It's a little after two a.m. Moonlight bathes the hotel room in an eerie blue light, turning the furniture into oddly shaped ghosts. The curtains at the window stir a little with the movement of the air that the AC causes.
After meeting Talay, and hearing both his and Silo's assurances that there really is nothing else she can do for the moment, Nina has spent the past week pretending to be on vacation: going for dips in the hotel pool, getting pampered at the spa, and visiting the parks and temples--and slowly going out of her mind.
Nina is not the kind of person who likes sitting around and waiting. But it's not like she had any other choice. Since Bel and Kam haven't found anything worth looking into either, Nina feels completely useless, and on edge. Useless, because she's playing the waiting game while Talay digs through the Intelligence archives, and on edge because the targets on her and Bel haven't been removed yet.
Which is probably why the hastily muffled footsteps that wake her up that night are only partly unexpected.
Nina opens her eyes in time to see the shadow that definitely doesn't belong to any of the furniture slide through the door and into her bedroom. It's certainly a human shadow, but the face is carefully hidden, so the moonlight outside doesn't catch so much as the outline of his features. The shadow is moving deliberately over to the bed, and there's an oddly square lump where the shadow's chest should be. Very carefully, Nina slithers toward the edge of the bed, keeping her eyes on the approaching shadow. For a moment, neither of the occupants of the room move--Nina is frozen near the edge of the bed, and the shadow frozen close to the door.
The shadow moves first, proving that it is in fact the human body of an intruder, and one that definitely is after Nina. It takes two strides for the intruder to cross the room, raising the square object and bringing it down toward Nina's face.
*thwump*
Nina turns her head at the last second and the throw pillow that would have suffocated her hits the place where her head has been seconds earlier. She slides the rest of the way off the bed and rolls onto her knees in one smooth competent motion that throws her attacker off for half a second, and that half a second is all Nina needs to wrap her arms around the intruder's legs in an attempt to tackle him to the floor.
There is a muffled grunt of surprise from her attacker and as he sways, Nina throws her weight against the legs, hoping the knees she's currently wrapped around will bend completely and next thing she'll hear is a body hitting the floor. Instead, strong fingers tangle inside Nina's hair, and yank. Black dots dance before her eyes as she is tossed almost carelessly across the floor.
The impact of the floor against her ribcage has knocked the wind out of her, so it's instinct that makes her roll a second time as her attacker aims a kick at her side. He misses and his foot makes contact with a chair leg instead. The sound of the chair crashing to the floor is accompanied by her attacker's second painful grunt as Nina scrambles to her feet, running out of the bedroom and into the front room of her suit. She glances behind her in time to see the intruder raise his hand, holding something that glints metallically in the moonlight. A gun, or a knife? That's a question Nina doesn't want answered. She is almost at the door when her feet tangle with the edge of one of the rugs and she tumbles back to the ground. The intruder flips her onto her back, hands locking vice-like around her throat.
Nina's vision blurs around the edges as her air supply is cut off. The pressure on her windpipe steadily increases as Nina reaches her hands blindly up, finding the intruder's face and digging her fingers into the intruder's eye sockets. The cry that comes out of her attacker's mouth is louder this time, and confirms that he is indeed male, and as the pressure on her throat lessens just a little bit, Nina raises one of her knees, aiming for the man's crotch.
