The Hitman's Baby - A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance (With extra added bonus novel for a short time only!)

by Ashley Rhodes

  The spotlights dropped, but in the sudden lack of them Nick was near blind. It took a moment for the spots to clear.

  When they did, he was looking at a short haired blond woman, maybe in her late twenties, tattooed up to her neck, her nostrils and ears decked in steel piercings. She stuck her hand out. “Hi, Nick. Nice to finally meet you. I’m your boss.”

  “Nick made it sound like Alex was a man,” Cassandra mused when he’d collected her and Ramon and brought them inside.

  “That’s one part my fault and one part male bias,” Alex admitted. “The less anyone knows about me, the easier my life is.”

  Nick looked around. “Where’s Pete?”

  “Pete Porter doesn’t exist,” Alex said, smiling. “Well, not exactly. He’s my AI assistant. Made him myself. Say hi, Pete.”

  There was a marked pause, and then a voice chimed from speakers in the corners of the warehouse. “Hi.” It was a typical synthetic male voice.

  “I pretty much ripped off Siri and made some modifications,” Alex sighed. “He’s still a little slow.”

  Nick shook his head slowly and looked around the place. From the outside, it looked barely functional. Passing through the doors, however, revealed that the walls were not the corrugated aluminum and wood that the outer husk suggested—they were nearly foot-thick steel.

  The main floor they were in now was ordered chaos. Piles of components littered long tables, and there were projects strewn over parts of the concrete floor but there was a theme to them that Nick noticed immediately. Some were hi-tech infiltration devices, others were weapon modifications; there was even a section devoted, apparently, to explosives.

  Ramon, who woke up as soon as Nick pulled him from the car, stared around the place with rapt wonder.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Nick told him.

  “I bet I can make you say ‘whoa’,” Alex told Ramon.

  “Okay,” Ramon said, challenge accepted. “How?”

  Alex whistled.

  A horse came down the stairs from the loft.

  No, not a horse. But very close. A mass of black and brown fur came trotting toward them, standing almost shoulder to shoulder with Ramon.

  “Whoa,” Ramon breathed.

  “Told ya,” Alex smiled. “This is Pinky. He is super good with kids. Just don’t grab his tail. Why don’t you take him upstairs and get to know one another? There’s a PS4 on the big TV. Help yourself, there are tons of games on it.”

  Ramon looked to Cassandra, who gave him a nod. “It’s okay.”

  “Come on, Pinky,” Ramon said. Pinky obliged, trundling after him as Ramon ascended the stairs.

  When they were gone, Nick stared at Alex again. The difference between this girl and Lester… it was like she didn’t fit in the world.

  “I know,” Alex sighed. “Not what you expected. I totally get it. You normally wouldn’t have ever known, except, well… I’ve never had one of my own clients target one of my assets before and you don’t strike me at the typical cold hearted killer type.”

  “You’re a poor judge of character,” Nick said.

  Alex snorted, and looked Cassandra over once before she shook her head. “I’m really not.” She turned on one heel and waved them toward a bank of computers. “Come on. I haven’t found much—which is a mouthful, for me—but I have found something you might be able to make sense of.”

  She sat down before the bank of monitors, and tapped a few keys before she pointed to one of them. “I was able to trace the original point of contact back. Not to a person, but to an effectively non-existent corporation with an address here, in Bogotá, Columbia. It could be a fake.”

  Nick and Cassandra shared a look, and Nick sighed. “No. Probably not.”

  “You know it?” Alex asked.

  “It’s my old home,” Cassandra whispered. “Where I grew up. The Gonzales villa.”

  Alex whistled. “Did you… have a falling out?”

  “You don’t know?” Nick asked.

  “I make it a point to seem like I know everything,” Alex said. “But in this case… no. What’s the deal?”

  “That place used to belong to Emilio Gonzales,” Nick said.

  “My father,” Cassandra added.

