Belgian Betrayal, page 1
Belgian Betrayal
Brotherhood Protectors International
Book Two
Elle James
Twisted Page Inc
Contents
BELGIAN BETRAYAL
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
CROATIA COLLATERAL
Chapter 1
REMY
Chapter 1
Afterword
About the Author
Also by Elle James
Copyright © 2024 by Elle James
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
© 2024 Twisted Page Inc. All rights reserved.
ISBN EBOOK: 978-1-62695-554-7
ISBN PRINT PB: 978-1-62695-555-4
ISBN PRINT HC: 978-1-62695-556-1
Dedicated to Courtney for going with me to Bruges, Belgium. What a magical place where the idea for this book was born!
Elle James
Author’s Note
Enjoy other military books by Elle James
* * *
Brotherhood Protectors International
Athens Affair (#1)
Belgian Betrayal (#2)
Croatia Collateral (#3)
Dublin Debacle (#4)
Edinburgh Escape (#5)
Visit ellejames.com for more titles and release dates
Join her newsletter at
https://ellejames.com/contact/
BELGIAN BETRAYAL
Brotherhood Protectors International Book #2
New York Times & USA Today
Bestselling Author
* * *
ELLE JAMES
Chapter 1
Catya Romanov adjusted her headset, not at all happy to be working in tandem with another assassin. She preferred to work alone. Less fuss. No unnecessary communication. No other personalities involved.
She’d read the dossier and researched the target. When assigned a mark, Catya made certain the intended target was a menace to society and deserved elimination before she moved in with her choice of weapon to do the job.
When she didn’t think the person deserved to die, she refused to get involved.
Today’s target: Gia Rosolino, the thirty-four-year-old daughter of the late Rocco Rosolino. Her father had been known to facilitate the sale and transfer of illegal weapons from their origin, usually in Russia, to buyers in various war-torn regions, even supplying opposing forces simultaneously.
Gia’s dossier implicated her as Rocco’s right arm in the negotiations, sales and transport of the illegal arms trafficking operations.
Catya had spent some time on her laptop, looking up whatever information she could find on the woman, who was not much older than herself. What she discovered didn’t entirely match the dossier.
The woman worked as a preschool teacher and volunteered at a nursing home in Florence on weekends. That didn’t sound like someone heavily involved in the illegal arms trade.
Given what she’d found...or rather not found, she would have declined the assignment. Family connections didn’t necessarily define an individual.
The fact that her handler had insisted she work with another assassin to neutralize a target had given Catya a bad feeling about the entire affair—a sure sign she should walk away. And yet, she hadn’t.
She’d met with her counterpart, MI6 agent Peter Atkins, briefly that morning. To her, Atkins was a known quantity, considering only a handful of highly skilled professional assassins existed, employed by individuals and governments worldwide. The MI6 agent was loyal to his country and, like Catya, only took out targets who’d orchestrated events of mass genocide or were major influencers, working to destabilize a country or region.
Catya wondered why Atkins hadn’t balked when handed the Gia Rosolino’s assignment. Yes, Gia’s father had been up to his eyeballs in arming bad guys worldwide, but that didn’t mean his preschool teacher daughter had picked up where he’d left off upon his sudden death. Catya’s contacts had confirmed her suspicions that Rocco’s death had been an assassination. His expansive home on the outskirts of Florence had burned to the ground with him inside, a bullet through his forehead.
Gia hadn’t been taken out at the same time because she had been on vacation on Lago Maggiore in northern Italy. By the time word had gotten out of Rocco’s death, Gia had disappeared.
Until now.
Catya had flown into Rome from Amsterdam. Atkins had come from London. A rental car awaited them at the airport along with Gia’s dossier and location in a packet inside the vehicle.
They were to move in at nightfall, take out Ms. Rosolino and head back to the airport. Along with the packet containing the dossier, they’d discovered a pair of radio headsets to allow them to communicate during the mission.
Catya wanted to understand why someone had put a mark on this Rosolino—preferably before Atkins jumped in and finished the job, no questions asked.
When they’d met that morning in Rome, she’d stood toe-to-toe with the assassin, nearly as tall as he was and every bit as intimidating, relying on the fact that her reputation preceded her in the business.
Chin held high, she’d told him, “I will go in first and assess the situation.” Catya poked a finger at the man’s chest. “You will watch the rear exit to ensure Ms. Rosolino does not slip out the back. If, and only if, I need backup inside, I will call you in to assist.”
“That’s not how I work,” Atkins had argued.
