Updated Apr 20, 2026 • ~10 min read
Chapter 4: Forty-Seven
Riot
The kiss was a mistake—Riot knows this with the kind of bone-deep certainty that usually precedes very bad decisions and court-martials—but knowing something and actually being able to forget it are two entirely different problems, and three days after pressing Nadia Volkov against her living room wall like a man possessed, he still can’t stop thinking about the way she tasted like coffee and fury, the small sound she made when he bit her lower lip, the way her hands felt fisted in his shirt like she was trying to climb inside his skin.
He’s maintaining professional distance through sheer force of will, speaking to her in clipped monosyllables when they have to interact and otherwise making himself scarce in the guest room, but the tension between them has gone from simmering to boiling over, and Riot knows with grim inevitability that something’s going to give.
What he doesn’t expect is for that something to be an assassination attempt at two in the fucking morning.
The perimeter alarm wakes him from restless sleep with a soft chime that most people would miss but that cuts through Riot’s SEAL-trained consciousness like a gunshot, and he’s out of bed with his weapon drawn before his brain fully processes what’s happening. The security tablet on his nightstand shows motion on the exterior camera—someone approaching Nadia’s bedroom window from the fire escape, someone who knows how to avoid the primary sensors but didn’t account for the redundancies Riot installed on Day Two.
Professional assassin, then, which means Viktor’s getting serious.
Riot moves silently through the dark penthouse toward Nadia’s room, every sense on high alert, and finds her still asleep in bed, completely unaware that death is currently picking the lock on her window with professional precision. He crosses to her in three long strides, clamps a hand over her mouth to muffle any noise, and feels her jerk awake with a muffled sound of panic that goes straight to his chest.
“Quiet,” he breathes directly into her ear, feeling her heart hammering against his palm where it’s pressed to her sternum. “Intruder on the fire escape. I need you to stay silent and do exactly what I say. Nod if you understand.”
She nods, wide-eyed and terrified in the dim light filtering through her curtains, and Riot releases her mouth slowly, trusting her to keep it together because Nadia’s survived worse than this and he needs her sharp, not panicking.
“Get under the bed,” he orders in a whisper that somehow carries more authority than most people’s shouting. “All the way against the wall, as small as you can make yourself, and do not come out until I tell you it’s safe. Understood?”
“What are you going to—”
“Under the bed. Now.”
She goes, scrambling off the mattress and wedging herself into the narrow space between the floor and the bed frame, and Riot positions himself in the corner where he’ll have a clear shot at the window and the best possible defensive angle. The lock clicks open with a soft snick that sounds unnaturally loud in the quiet room, and then a dark figure is sliding through the opening with the kind of practiced grace that confirms Riot’s assessment—this is a professional, someone who’s done this before, someone Viktor paid good money to make sure this hit actually lands.
The intruder clears the window and takes two steps into the room before Riot moves, emerging from his position with his weapon raised and his voice pitched low and deadly: “Down on the ground. Hands where I can see them. You move wrong and I put a bullet in your skull.”
The assassin freezes for a heartbeat—probably calculating odds, probably considering whether he can draw and fire before Riot makes good on his threat—and then apparently decides discretion is the better part of valor and drops to his knees with his hands raised.
“Face down. Spread your arms. Do it slowly or I’ll assume you’re going for a weapon and react accordingly.”
The man complies with the kind of reluctant efficiency that suggests he’s been on the wrong end of a gun before, and Riot keeps his weapon trained on the back of his head while reaching for the zip ties he keeps in his tactical pants for exactly this kind of situation. He’s halfway through securing the assassin’s wrists when the man makes his move—sudden and desperate, twisting sideways and reaching for something in his boot—and Riot doesn’t hesitate.
The gunshot is unnaturally loud in the confined space of Nadia’s bedroom, and the intruder drops with a wet, heavy sound that Riot’s heard too many times to count, blood already pooling beneath him in a spreading dark stain that Nadia’s expensive carpet will never fully recover from.
“Clear,” Riot says automatically, even though there’s no team to acknowledge the call, and then he’s moving to the bed, dropping to his knees and reaching under to find Nadia. “It’s over. He’s down. You can come out.”
She emerges shaking and pale, her eyes immediately going to the body on her floor and then to Riot’s face, searching for something he’s not sure how to give her. “You killed him.”
