He was a bad man. There was no doubt about that. He sacrificed his moral compass at the altar of a higher purpose and for the most part he’d served it. There were few targets he’d been assigned that didn’t have a reason to die. He’d taken down a prominent bishop once, but only after he’d watched the man long enough to see that he was molesting children, embezzling from his diocese, and snorting cocaine off of the youngest male prostitutes he could find.
For this girl, though, he couldn’t find a single reason. She was living in terror of being found but doing good in the world regardless. What was her crime? Where was her darkness? If she had it, she hid it well.
So the day it had to happen, Nick decided to get in close and see for himself.
He went in dressed like a bum, and she served him coffee. Not with a sneer or and hint of condescension. In fact she smiled at him, entirely unaware that he was here to kill her and seemingly happy to see him, along with everyone else.
He took his seat, but only picked at his food to keep up the show as he watched her treat every single person the same. When the supplies dried up, she looked heartbroken.
The crew began to shut everything down, and as they did the small population that hadn’t gotten fed instead turned to their peers for scraps. Nick handed his plate, nearly untouched, to one of them as he rose to leave.
He knew where she would be next, so he left the kitchen, cleaned himself up and changed, but didn’t shave. He bought jeans and a flannel shirt with cash, along with a pair of thick rimmed glasses with plain plastic lenses, and a trucker cap, and then dropped in on her at the diner.
There, he actually spoke to her briefly. After he ordered—just water and a grilled cheese sandwich—he’d pushed her a bit to talk with him by playing on her need to help people.
“You ever been cheated on?” He asked.
Cassandra paused, mouth open a little, her eyebrows pinched with some mix of confusion and sympathy. “Uh, no. I haven’t.” She smiled at him. “I guess I haven’t had much of a chance, though.”
He grunted, and put on a dejected face as he stared at the sandwich she brought him.
After a moment, Cassandra sighed. “Are you okay, sir? I don’t mean to pry, just… you look a little down.”
“Just found out my wife is cheating on me with her therapist,” Nick said. A flat, numb affect wasn’t hard. “That was this morning. Just now, I lost my job. It’s like my whole life is falling apart, you know?”
He coughed, and glanced furtively up at her. “Sorry. I shouldn’t dump my problems on you like that,” he said. “Just don’t have anyone to talk to so… I’ll let you get back to work.”
Instead of leaving, though, she sat down in the booth across from him. “I’ve got just a minute,” she said. She glanced at the long diner bar, and then looked back at him. “I know what it feels like for your whole life to change in a day. For it to all seem like its coming apart. I’m sorry you have to go through that.”
Nick shifted, genuinely uncomfortable and regretting the ruse now. He’d just wanted to engage her briefly, not sit down with her. It had been a bad idea; now he was trapped. “Ah… well… thanks.”
“You know what helps me?” Cassandra asked.
“No,” Nick said. “What?”
She sighed, and touched her shirt. “I try to believe that there’s a plan.”
“I’m not really religious,” he said.
“You don’t have to be,” she said, and winked. “Maybe there’s a deep part of you, something you don’t always hear, that knows where you’re supposed to go, what you’re supposed to do. Your purpose. And it could be that when you aren’t hearing it, it makes itself heard. Doesn’t have to be God.”
She reached across, and touched his hand. “Could just be your heart. I was raised Catholic. But… sometimes,” she whispered conspiratorially, “I think it’s the same thing.”
She withdrew her hand, and Nick’s skin was still warm where she’d touched it.
“Uh… thanks,” he said. “For… for the advice.”
“All the bad stuff,” she said seriously, “is just clouds in the sky. They pass. The sun comes back, one way or another.”
Nick almost said that once you were dead and underground, the weather didn’t matter that much. But he held his tongue out of both a desire to keep up his character, as well as some degree of shame for having even thought it.
She smiled at him as she got out of the booth, and pointed at his sandwich. “That’s on me. Pay it forward, okay?”
“Uh… I will,” Nick said as Cassandra left him.
He took a bite out of it, intending to at least eat it and make a show of being there for a reason, but it wasn’t very good. More than that, if he was a praying man he’d have believed that just then there were angels with fiery swords watching him very, very carefully. This one, they would have said, gets a pass, monster.
He fished a twenty out of his pocket, along with the few bucks for the sandwich, tossed the lot on the table and left.
The day slid into evening, and evening finally darkened to night. Leonard’s closed at two in the morning—way too late for a young woman like Cassandra to be walking through her own neighborhood alone—and she had to be up at seven to deliver breakfasts to her elderly neighbors.
Nick perched atop a building on Pennsylvania, with a clear view up and down both directions and over Gillette place, one of the five cross streets she took, and the one she’d taken the least in the last two weeks.
He leaned against the roof, binoculars in hand, clad in black. His trusty AR-31 rifle rested on its legs next to him. Lester had checked in and demanded he get to it. It had only taken him a week to take out her father; what was the problem?
He’d told Lester that the problem was that Emilio Gonzales lived in a compound surrounded by his own men, but the chink in his routine had been obvious. He’d had a routine to begin with.
