Free Found by Tara Crescent

Chapter 1
    Alexander / Marc:
    It was August in Paris and the city was muggy and entirely unpleasant. The sun beat down mercilessly. Heat radiated from the sidewalk. Most Parisians had taken advantage of their generous vacation allowances and headed somewhere cooler.
    Of course Paris was always crowded with tourists, but there were never any that ventured to this downtrodden corner in the banlieu. Saint Denis had been one of the epicenters of the riots that had rocked France ten years ago. It teemed with poor immigrants from the former French colonies in North Africa, desperate in their search for peace, prosperity and the French way of life. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, the Republic’s founders had called it.  
    Yet in this corner of the city, the dream seemed distant. Unemployment was over twenty percent. Massive, crumbling low-income housing projects constructed by the French government quarantined the poor, as if poverty were a contagious disease. Gangs flourished where the law had failed. Until the riots, all of France was happy to pretend that places like Saint Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois didn’t exist.
    It was a perfect place to find a bar and take refuge while the plan I’d set in motion unfolded in a much more prosperous part of the city.
    I had to admit it chafed that I wasn’t part of the operation. In the early days, I’d have been on the frontlines with a gun in my hand. Now though, the risks were too great. If I died, everything I spent my entire life working for would fade. That could not happen. I didn’t care for my own safety; I hadn’t since my seventeenth birthday, when the truth of who I was had been revealed to me, but my plans were of vital importance.
    “You are sulking, Marc,” the man sitting next to me at the bar rumbled. Grey stubble covered his face as he scratched his chin in a familiar gesture that had me smiling to myself.
    Jean-Luc was right. “Am I that obvious?” I asked wryly. I took a reflexive look around the bar to make sure our conversation wasn’t being overheard. Even though Jean-Luc was a professional and had called me Marc, preserving my cover, I was still fanatical about secrecy. The stakes were too high.
    “ Mais oui, but only to an old friend.” Jean-Luc took a sip of his beer.
    In this particular bar in Saint Denis where I was a semi-regular, I was a two-bit thief named Marc. The bartenders here had seen me in rags and they’d seen me in suits that cost thousands of euros. They were under the impression that my clothes swung with my fortunes.
    Jean-Luc had devised that cover, the wily old tactician. It was remarkably effective, but then again, Jean-Luc was my second-in-command for the most important portion of my multi-billion dollar empire. He was brilliant at his job.
    “Everything is all set?” I asked, not for the first time that evening.
    “Relax, Marc,” he muttered. “We have planned for every contingency, you and me.”
    Of course we couldn’t plan for every contingency. We had two failed attempts on Stanislav Durov’s life to remind us of that. The first time we’d failed, we’d tried to kill him in his home country of Russia. That had been a mistake. We’d used mercenaries and the cost had been high, both in dollars and in lives. Another attempt had been made when he had been on vacation in the Caribbean. That too had failed.
    About the only reassuring thing was that Durov hadn’t traced the attempts to my door. But why would he? I was trusted .
    My phone rang. I looked at the display and drew back in instinctive revulsion. Dylan . I slid off my stool and headed to the door. This call I definitely didn’t want anyone to overhear.
    “ Oui? ” My tone was curt as I answered. I’d no need to pretend with Dylan. Our conversations were always fraught with tension.
    “Speak English goddamnit,” he huffed irritably from the other end.
    I rolled my eyes. “What do you want?” I had no time for idle chit-chat.
    “You are overdue for a