Alle Kapitel von The Man Who Married My Name: Kapitel 11 – Kapitel 20

"Put the gun down, Nadia."Elise’s voice was smooth, stripped of every shred of warmth I had ever associated with her. She twirled the silver vial of antidote between her long fingers, the liquid inside catching the flickering candlelight like liquid mercury.My best friend. The woman who was supposed to be my anchor to reality. She stood beneath the majestic stained-glass arches of Sainte-Chapelle, holding a suppressed pistol leveled straight at Lucien’s unconscious face."You," I breathed, my throat locking up as a wave of nauseating vertigo crashed over me. I kept my weapon raised, aiming directly between her eyes, though my entire body was shaking wildly. "You were the one on the other end of the wire. It wasn't Adrian Moreau running this operation—it was you.""Moreau is a blunt instrument with a big checkbook," Elise scoffed, taking a slow, arrogant step forward, her heels clicking sharp and rhythmic on the ancient stone floor. "He paid for the hit, he supplied the muscle, but *

"Shoot him! Shoot him right now!"The manic scream tore from my throat before the heavy manila envelope even hit the blood-slicked marble floor.Lucien didn't hesitate. He pulled the trigger.But Moreau was already moving. With speed that defied his age and limp, the crime lord slammed the hollow tip of his heavy cane against the solid stone altar. A blinding flashbang concealed within the cane erupted with the catastrophic force of a dying sun.Absolute, searing white light scorched my retinas. The deafening screech of the flash-charge completely hijacked my inner ear, dropping me to my knees on the shattered stained glass. I fired blindly into the whiteout, the heavy recoil jarring my shoulder, my bullets chewing uselessly into the ancient limestone walls.Through the disorienting chaos, the sickening sound of flesh violently impacting flesh echoed across the ruined sanctuary. Lucien and Moreau were locked in brutal hand-to-hand combat, grunting like wild beasts.A terrifying loss o

"Surrender the biological asset immediately, or we will reduce this building to ash with you inside!"The amplified, robotic voice from the military gunship outside shook the very foundation of Sainte-Chapelle. The blinding, twin searchlights from the helicopters cut through the shattered stained-glass windows like divine crosshairs, pinning Lucien and me against the bloody altar."They don't want you," I breathed, the horrific realization paralyzing my lungs as the deafening hum of rotor blades drowned out the Paris storm. "They want the formula. They want *me*.""They will have to pry you from my cold, dead hands," Lucien snarled.He didn't waste a single millisecond. He wrapped his massive hand around my wrist, hauling me backward just as the gunships opened fire.*Brrrrrrrrrrt.*The apocalyptic roar of heavy rotary cannons shredded the ancient stone. A torrential downpour of pulverized limestone, splintered wood, and shattered glass erupted where we had been standing seconds befor

"Evelyn Brooks."The name tasted like ash and iron on my tongue, completely foreign yet vibrating with a terrifying, buried resonance.I stared at the waterproof dossier lying on the wet cobblestones. Financial fraud. Money laundering. Corporate sabotage. It wasn't an assassin's kill ledger; it was an investigative case file."I'm an art dealer," I choked out, my hands trembling as I kept myself positioned firmly between the barrel of her gun and Lucien’s bleeding body. "My name is Nadia Voss."The woman laughed, a sharp, bitter sound that cut through the pouring rain. "You really did a number on your own brain, didn't you? Nadia Voss is a ghost. A fabricated identity we created to get you inside the Voss Syndicate. You are Special Agent Evelyn Brooks, and you were sent to dismantle their empire by following the bloody money trail of their bioweapons division."The world tilted violently on its axis. My parents' murders. The neurotoxin. The memory wipe."You were the mole," the woman

"Brace for impact!" Vance roared over the deafening scream of the helicopter’s twin turbines. The freezing, razor-sharp wind of the Swiss Alps ripped through the open cabin doors as our heavily modified gunship plummeted through the blinding blizzard. We were flying terrifyingly low, skimming the jagged, snow-capped peaks in the dead of night to evade Silas’s radar network. My heart hammered against my ribs, but my hands were completely steady as I slapped a fresh magazine into my suppressed submachine gun. The terrified art dealer was gone. Evelyn Brooks had taken the wheel, her lethal muscle memory moving with cold, mechanical precision. Across the vibrating cabin, Lucien checked his sidearm. He was pale, his jaw set in a rigid line of pure granite. Vance had pumped him full of military-grade painkillers and stitched his torn shoulder, but the dark circles under his eyes betrayed the catastrophic toll the night had taken on his body. He looked up, catching my stare. The ruthles