Cassandra was either less ordered, or more intelligent and paranoid. One or the other. But he’d get it done, and deliver confirmation tomorrow.
He spotted her coming down Gillette. There were some potential onlookers, though; a group of kids being assholes at two in the morning and wasting their lives on a street corner.
Cassandra crossed the street well before she reached them. Good girl. Smart. Also, it was an opportunity. That side of the street was dark. He put the binoculars away, and leaned into his scope instead. After a second he found her, and rested his finger on the trigger.
She looked up, suddenly, almost as if she’d sensed him but… no, she was looking at the kids ahead of her. One hand disappeared into her purse. Well, well. She had bite when she needed it, didn’t she?
It became clear very quickly that they had designs on her. He watched through the scope, tracking all five of the young men along with Cassandra, as they waved their arms and made noises at her like apes. He couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but from the way the group reacted to one kid in particular, it was probably lewd.
He’d have expected a girl Cassandra’s size, even with some hidden bite to her, to run at that point, and look for the nearest officer—which she wouldn’t find, as they rarely patrolled this corner. Instead, though, she straightened her shoulders and seemed to take a stance. She stared down these five young men who could easily take her if they wanted to. Her arm stiffened when one of them stood out from the rest of the crowd and said something to her while grabbing his crotch.
One of the boys in the back nudged his friend, and pulled something out of his pocket. A blade flashed open.
If he let it happen, he might not have to pull the trigger.
If he let these kids beat, rape, and kill her.
At least his way was faster.
Except…
It was a split second decision. Not a rational, carefully thought out one. The kind that meant trouble. The white kid with the sagging pants moved forward, aggressive, and started to reach for her.
Nick put a r
ound through his temple, and he dropped. In the time it took for the rest of the group to realize it had happened, he put down two more of them. He’d have gotten the other two, but they bolted and were out of sight before he could get his sights trained.
He turned the cross hairs back to Cassandra. She was staring at the bodies. It took her a moment and then… there, it all hit her. She raised one hand briefly to her mouth, staggered back, and glanced at the rooftops, and then turned and sprinted up Pennsylvania.
He still could have taken the shot, but he didn’t.
“Shit,” he muttered, and began packing up his rifle and gear.
If he thought about it too much, he would realize it was a bad idea. So, he didn’t.
Nick paid cash for an hourly motel a few blocks from Cassandra’s place. If she was smart, she had a go bag and a plan, a little extra cash, and a destination. He didn’t know where she’d go but he had a good idea of how she’d get there.
Unlike him, she didn’t have a tracker embedded in her body.
He gritted his teeth in the filthy bathroom of the crummy motel, as he dug into his wrist with a razor, being careful—so, so careful—not to cut the vein. Between the tendons was a tiny chip, powered by his own body heat and the electricity from the nerve it was deposited against. Removing it was excruciating and left his middle and ring finger both half numbed and tingling. Nothing that wouldn’t heal.
The place had wifi, at least, and so he opened his laptop, accessed the remote server and uploaded a data packet. Nothing unusual about that, except this one was loaded with a worm. It would use his credentials to eat away everything Lester’s organization had on him.
He’d had it made for him three years ago, after Lester had assigned him a target he didn’t particularly want to take down. It turned out the guy wasn’t all that virtuous to begin with—it was hard to get on anyone’s list without being an asshole of some kind—but it had gotten Nick thinking, and planning. Just in case.
Now was that case.
Calmly, he watched the upload finish, and then turned the laptop over and removed the battery and the hard drive. The hard drive he cracked open, shattered the disks inside with the butt of a pistol, and then disposed of on his way out of the motel in pieces—some here, some there, some in an alley in a different direction from Cassandra’s place before he made a turn and headed toward her to intercept.
If he was quick, he could have Cassandra out of Newark, maybe out of the country, in no time at all. A few days at most. All he had to do was convince her to come with him.
Right. Because nothing could be simpler than that conversation.
Chapter 4
The cash was enough for a night at a hotel and a plane ticket. Both required the use of Cassandra’s fake ID and the fake credit card she’d gotten to go with it. Those she would have to toss when she got to the next city, but this was what they were for.
She paced the hotel room, checking the clock every few steps as though it might speed up if she paced fast enough. It didn’t.
The plan was simple. Same as before. Go to a new city. Flash her eyelashes and pick up a job as a waitress—it was the easiest job to get in any city, if you were a pretty girl, that didn’t involve getting paid for sex. Use the local homeless shelter to take cover and have an address until she could get the cheapest apartment that would take cash and not require a lease.
Cassandra had done it eight times, and she would do it a ninth. She would keep doing it, again and again, as often as she needed to. What other choice was there? This was the way it had to be.
But something bothered her about this time. Initially, she had panicked and run but if someone could take out three targets from cover in an urban landscape then surely, if she was on the list, the killer could have taken her out too. Hell, she’d stood more or less perfectly still while she came to terms with what she was seeing. So what had happened?
It was possible that she hadn’t been the target. That was her first thought, once she settled into the hotel room. Maybe she’d jumped to conclusions. It could have been some kind of sniper vigilante coming to her rescue and moving on.
Like a scared rabbit, she’d bolted without a thought.
