Her Name Is Knight(Nena Knight #1)(4)

She pushed away the unwanted thoughts and closed in. She put the gun to the back of his head and squeezed the trigger. He was so engrossed he hadn’t noticed her. His head jerked forward, then dropped, chin to chest.

She was leaning over to make sure he was really dead when a dark head of hair popped up from below, in front of Ruiz, like a prairie dog on one of those National Geographic documentaries. She recognized the uniform. He was one of the guards. Couldn’t be more than twenty, if that. She swallowed her surprise with a blink. This information was not in the intel. And she hated surprises.

He looked up, but before the young guard could make sense of his slack-jawed lover, the exit wound between his eyes, or the thick rope of blood forking down both sides of Ruiz’s nose, Nena repositioned her gun and put a bullet in him too. The guard’s head plopped back into the lap he was intimately, and quite recently, familiar with.



Nena swept the room, ensuring there were no more playthings who would pop out at her. Her eyes landed on the array of TV monitors and narrowed, zeroing in on one screen that looked different from all the others. It was a black-and-white video feed of Juarez in his bedroom—and she could see he wasn’t alone. She swallowed, visions of what could have gone very badly running through her mind. How Network had missed this feed, she had no idea. They’d been lucky.

“Dispatch is complete. There’s a separate feed running,” she muttered into her comm device. “Looks like the mark’s been watching number one’s bedroom.”

“We see it,” was the response she received. This time it wasn’t Witt but some member of the Network team she didn’t care to know. “Leave him. Use the flash drive to burn their system and return home.”

“But what if it’s in the cloud?”

A pause. “It’s not. They’re old school.”

She didn’t register the last part because the screen held her attention hostage, her jaw tightening as she made sense of what she was watching. Through her earpiece, Nena heard the team engaging more guards, clearing the home, readying to return to the van—each soft grunt, each pewt of the silencers, each padda padda pat-pat of the semiautomatics. She forced herself to move on her new orders. She found the computer and slipped in a small flash drive Network would use to fry the system.

Then she hustled, leaving the room to head downstairs. But she paused at the top of the carpeted steps. Time was winding down, but what she’d seen on the screen made her turn around and run up the next flight of stairs instead of down. She had to do one last thing. People thought slavery was long dead, but they only had to look at the recording of the Cuban’s master suite to see that slavery did indeed still exist, and right in this very home. It was something of which Nena knew all too well. That was, before she became Echo.

She recalled the mansion’s layout, finding the master suite quickly. Ignoring the chatter of her team and Network communicating in her ear, she grabbed the doorknob and twisted silently. The door opened on a slight creak, making her pause. She listened in case anyone inside had heard. No one had.

“Echo, switching to a private channel,” Witt said in her ear. A second later he asked, “What are you doing?” She grimaced. Witt never went off script during missions. But then again, neither did she. Her straying from the playbook must have worried him enough to break protocol. “You’re off course. Get where you need to be.”

But Nena was where she needed to be. She pushed the door open wide enough to enter a suite bathed in burgundy and gold and furnished with a massive four-poster bed that would fit six grown men. The room felt bigger than her little home in Citrus Grove, bigger than any room she’d imagined when she was a girl living in Ghana. This ugly, dark room reminded her of Fifty Shades, but in it was the stuff of nightmares—and the Cuban, the boogeyman.

The girl Nena saw was nothing more than a waif. It was difficult to tell her ethnicity from behind the veil of long stringy hair obscuring her face like something out of a horror movie. The straps of the inappropriately adult negligee slid off her young shoulders. She trembled so violently the massive satin-covered bed shuddered beneath her. Her whimpers struck a nerve-jarring chord in Nena. Memories of barbed wire, the Hot Box where she’d been kept, and the bodies—so many bodies—flashed through her mind and nearly brought her to her knees.

His back to where Nena stood in the shadows, the Cuban carefully selected a collar with an attached leash, smiling lecherously. He did it as if he were choosing an engagement ring. He lurched toward the girl while shrugging off his robe, revealing he was naked as the day he was born.

The girl, now on her knees, whimpered louder. Her eyes were wide as she stared from behind the curtain of hair and whispered, “Por favor, se?or. No.”

Nena wasn’t sure why she was hesitating. Why she watched as he fastened the choker around the girl’s bone-thin neck and clicked the lock. The girl winced when he cinched the collar too tight. Every time he touched her, she jerked as if branded with a white-hot poker.

Nena holstered her sidearm and, from the sheath strapped to her back, pulled out her blade.

“Time,” Witt warned.

“You gonna love it, mami,” the Cuban said.

Nena’s muscles grew taut as she readied herself.

“I’m gonna give it to you good.” The Cuban slapped the girl hard, so hard Nena felt its sting. He pulled his hand back, up behind his head. His fingers curled into a tight fist.