Page 54 of Acting on Instinct
Honesty as much as possible. Yes, Kira knew Omar was her intended. Yes, London had told her because that’s what best friends in the American culture do. And yes, she was ready to follow the family tradition and marry Omar, sight unseen.
Kira had greeted Omar on the back step of Davidson’s Tanzanian mansion and escorted the party into William’s home. She’d hosted them through cocktails, and she’d escaped with baby Archie up the stairs when he was kind enough to start screaming.
Omar was middle-aged. He was missing a finger. He looked at her approvingly when she soothed baby Archie.
That’s what she knew of Omar.
Kira had been prepared to succumb to her uncle’s wishes. But that was before she’d fallen in love with Ty.
Had Tanzania taken place a week earlier, had Ty been unavailable because he was already out on his other mission, the family sacrifice wouldn’t have been such a dagger.
If Ty and Rory weren’t there, she and the villagers would probably have been killed that night. And none of this wouldmatter because she’d be washed, wrapped in a kaffan, and buried in the soil, maybe in Africa, maybe Qatar.
But the stars had lined up, Ty and Rory were with her, and she ran into the night to escape the attack on William’s compound.
Then Omar was dead.
That was, start to finish, quite literally all that Kira knew of Omar.
What she knew amounted to a phone conversation, not a henchman situation.
It had been almost two years since Omar Imadi was shot in the raid at the Davidson compound. Everyone had said that there were warriors who had come over the border on a raid, and they were the ones who shot Omar when he resisted getting into their helicopter.
It might not have been Ty.
In Kira’s heart, it felt like it was Ty.
Kira and London had hidden with the other women and children at the animal preserve. London might have told everyone about the American soldiers who helped them escape. Surely she told William everything about that night.
It could have been the rangers at the preserve who were stunned by the American military team that rose from the field in their ghillie suits, rifles in hand, to talk to Ty.
The militant group and the American soldiers might be the reason why Uncle Nadir thought Kira brought death to the Davidsons’ compound.
He thought she was a spy?
Did he know that Lula actually was a spy?
Kira needed to warn Lula that she might have been exposed. She turned her head to look at her phone on the seat beside her.
She’d text when she stopped.
Swinging her eyes back to the road, Kira’s gaze caught on the big fat ring on her index finger.
“London, thank you for warning me. Thank you. Thank you.”
Though London had become a different person since she met William, Kira still thought of London as a sister and of Archie as her nephew. She loved them both, still, it was just that, yeah, Kira thought she needed to stay out of that world.
The thing that snagged Kira’s attention was that she’d heard not a single word from Uncle Nadir for almost two years. If he suspected her of spying and assassination, why hadn’t he acted on it before?
Why now?
Chapter Seventeen
Kira
Kira now knew exactly where her internal beacon was leading her as she blindly roamed the dark highway. She was headed straight to Fort Bragg.
It made perfect sense even if Ty wasn’t there. She had the long-term pass that allowed her to move through the gate with a scan of her card, then she could head to Ty’s house, where it was safe from stalkers and interrogators-for-hire.