  Alex whistled again, and leaned back in her chair, arms folded. “Wow. That Gonzales. I figured you and your son were just wealthy inheritors or something. That’s the usual reason people go after kids. Distasteful, if you ask me. If Nick hadn’t requested a standing query, I’d have turned the contract down. When your face came across with Ramon’s, I figured I better pass it along instead; keep it out of someone else’s hands.”

  Cassandra blinked, and looked at Nick, shocked. “You were, what… looking for me?”

  “Of course I was,” Nick said softly. “Just in case.”

  “So,” Alex said, eying them both before she turned around and began typing again. “This makes things a little more clear. There’s been some chatter among the leaders of the Columbian underworld lately. Lots of contracts. They’re killing each other’s… well everyone, pretty much, left and right. It’s chaos down there. But then…” she looked to one of the monitors with a series of names and dates, most of which were fairly close together.

  “They stopped six months ago,” Nick said.

  “This list is compiled from servers all over South America,” Alex explained. “Other agencies. I’ve got trojans in most of them. And yeah, about six months ago it’s like all of them just stopped. But the Cartels are still at large—they didn’t run out of bodies.”

  “Someone made them stop,” Nick said.

  “That would be my guess. You see this sort of thing a lot after Mafia bosses go down,” Alex went on. “A series of hits, lots of blood, then someone climbs to the top and makes everyone else behave.”

  Someone had slipped into the vacuum created by Emilio’s death, and taken control of the Gonzales network.

  “So, we’re… what,” Cassandra asked, shaking her head, “loose ends? Someone is afraid I’m going to wade back into all that?”

  “Your father was more than just a drug lord,” Nick said. “He wasn’t a good man, by any means, but… he was known and liked by his people, even by the other cartel bosses. There’s history there, too, that goes back a long way.”

  Cassandra shook her head in disbelief. “Papa always talked about history, and tradition, and honor… but all those things he did… I thought it was just self-delusion.”

  “He knew who he was,” Nick said.

  She glanced up at him. “How do you know so much about him? Was all that in my file, too?”

  “I always learn as much as I can about who my target is,” Nick said, polishing the edge off a harsh truth he didn’t want to tell her just yet. Not when she’d looked at him the way she had, and kissed him and…

  “Right,” Cassandra sighed. “So… we know, maybe, why… but not who?”

  “Did your family have any enemies?” Alex asked, and then grimaced. “Right. Cartel lord. Forget I asked.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Nick said. “Now I know where to go.”

  “What?” Cassandra grabbed his arm. “Nick…”

  He took her hand gently off his arm, but didn’t let it go. “We can’t just run forever. It won’t work that way. I have to find out who’s doing this, and I have to put a stop to it. Now that I know where they are, there’s only one course of action that leads to you… to us being safe. And that’s cutting this problem out at the root.”

  “What are we supposed to do in the meantime?” She asked. “Stay here?”

  “No offense,” Alex said, rubbing on arm slowly, “but I’d really rather you… didn’t. You seem like good people, and this place is a fortress, but, I mean, there are assassins after you. I’m happy to help however I can, but sitting still is a bad idea. You need to get far, far off the grid. Like, uncharted territory far.”

  “Where are we supposed to go?” Cassandra snapped. She looked from Nick to Alex, panic
ked and afraid and maybe a little angry because of it. “Climb up a mountain and live in a cave?”

  Nick sighed, and ran his hands through his hair. Of course there was one option. Not one that he liked. But, then again, Ramon was his son. So, it surely it would be alright. A risk worth taking.

  “I know a place,” he said finally. “You and Ramon will be safe there. It’s off the grid, unlisted… no one will find it.”

  “How do you know?” Cassandra asked. “It’s like these people know everything, see everything.”

  “I know,” Nick said slowly, ingrained habits and instincts railing against him, “because there are plenty of people who would have had good reason to find out, but they haven’t.”

  Unless someone followed him or his family there. But, then, it was a risk worth taking. And he was sure he wouldn’t be the only one that thought so.

  “I… can take you to stay with my mother,” Nick said. “Ramon’s grandmother.”

