chest, deep, immediate, the specific cold-then-burning of a cut that was bad and that I didn’t have time to assess properly because the man was already coming again.

I had spent fifteen years training a body to move under pressure. This was not tennis. But the same instincts, the trained reflex, the refusal to freeze, the specific competitive fury of someone who does not accept losing, took over completely.q

I drove my good shoulder into him. As soon as our bodies touched I felt something. It was like a sound that might have come been him, or me. We went down together, the pavement cold and unforgiving against my back, his weight on top of me, the knife somewhere between us.

I got a hand on his wrist. I do not know how long the next part lasted. Seconds. It felt longer and was almost certainly shorter than it felt. I fought the way an animal fights, not the way a person plans to fight, no strategy, just the absolute refusal of every part of me to be the thing this man had been sent to make

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got a knee into him so hard. He shouted out of pain.

He let go.

He ran.

Claim

I lay on the pavement for a moment that felt longer. My forearm was bleeding badly. I could see that much, and even through the white statis at the edges of my vision. My head was ringing very hot. I was very worried because of it. The worry came a terrible shock. Itrembled and my ribs cracked when I tried to sit up. Something had happened there too, somewhere in the struggle I hadn’t fully registered.

I sat up anyway.

I got my phone out of my bag with my good hand. My fingers slick unsteadily. I did not call 911 first.

I called Cameron on the phone. He picked up the call after the phone rang twice. If felt he was being smart. By this I mean he answered everything before fully waking. Which was a habit from years of managing things that couldn’t wait for business hours.

“Dante?”

“Cameron.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. “I’m hurt. Facility lot. Someone..” I stopped. The ringing in my head made the sentence hard to hold together. “Knife. He’s gone. I’m…”

“Where exactly,” Cameron said. Already moving, I could hear it,, a door, footsteps, the specific shift in his voice from asleep to fully operational in under two seconds.

“East lot,” I said. “By the side entrance.”

“I’m calling it in right now. Stay on the line. Stay awake.”

My forearm pressed to my chest and blood soaking through my shirt.

I was still on the cold pavement. The lot was empty.

“Cameron.”

“I’m here, stay with me. The ambulance is coming.’

“Tell her after.”

A pause. Just long enough for him to understand exactly what I meant, not now, not while she was sleeping forty minutes away in a house full of people who loved her, not before someone could tell her in person, with her hand to hold instead of a phone ringing in the dark.

“After,” Cameron said. “I promise you. After.”

“Three words,” I said. The ringing was getting worse. “That’s all. Tell her…”

“I know what to tell her. Stay awake, Dante and stay on the line,” Cameron said.

The phone slipped slightly in my bloody grip and I adjusted it, kept it to my ear, kept Cameron’s voice going steady, urgent, the specific controlled panic of a man holding himself together because someone needed him to.

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SIX A M

In the distance, finally, a siren.

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