Free The Kill Shot by Nichole Christoff

Troubled by the sight and wanting not to show it, I tried to cross my arms against my chest. The cast on my wrist wouldn’t cooperate. Pain spiked from my thumb to my elbow brutally enough to make me wince. But the discomfort was nothing compared to the ache of knowing Barrett was in serious trouble. And that Philip hadn’t brought me here to help Barrett out of it.
    “You’ve been traveling with bad company, Jamie.”
    “Not me,” I replied, proud that my voice didn’t tremble. “I’ve been traveling with Katie deMarco, as you well know.”
    Philip ignored my insinuation that he’d been nosing through my business and stepped to a narrow workstation bristling with buttons. At the brush of his finger, Barrett’s expressionless mug swelled to fill each screen. “Have you seen this man before?”
    I had. In the hour before I’d boarded my plane for London, I’d seen soft lamplight deepen the chocolate pools of his eyes and his sunburnt cheeks flush with passion. At the time, I’d thought I wanted to see a lot more of him. Now, fear for him made me get defensive. But then I remembered the best defense could be a solid offense.
    I hiked my chin, stared Philip in the eye. “Yesterday, you mentioned Katie by name. You knew we were staying at The Elizabethan Rose. How long have you been keeping tabs on me? And more important,
why
?”
    Philip shook his head as if I were a schoolgirl who hadn’t done her homework. “I didn’t bring you here to ask questions, Jamie. I brought you here to answer them.”
    “Then how about we answer questions for each other?”
    “No, how about you look at this?”
    Philip rewound the video.
    Barrett shot Dalmatovis over and over.
    Blam!
Blam!
Blam!
    I flinched with every blast.
    “That man,” Philip said, “is a killer.”
    “So is this one,” I said, stabbing the pixels of Dalmatovis’s bald spot with my index finger, “by your own admission. If he’d had his way, he might’ve killed me.”
    “No. Dalmatovis only hired on to kill the two defectors. I don’t know the other man’s agenda.”
    “Well, neither do I,” I admitted, glad to tell my old friend the truth about something.
    Philip didn’t comment. He parked his finely tailored ass on the edge of the electronics console, grabbed the tail of my trench coat’s cinched belt, and drew me between his knees. From the frozen monitors, royal-blue light spilled across the ridge of Philip’s right cheekbone before splashing the side of his aristocratic nose. No doubt about it, my friend was a good-looking man. And he always had been. I’d willingly overlooked that fact when we were undergraduates. Frustrated and more than a little afraid, I found him hard to overlook now—especially at such close range.
    “Jamie, if you’ve gotten yourself into difficulty, I want to know about it.”
    “I’m a security specialist. I get into difficulties all the time because I get paid to bring people out of them.”
    “Yes, but when you brought Ms. deMarco to London at the behest of your government, murder wasn’t the difficulty you were expecting, was it?”
    I grabbed the tail end of my trench coat’s belt and jerked it from Philip’s hand. As far as I was concerned, Barrett hadn’t committed murder. He’d defended unarmed civilians from a known assassin.
    Not that Philip was likely to see it that way.
    Out loud, I challenged, “What makes you think I’m here ‘at the behest of my government’?”
    “Darling, which British ministry do you suppose your government contacted before they launched this action on these shores? And which government representative do you suppose supplied British passports so Ms. deMarco could spirit her contacts away?”
    I blinked at Philip in disbelief. “You sent the passports to our State Department?”
    “Indeed. Although Ms. deMarco hasn’t managed to spirit anyone away so far, has she?”
    No, she hadn’t. Because Ikaat wouldn’t leave Britain without her father. And her father