  “Oh,” Cassandra breathed, but then frowned. “Wait… so why is that so safe?”

  “Because,” Nick said, “I went to great pains to make the world think she was dead, and put her in a place no one would ever find her.”

  “Where?” Alex wondered.

  “Where everything else goes to disappear,” he said. “The Edge of the World.”

  Chapter 12

  It took three days to get to The Edge of the World. From Jersey, they headed south to Florida. Nick stopped to get Ramon a portable DVD player and several volumes of Naruto to occupy his attention. Cassandra urged him to get headphones as well. “Believe me,” she told Nick, “after a few hours, you’ll regret it. Three days? We’ll go mad.”

  He did, and Ramon was overjoyed—he even hugged Nick as he thanked him again and again. Nick seemed to take it in stride. Cassandra had to bite back an amused smile when he awkwardly patted Ramon on the head and then the back, and finally gave him a brief hug back.

  Once Ramon was occupied, his headphones on, his eyes glued to the screen, she asked about Nick’s mother.

  Keeping secrets was a hard habit to break. Cassandra understood that. So when Nick at first was vague and almost dismissive of the woman, Cassandra was patient in response. “But,” she said, “she’s Ramon’s grandmother. And his only grandparent. I want to know about her, and about you. You can trust me, Nick.”

  When they had reached Florida, and rented a small boat, and Ramon had laid down in the cabin after spending hours mooning over the ocean, only then did Nick finally open up. Perhaps, Cassandra decided, the impending meeting had finally outweighed his worries about telling her his story. Better she hear it from him than from his mother. He set the boat’s heading and then engaged the autopilot, and they lounged on deck outside the pilot’s cabin, watching the stars.

  “When I was about six, my father died,” Nick began. “He’d been drinking. My mother was crushed. They had met when they were twelve and thirteen, dated in high school, and then gotten married just a few years later. They waited to have kids so that they could spend those first years alone with one another. So, when my father, Michael, died… she lost herself.

  “For the next few years she didn’t work, didn’t go outside, and barely spoke to me. I walked to school, walked back… learned to make my own breakfast. I survived. Maybe that’s where the instinct came from. I had to learn to fend for myself and be smart about it. Mom lived off the life insurance until I was nine. By then I was too smart for my own good.”

  His jaw clenched and he shrugged. “I was shoplifting regularly, staying out late at night on the streets. I broke into neighbors’ houses, sometimes while they slept, just to have something to do. I had complete freedom at nine years old so, of course, I abused the hell out of it. And, one night, it bit me in the ass.

  “I broke into a house that didn’t seem like it had an alarm on it. But it did. A silent alarm. The police called and woke the family up, and they caught me and turned me over when the cops arrived. I kept my mouth shut but they threatened to put me in prison for life so… I cracked because I didn’t know better. When they took me home, it was the last straw for my mom…”

  Cassandra reached across the space between them to put her hand on his arm. After a moment, Nick turned his hand over and let her thread her fingers between his. She tried not to think about it too much, or read into it. They were hard memories for him, and she liked that he accepted comfort from her. It didn’t have to be more than that.

  “She got committed for a while, and I went into foster care,” Nick went on. “Bounced around from house to house, family to family. None of them liked me and I didn’t like any of them, so, I found ways of making myself more trouble than it was worth.

  “And then, I met Lester.

  “I remember thinking that I’d hit pay dirt when they took me to his house. Big, sprawling estate in New Hampshire. I was thirteen then, and figured that I could steal a bunch of valuables and then run off, live my own life. Maybe find my mom. But Lester… he knew all about me. He was prepared. And I never got away with anything. He knew where I was at all times, he even expected me to steal from him, so the whole place was basically empty except for the other kids and one room with some very enticing valuables.

  “He told me that if I could break into that room and get off the property with anything in it—gold, jewels, priceless art, antique weapons—that I was home free and he’d never report that I’d vanished. As far as he was concerned, he said, I’d have earned it.”