“Yeah, well, I work alone.”
“We should go in together, from both sides,” Atkins suggested.
Catya shook her head. “I will go in first. You will remain outside.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Or I’ll perform the hit, and you can return to Russia.”
Before Atkins could raise a hand to defend himself, Catya had a knife out of the sheath at her waist and pressed to Atkin’s carotid artery. “We’ll do it my way, or I will waste one of MI6’s assets.”
“Fine. When you put it that way, I can see your point,” Atkins said through gritted teeth. “And feel it.”
Standing outside the townhouse in an affluent part of Rome, Catya waited for the sun to set, cloaking her movements as she moved closer to the building.
A tree grew beside the front stoop, rising over the top of the roof, casting eerie shadows over the townhouse and the cars lined up in a neat row against the curb.
The townhouse belonged to one of Rosolino’s cousins. MI6 intel had traced Rocco’s daughter to this location after her return from her vacation.
Catya and Atkins had staked it out for most of the day. No one had gone in or come out, making Catya wonder if anyone was in the townhouse.
After the sun finally set, a light appeared in a tall upstairs window, making the curtained window glow softly.
Atkins checked with Catya every ten minutes after the sun set, eager to get in, get it done and get out.
Not so Catya. She preferred to wait until after most people settled in for the night, traffic slowed to a trickle and the target went to bed. A sleeping victim was much easier to subdue than one wide awake and ready to defend themself.
“What are we waiting for?” Atkins asked for the sixth time.
“The right moment,” Catya responded, standing in the shadows between two buildings directly across from the townhouse.
“We’re wasting time,” Atkins grumbled into the headset. “Someone will see us lurking around and blow our cover.”
A few minutes later, the light in the second-floor window blinked out. No other light came on anywhere else in the home.
“I’m going in now,” she said. “Hold your position outside the back door of the townhouse until you hear from me.”
The MI6 agent didn’t respond.
Catya didn’t ask for his assurance that he’d stay put. She was already halfway across the street, moving into the shadows beneath the tree. For the past few hours, she’d studied the townhouse, gauging the best entry point, concluding that the best way would be through one of the downstairs windows, half-hidden by shrubbery.
Once she’d pushed through the bush, she tried lifting the window first.
It didn’t budge.
Catya quickly shrugged out of her leather jacket, wrapped it around her arm, checked over her shoulder for anyone passing on the deserted street and then slammed her arm into the window, knocking through the glass. After sweeping the leather across the jagged pieces remaining, knocking them out onto the ground, she pulled the jacket back on and then hiked her ass up over the windowsill.
A scream stabbed through the silence, the sound coming from upstairs, followed by footsteps thundering down a staircase.
Catya swung her legs through the window and dropped to the floor, pulling her Baretta from the shoulder holster tucked against her ribs. She stood in a sitting room with a closed door between her and whoever was coming down from above.
She ran toward the door and pulled it open enough to see a shadowy figure, too tall and broad-shouldered to be a woman, disappear down a hallway and out what appeared to be the rear door.
“Someone headed your way,” Catya said softly into her mic. Instead of following the shadowy figure, she headed up the stairs, her gut clenching tighter with each step.
When she reached the landing, a door stood open to what could only be the room facing the front of the townhouse, the room that had a light shining from it minutes before.
Catya eased up to the open door and peered around the doorframe into the room, shrouded in darkness. There was a weak glow from the streetlight on the outside corner, the only light penetrating the curtain.
A moan sounded from the far side of the room, coming from the floor on the other side of a bed.
Holding the Baretta in front of her, Catya crossed the room and rounded the end of the bed.
A woman lay sprawled on the floor, her pale nightgown sporting a sizeable dark stain across her chest. She moaned and raised a hand toward Catya.
“Help me,” she said in faint Italian, her voice barely above a whisper.
Thankfully, Catya was almost as fluent in Italian as in English and her native Russian. She took the woman’s hand in her free one and crouched beside her while keeping her gun pointed toward the door. “Gia Rosolino?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice gurgling as blood dribbled from the side of her mouth. “He...took...it.”
“Took what?”
“I’m sorry... Didn’t know... Father...bad man...” Gia coughed. More blood trickled out of the corner of her mouth. “Bigger...than...him...” She closed her eyes and lay still.
Catya thought she’d slipped away and started to release her hand to feel for a pulse.
Gia’s fingers tightened around hers with surprising strength, her eyes wide. “Get the disk back... Take it...to someone...you trust... Stop them...” Gia’s fingers loosened. Her hand fell to her side, and her eyes closed. “Before more...people...die...”