“He was reaching for a weapon. I didn’t have a choice.” Riot knows he should feel something about that—guilt or regret or at least professional concern about the paperwork this is going to generate—but all he feels is cold satisfaction that the threat is neutralized and Nadia’s still breathing. “I need to call Marcus, get a cleanup crew here, and move you to a secondary location before whoever sent this guy realizes he failed.”
“You’ve killed people before.” She says it like a statement rather than a question, still staring at the body like she’s trying to process what just happened.
“Forty-seven, counting this one. All in the line of duty, all necessary to protect someone or complete a mission.” He stands and offers her his hand, needing to get her moving before the shock sets in and she shuts down completely. “I know this is traumatic. I know seeing someone die in your bedroom is going to mess with you. But right now, I need you to focus on survival, which means you’re going to pack a bag while I secure the scene, and then we’re disappearing to somewhere Viktor’s people can’t find us. Can you do that?”
Nadia takes his hand with fingers that are ice-cold and shaking, lets him pull her to her feet, and says with more steadiness than he was expecting: “Where are we going?”
“Safe house. Montana wilderness. Completely off-grid, no electronic signature, no way to trace us.” He’s already moving her toward her closet, away from the body and the spreading blood and the visual evidence of exactly how dangerous her life has become. “Pack light—clothes for a week, essentials only. We leave in ten minutes.”
“What about my company? My work? I have meetings tomorrow—”
“Remote work from the safe house. Everything else gets rescheduled or delegated because you’re no good to your company dead.” He turns her to face him, needing her to understand the seriousness of this. “Viktor just sent a professional to kill you in your sleep, Nadia. That means he’s escalating, means the threat is immediate and credible, means I can’t protect you here anymore. So you’re going to pack your bag, we’re going to get in the car, and we’re going to disappear for as long as it takes to figure out how to neutralize him permanently. Understood?”
She nods, still pale but getting steadier, and Riot watches something shift in her expression—fear transmuting into anger, shock hardening into determination. “Okay. Okay. Ten minutes. I can do that.”
“Good girl.” The words slip out before he can stop them, rough and approving, and he sees something flash in her eyes that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the kiss they’re both trying to forget.
But there’s no time for that now, no space for the tension that’s been threatening to consume them both, because there’s a dead assassin on her bedroom floor and Viktor Antonov clearly isn’t fucking around anymore.
Riot makes the necessary calls while Nadia packs—Marcus first, then the cleanup crew, then the pilot who keeps a plane on standby for exactly this kind of emergency extraction. By the time Nadia emerges from her closet with a packed bag and determination written across her features, Riot’s already coordinating their exit strategy and mentally calculating how long they’ll need to stay underground before it’s safe to resurface.
“Ready?” he asks, taking her bag and doing a final visual sweep of the room to make sure they’re not leaving behind anything that could be used to track them.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” She looks at the body one more time, her expression unreadable, and then turns away with what looks like conscious effort. “Let’s go.”
They leave through the service entrance, moving fast and quiet through the pre-dawn Seattle streets, and Riot keeps one hand on his weapon and the other on Nadia’s lower back, guiding her toward the armored SUV that will take them to the airfield. She doesn’t speak during the drive, just stares out the window with her arms wrapped around herself, and Riot wants to say something reassuring but has no idea what that would even sound like.
It’s not until they’re airborne, Montana-bound and relatively secure, that Nadia finally breaks the silence: “Thank you. For saving my life.”
“It’s my job,” Riot says automatically, even though they both know it stopped being just a job sometime around the moment he kissed her against her living room wall.
“Still. Thank you.” She looks at him then, really looks at him, and Riot sees the exact moment she makes a decision he’s absolutely going to regret. “What happens now?”
“Now we disappear. Regroup. Figure out how to end Viktor before he sends someone else.”
“And in the meantime? We’re just going to be stuck in a cabin together, alone, with all this—” She gestures between them, clearly referencing the tension that’s been threatening to strangle them both. “How exactly is that supposed to work?”
Riot has absolutely no answer for that, because the truth is he has no idea how he’s supposed to spend days or weeks in close quarters with Nadia without giving in to the want that’s been eating him alive since the moment they met.
But he’s going to try, because the alternative is crossing a line he can’t uncross, and Nadia deserves better than a bodyguard who can’t keep his professional distance.
Even if that distance is currently measured in inches and eroding faster than either of them can rebuild it.
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