  “He told you to steal from him?” Cassandra wondered. She glanced at the door to the lower cabin where Ramon was sleeping, imagining him in the same situation. Ramon was too sweet and good; she couldn’t fathom what it must have been like for Nick.

  “It was a trick,” Nick said, shaking his head. “One that me and all the other kids he was fostering fell for. We would take turns trying to break in, and we’d fantasize about how we would live after we stole something. We worked together sometimes, and sometimes alone. It was a safe of some kind; we knew that. Fingerprint locked. Security windows on one wall, ventilation regulated by computers in a closed system for climate control to ensure the paintings weren’t destroyed. We combed through the house whenever we got the chance looking for clues, for fingerprints we could lift off a glass, for pass codes. We quietly turned the place upside down, day after day, and put it back together because Lester promised that if he saw any evidence of our snooping he would send us back into the system.”

  “He was training you,” Cassandra muttered.

  Nick nodded. “Not just with that. We had a daily regimen. It was like being in military school. PT in the morning, martial arts in the evening. A year in, we started marksmanship, those of us that were still there. New kids came, older kids left. Only a handful came of age under Lester’s tutelage—most of them were sent away. I knew, at that point, that there was a… point to it all, but I didn’t know what it was.”

  “When I was seventeen, Mom was given a clean bill of health and released.” Nick paused, and watched the stars for a long moment, his eyebrows creased. “Lester told me that if I stayed with him for just one more year, instead of going back to live with her—and, it had been eight years since I saw her at this point—that I would be in a position to take care of her for the rest of her life. So I did. He made me tell her, but wouldn’t let me tell her why. So, all she knew was that I… that I didn’t want to go back to her. If I had tried to explain, Lester would have dropped me.

  “It’s funny… all these years later, I sometimes think it would have been better if he had.”

  Cassandra squeezed his hand. “So… what happened? You started working for Lester and, what, decided your mother needed to be hidden away? That he might hurt her?” The idea that Nick would have worked for someone who would threaten his mother seemed horrifying.

  But Nick shook his head. “Not at first, no. When I… graduated, I guess you could say, Lester took me on my first assignment and explained what all of it was for. Th
at he ran an organization which, he said, promoted order in the world by taking out the elements that threatened the stability of governments, economies, militias… he pointed someone out, told me to make sure they died, told me what would happen if I did and what would happen if I didn’t. Armando Castillo St. Cyr. The first man I killed.

  “I’ll never know if everything Lester told me was true or not, but he was a bad man. He was a key member in a human trafficking supply line running from Portugal, up to the UK, and across eastern Europe into Russia. Lester showed me pictures of… girls, and boys who had been…” His words trailed off, and he grimaced, recalling the horrors he’d seen. “It was bad.”

  Nick sighed and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “So, I did it. And Lester paid me my first bag of cash. He showed me how to set up Swiss bank accounts, hide money in the islands, how to pay my taxes on it and how to not pay my taxes on it. He showed me how to live life in the shadows.

  “And then… he told me that I was making enemies. With every assignment, the list of people who would want me dead got longer and longer. The best thing would be to cut ties with my mom forever; to let her think I had died. He could set it up and make it convincing. Ghost me forever in the eyes of her, the US government, the whole world. If I did it, there was no going back but she’d be safe.”

  Nick snorted. “She wouldn’t have been, though. After we ghosted me, made me disappear for good, I took an assignment just twenty miles away from where she was living. I had to check up on her, see how she was doing and… she wasn’t doing well. She was sliding back, becoming unstable again. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that I had had a hand in it. This time, she wouldn’t survive. I knew it when I saw her.”

  “So you showed yourself to her,” Cassandra said, her throat tight. If she lost Ramon… well, she understood how it could drive a person to madness.

  “Not right away,” Nick said. “I was careful. I took a kind of vacation, told Lester I needed time to adjust and not feel like I was covered in blood. He understood. It’s like that for all of us at first. Assassins, I mean. We start out human, usually.”