“So she’s handling it?” Lucas asks, and I know he’s talking about Majid’s death. All of my men know about the way Nora gunned him down, and about her role in my rescue. They admire her for being so brave, whereas I’m battling a daily urge to throttle her for risking her life. And Peter—well, that’s a whole other matter. If he hadn’t disappeared promptly after bringing us to the clinic, I would’ve torn his head off for placing her in that kind of danger.

“She is,” I say in response to Lucas’s question. My concerns about Nora’s mental state are not something I want to share with him. “She’s handling it about as well as can be expected. The first kill is never easy, of course, but she’s tough. She’ll get through it.”

“Yes, I’m sure she will.” Reaching for his crutches, Lucas gets up and asks, “How soon do you want to head back to Colombia?”

“Goldberg says we can leave tomorrow. He wants me to stay here one more night, to make sure everything is healing properly, and then he’ll oversee my care back at the compound.”

“Excellent,” Lucas says. “I will make the arrangements then.”

He hobbles out of the room, and I reach for my laptop to check on Nora’s whereabouts. She went to get a snack from the cafe on the first floor of the clinic, but she’s already been gone longer than ten minutes, and I am beginning to get worried.

Logging in, I pull up the report from the trackers and see that she’s standing in the hallway, about fifty feet away from the room. The dot showing her location is stationary; she must be chatting with someone there.

Relieved, I close the laptop and place it back on the bedstand.

I know my fear for her is excessive, but I can’t control it. Seeing Majid’s knife at Nora’s throat had been the worst experience of my life. I had never been so terrified as when I saw the blood trickling down her smooth skin. I literally saw a wall of red at that moment, the rage pumping through me giving me a surge of strength I hadn’t known I possessed. Killing that terrorist hadn’t been a conscious decision; the need to protect Nora had overwhelmed both my instinct for self-preservation and common sense.

If I had been thinking more clearly, I would’ve come up with some other way to get Majid’s attention away from Nora until the reinforcements could arrive.

I had begun to suspect the rescue plan as soon as Majid mentioned shopping. It made a terrible kind of sense: Nora knew that my enemies would want her as leverage, and she knew that she had the trackers. I couldn’t believe that she would put herself out there like that—or that Peter would let her—but it was the only thing that could explain how Al-Quadar were able to lay their hands on her in my absence.

Instead of staying safe at the estate, Nora risked her life to save mine.