Catya felt for a pulse at the base of the preschool teacher’s throat. When she didn’t find one, she straightened and spoke into her mic. “Atkins, did you stop him?”
The MI6 assassin didn’t respond.
She started for the door. After only two steps, an explosion blasted through the floor beneath her, throwing her backward.
She hit the bed behind her, the mattress cushioning the impact. Catya slipped to the ravaged floor, her head spinning and her ears ringing so loudly she couldn’t think.
Flames flashed through the hole in the floor, and smoke rose to the ceiling.
Instinct pushed Catya to move. She shoved her Baretta into her shoulder holster and rolled onto her hands and knees. The hole in the floor, smoke, and fire blocked her from exiting the house the way she’d come in. She crawled across the ravaged floor toward the tall window.
The glass had shattered with the explosion. Using her leather-clad arm, Catya swept it across the broken shards.
With smoke and fire quickly eating away at the home’s furnishings and structure, she had only a few precious seconds to get out, die of smoke inhalation or go down in flames.
She struggled to stand, held onto the window frame and swung her legs over.
The drop to the ground was too far. In her current state, she would surely break an arm, a leg, her back or her neck.
What other choice did she have?
Her gaze went to the tree growing up in front of the townhouse. A large limb curled out and upward toward the corner of the structure. It was a stretch, but she could reach that branch by throwing herself out and to the left.
The heat and smoke from the fire behind her made the decision for her. It was the branch or the ground. She’d rather break every bone in her body, or even break her neck than live long enough to have her flesh seared off her bones.
If she missed the branch, she’d hit the ground anyway—a quicker, less painful death.
Her head still spinning, her balance unsteady, Catya gripped the window frame and eased her feet under her to balance on the windowsill. Crouching beneath the window’s header, she bunched her muscles.
Before she could leap to the branch, something whizzed past her ear and hit the townhouse wall mere inches from where her hand held onto the window frame.
Half a second passed before Katya realized someone had fired a bullet toward her from somewhere on the ground. She couldn’t stay where she was, and now the ground wasn’t an option.
She leaped from the window, throwing all her weight toward the massive tree limb. Her chest hit first, knocking the wind from her lungs. Immediately, her arms wrapped around the limb, holding tightly until she got her balance.
A muffled popping sound indicated someone was firing at her with a silencer attached to his weapon. Catya whipped her legs up over the limb and shimmied toward the trunk. A bullet passed through the branches, cutting through leaves close to where Catya stood. She reached for the branch above her, pulled herself up and climbed limb by limb until she reached the big one growing out toward the far corner of the townhouse.
Another pop sounded below her. Something stung her calf. Catya didn’t slow to find out what. She pushed to her feet. Holding onto a thinner limb above her, she ran along the thick branch that angled slightly upward. It had missed growing into the corner of the townhouse roof by a few inches.
Catya flung herself onto the flat roof, landing on all fours. The fire within the building had yet to breach the roof but would soon if the heat beneath her hands was any indication.
Hunkering low, Catya raced to the edge, leaped over onto the roof of the next building and kept running as bullets continued to fly over her head. She had to climb a short metal ladder to reach the roof of the next building, exposing her to the gunman below.
Bullets chipped at the stucco, narrowly missing her as she pulled herself up the ladder and over onto the roof of the next townhouse.
Catya raced to the far side of the roof, ready to leap onto the next roof. She skidded to a stop and teetered at the edge. The next building stood six feet from the one she was on, and there was a narrow alley between them.
Sirens wailed in the distance as more bullets peppered the side of the building and whizzed past her.
Footsteps sounded on the rooftop behind her, which meant she had more than one person after her.
With nowhere else to go, Catya backed up a few steps and ran, leaping over the edge. As if in slow motion, she sailed through the air. Halfway across the divide, she realized she wouldn’t quite make it.
Catya landed on her belly on the short wall surrounding the rooftop of the building. Kicking hard, she rolled over the wall and landed on the other side as a barrage of bullets rained down around her.
The click and clatter of a magazine dropping from a weapon gave her the heads-up that her pursuer was reloading.
She pulled out her Baretta, leaped to her feet and fired at the dark silhouette of the man on the other rooftop.
He ducked down.
Catya used that moment to run across the rooftop only to find a dead end. No other building adjoined the one on which she stood. A wide street stretched out below. A loud thunk sounded from the other end of the roof as the man pursuing her landed hard, rolled and came up on his feet.
