All Chapters of BEAUTY AND THE BODYGUARD: DANGEROUS DESIRE BOOK 2: Chapter 111 - Chapter 119

ZADE'S POVThe answer arrived without the courtesy of being deniable.No.Of course not.Nancy was fierce and generous and astonishingly forgiving in ways that still surprised me. But this wasn’t a small thing to forgive. This wasn’t a lie told to spare someone’s feelings or a secret kept out of cowardice.This was a fundamental betrayal. An original sin that touched everything that had come after it.Every morning of training. Every shared meal. Every conversation in the dark. The night she’d had the nightmare and I’d broken down her door without thinking. The hidden cove and the moonlight. The two days alone and the pancakes made from my mother’s recipe. The way she looked at me like I was something good.All of it contaminated at the root.When she found out—and she would find out, because the timeline Viktor had given me was not infinite, and the mission didn’t pause for feelings—she would look back at all of it and see it differently.See me differently.The man who’d made her fe

ZADE'S POVBecause I had needed air and distance and a wall to hit rather than doing the thing I should have been doing, which was staying between her and everything that wanted to hurt her.I picked up the gun from the path. Checked the chamber in a single practiced motion—loaded, round seated, suppressor functional. Pressed my split knuckles against my thigh one more time, hard, using the pain to sharpen my focus.Then I moved toward the villa door at a run.Not a sprint. Controlled. Making myself think through the anger and the fear rather than running blind into a situation I hadn't assessed.How many. Viktor wouldn't send a two-man team for something this sensitive. Minimum six, probably more. How they'd be positioned—ground floor entries covered, primary target secured first, which meant upstairs, which meant—Two men stepped out of the darkness between me and the door.I didn't slow down.Fired twice in quick succession, the suppressor reducing each shot to a sound like a hard

NANCY'S POVOne moment Zade was standing.The next he wasn't.It happened so fast that the sequence of it didn't make sense to my eyes. One moment he was turning toward Maria, weapon raised, completely in control the way he always was in every situation—and then his arm dropped wrong, moving with a heaviness that had nothing to do with intention, and his knees buckled in that terrible involuntary way, and he went down hard on the dock boards.The sound of it knocked the air out of me."Zade!"I was already moving, crossing the distance between us before his name finished leaving my mouth, dropping to my knees on the wooden dock beside him. The boards were rough under my knees and damp from the sea air and I didn't feel any of it.His eyes were open.That was the worst part somehow. Open but wrong. The sharp silver focus that I knew so well, that I'd watched track every corner of every room he walked into, that had looked at me across pillows and across training mats and across

NANCY'S POVThe silence of someone standing still and looking at me.I lifted my chin.Found the floor.Planted my feet on it even though they were cold and bare and tied to a chair."Hello," I said.My voice came out clear and even and completely steady.You're Marco Valentino's daughter, Zade had told me once. Act like it.So I did.The footsteps stopped just inside the room.The silence that followed was the kind that had weight to it. The silence of someone who was comfortable making other people wait. Who understood that silence was its own kind of power.I kept my chin up and my eyes forward and waited.Then a sharp click—a switch somewhere to my left—and pale yellow light flooded the room from a single bulb hanging from the ceiling above me.I blinked against it, my eyes adjusting after the complete darkness, the light burning even though it was weak and jaundiced and barely adequate.The room came into focus around me slowly.Stone walls, dark with age and damp,

NANCY'S POV"I'm going to take everything from him first," Viktor continued, and his voice had taken on a quality I couldn't name—not pleasure exactly, but a dark satisfaction, the sound of a man finally saying aloud the thing he had been planning for a very long time. "His power. His empire. Everything he has built. And then, when he has nothing left, when he is standing in the wreckage of his life looking for the one thing that could still make it bearable—"He paused.Let the silence do its work."I'm going to take you too," he said. "In front of him. So the last thing Marco Valentino sees before he understands what total defeat feels like is his daughter's face."My chest had gone very cold.Not metaphorically. Physically cold, like something had replaced my ribcage with the same damp stone that made up these walls.He had no intention of letting me leave here alive.It had never been part of the plan. Not any version of the plan.My father would comply because he believe