Still, she’d been here too long. In the end, it didn’t matter. It was time to start over. This time, maybe she could stay put, but not here. Not in Newark. Now that Papa was at rest, maybe she could rest too; just not in the last place she’d been while he was alive. It was the prudent choice.
She sucked in a breath and jumped when a knock at the door startled her. That breath stayed in her lungs as she pulled her can of bear mace out of her purse and crept up to the door to wait.
“Miss Aroja?” A polite, clipped voice came through the door. “I hate to disturb you, but I’m afraid there was a problem with your credit card.”
She could have pretended to be out, but he’d just have unlocked her door to collect her things and put them in the lobby. It had happened once before. So she sighed, set the mace down, and put her eye to the peep hole. The man on the other side wasn’t one she recognized from the front desk but he was holding a slip of paper and had that slicked-back Jersey style that was getting to be popular again.
She leaned her forehead on the door and breathed.
“Miss Aroja?” The man asked.
“Just a sec,” Cassandra said. She unbolted and unchained the door and pulled it open.
The man took a single step over the threshold and raised a hand. There was a gun in it.
“Very sorry, Miss Gonzales,” he said, “if my colleague hadn’t gone rogue, you wouldn’t have seen it coming. My condolences.”
Cassandra snatched the bear mace from the little table she’d set it down on and attempted to empty the can into the man’s face.
Immediately, he fired. There was a muffled, high pitched sound, and the air next to one ear snapped at her as a bullet narrowly missed. The next one went wider, into the wall. A third pierced the window.
Cassandra gathered herself to tackle the assassin—when it came to guns, you didn’t want to be far away—and empty the rest of the mace into his mouth directly, but she didn’t get the chance.
Someone rounded the door frame—a man, tall, wide shouldered, and perfectly calm—reached out almost casually and broke the flailing gunman’s neck, and then caught him as he slumped backwards.
“Pardon me,” he said as he dragged the dead man into the room. Cassandra stepped aside, still gripping the can of mace.
When the body was nestled between the two small twin beds in the room, the newcomer glanced at the duffel and nodded. “Smart. You had a bag ready. Good.”
“Who,” Cassandra stuttered out, “the f-fuck…? He’s dead?”
The man nodded slowly and glanced at the corpse. “He is. I’m Nick. I’m going to get you out of here.”
“Who sent you?” Cassandra asked suspiciously, and raised the mace. “What do you want with me?”
Nick sighed. “I was paid to kill you. I took out the young men last night that were going to…”
Cassandra had started to creep toward the door.
But Nick held up both hands in surrender and peace, and jerked his chin toward the dead man. “I decided not to do it,” he said. “Which is going to mean trouble for both of us. This one won’t be the last. My boss has a reputation to maintain. They monitor our vitals by a chip in our wrists. They’ll know he’s out when his chip goes dark. When his nerves die. Takes a few minutes. Look, see?” He pointed to his own wrist, which was bandaged. “I cut mine out.”
“Why?” Cassandra asked.
“So they couldn’t track me,” Nick said.
“No,” she waved the can at him, “why were you sent to kill me? I didn’t do anything. I don’t want to be a part of my father’s world. I just want to be a good person and live quietly.”
“I know that,” Nick said softly. “It’s why I changed my mind about the assignment. You remember me? From the diner?”
“From t
he…” And then, like a light switching on, she did. He looked different now but not drastically. “I knew someone was following me. Jesus Christ, you were… you could have…”
“But I didn’t,” Nick said. “And I’m not going to. But we have to leave. Newark, I mean. Maybe the country.”
“I already have a flight booked,” she said. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”
“That’s… not soon enough,” Nick said. “We’ve got contractors as close as Manhattan. They could be here in a few hours. Plus, if I know you booked a flight under Amelia Aroja, so does anyone else who wants to find you. They’ve kept tabs on your fake identities. They aren’t very good. I’ll make sure you get a solid one, with an anglo name they won’t be looking for.”
“Stop!” Cassandra snapped. “Just stop. Why should I trust you? You tried to kill me!”
“I didn’t try to kill you,” Nick said. “I don’t try to kill anyone. If I want someone dead, they die. I chose not to kill you.” He lowered his hands, and frowned at her. “You don’t have to trust me. But they’re not going to stop coming for you. Not unless you disappear entirely. I can help you do that if you’ll let me. Please, Cassandra. I need to do this. If I have a soul, it probably needs saving.”
“Everyone has a soul,” she muttered. She lowered the can. If he did mean to kill her, it was a strange way to go about getting to the point. If he didn’t, then she needed his help if what he said was true. If it wasn’t true… well then he was a crazy person but she couldn’t see why someone would lie about a thing like this. It was just too much to bother with.
“It would be nice if that were true,” Nick said.
“So what do I do?” Cassandra finally asked.
Nick moved quickly, gathering her bag as he led her to the door. “First, get to a different city. One with an Amtrak stop. I know someone who can get you a new identity. We’ll find a place for you to hide, get you set up with a low profile job. Maybe change your hair. Put the do not disturb sign on the door.”
The Hitman's Baby - A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance (With extra added bonus novel for a short time only!) Page 3