“Kiera—”
“But that’s the only time that I ever fucked up. And I was young. I was only fifteen, and ever since then—ever since—I have always done whatever job I was given, and—”
I wrapped my arms around her to stop the flow of words. “Shh,” I whispered. “Shh.”
She started to sob, but she was fighting me, trying to get away.
I held her tighter. “You were young and inexperienced. Even if you’d hacked in, you might have gotten caught. You could have gone to jail.”
She struggled in my arms. “I can do this stupid job, Danger. Failure is not an option for me.”
“You don’t even know if hacking the insurance company would have made a difference. You don’t know if the treatment would have saved him. If it was really cancer—”
“Failure is not an option.” She looked up at me, her expression fierce.
I took a deep breath. And then I had a thought. A horrible sort of thought, because it wasn’t really playing fair. But, for whatever reason, Kiera had just rolled over and showed me her belly. She’d given me her biggest vulnerability on a platter. It all clicked for me, why she was so intent on doing stupid, dangerous things. She was trying to save her dad. Over and over again, she was trying to do the impossible.
If I pushed the right buttons, I could crush her.
It would be for her own good. She was being irrational, and she was going to get herself killed. And if I did this, it would keep her away from this job, keep her away from me, keep her away from all the danger.
And so, I said it. “You know, Kiera,” I said in a quiet voice, “failure doesn’t matter. Because no matter what you do, your father is still going to be dead.”
She backed away from me in a flurry, arms flailing. She banged into the door, gaping at me. Her jaw worked, and I could tell she was trying to say something, but she was too devastated.
“You can’t fix that,” I said. “It’s done.” I took her by the shoulders and gently moved her away from the door.
She didn’t fight me. She was looking at me like a hurt puppy who was used to being patted but had just been kicked.
I felt guilt forming a tight ball in my gut, but I shoved it aside. “This job is fucked anyway. But if I need another hacker to help kill Nikolai, I’ll hire someone else.” I pulled the door open and stepped through it.
She just stood there, stunned.
I hesitated. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. And then I left.
* * *
Kiera
He was right.
That was the hell of it.
I’d been spending so much time trying to save my dad’s life, thinking that every hacking job I did was going to be the one. This time, if I did it right, he wouldn’t die.
How much of an idiot could I be?
My father was dead, and he wasn’t coming back.
It didn’t matter how many stupid jobs I did.
And it didn’t matter if Danger did think that I was weak and vulnerable. Truth was, I was both of those things.
There didn’t seem to be any reason to stay in the hotel, not anymore. I packed up my stuff and went back to my apartment. On the way, I stopped and got a six pack of hard cider.
When I got home, I took one cider out and put the others in the refrigerator. I took that cider into the shower with me. And I scrubbed myself clean.
I wanted to wash away every stupid trace of Demetrius Gallo.
The hot water poured over me, and I chugged the cider. I started to cry.
I guessed this was par for the course. Back in college, all my friends had already gone through the heartbreak of losing their virginities. To be fair, not everyone was heartbroken over it, but enough of them were. I knew that it was generally not a pleasant experience. It was a rite of passage, however. One that I’d skipped out on to live in a fantasy world.
Water was getting in my cider, diluting it and making it warm.
I didn’t care. I drank it anyway.
All that time telling myself that I was establishing myself, that I couldn’t allow anything to stop my focus on my job?
All that time, I’d been trying to resurrect my father’s ghost.
It wasn’t even what he would have wanted for me.
My dad was always worried that I spent too much time inside on the computer and not enough time outside playing with other kids. He would limit my screen time, force me to go to the park even when I whined and raged at him. He would have wanted me to have a full life. He would have wanted me to experience everything that I could.
I wasn’t doing him any favors living this way.
I finished the cider, got out of the shower, swathed myself in towels, and went out to my living room. There, I drank two more ciders and cried a lot.
I was starting to feel pretty drunk, but it wasn’t making me feel better. Instead, it was just making me feel worse.
By the time I started my fourth hard cider, I was hiccuping and talking to myself.
Well.
I was actually talking to my dad, but he wasn’t there, and I didn’t really believe in ghosts or the afterlife or anything like that, so I didn’t think he was looking down on me from heaven or something stupid. If you wanted to get super technical about it, I guessed I couldn’t deny the possibility, so maybe the essence of my father was hanging around. After all, all matter is energy, and energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so nothing really dies anyway, it just changes form. Still. I was talking to myself.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I slurred, hugging one of the pillows on my couch. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”
I imagined that my father’s spirit-thing patted me on the head and told me that it was okay. That I was the kid, and he was the parent, and it was his job to save me. That was the kind of thing that he would have said.
I broke out into fresh sobs.
There was a knock on my door.
I sat up straight. “Daddy?” I whispered. Christ on a cracker, was that him? Were ghosts real after all?
“Kiera, you in there?” called a voice from the hallway. A female voice.
I got up and opened the door. “Cass?”
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “Why’d you leave the hotel?”
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Can I come in?”
I stepped away from the door.
“Are you wearing a towel?” she said.
I looked down at myself. “Um, let me get dressed.” I went into my bedroom and threw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.
Cass was standing in the middle of the living room, inspecting all my empty hard cider bottles.
“You want some cider?” I hiccuped.
“Are you drunk?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said, and went and sat down on the couch.
“Did you make a move on Demetrius and he shut you down, because I think if you’re just patient, he’ll come around. He really does like you.”
I rolled my eyes, snagging my cider and taking a big drink. “Let’s not talk about Demetrius. Or his penis.”
“Okay,” she said, sitting down on the couch.
I sat down too. “He has a stupid penis, anyway. I mean, it’s freakishly big. There’s something wrong with it, I’m almost sure of that.”
“So… what exactly did happen between you two?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Nothing involves his penis?”
“Why are you here again?”
She took a deep breath. “Should I make you some coffee?”
“I don’t need coffee.”
“You sure?”
I drank some more cider. “Positive.”
“Ambrose and I were talking about Natasha. And the other girls. The whole reason we took this job—well, not the whole reason, but a big reason—was that we were going to save those girls. And now Danger’s talking li
ke it’s impossible, and we were thinking that maybe we just… well, is it possible that we could make the plan work without him? Maybe without Blaze. Just you, me, and Ambrose? And we don’t care about money. Ambrose and I are set. We just… I don’t think I can live with myself knowing we left those girls there.”
I sat up straight. Shit. Here I was, wallowing in my own crap, when whatever pain I was feeling was nothing compared to what those girls were going through. “He doesn’t want me on the job.”
“Who? Demetrius?”
“Yeah. He said that if he did find some way to kill Nikolai and he needed a hacker, he’d hire someone else.”
“But we don’t care about killing Nikolai. We just care about the girls.”
I nodded slowly. “Right.” I got up and started to pace. The room swam. I sat back down. “Did you say something about coffee?”
She laughed and went into my kitchen.
“Look, I’m not good at the planning stuff,” I said. “Maybe Ambrose could figure something out, though. He used to plan long cons. If he works something up, then I’ll help.”
She rattled around. “Where’s your coffee?”
“It’s next to the coffee maker.”
“Found it,” she said. “I don’t know about Ambrose doing it. He says that he’s never done anything of this kind of scope. And he needs to know what you can do for us with your computer skills.”
“Well, I can do what Demetrius wanted me to do already.”
She came back into the living room, and the smell of coffee was already starting to permeate the apartment. It made me feel a little more alert. She sat down. “Well, I guess what I’m saying, then, is can we make it work without Demetrius and without the explosives?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The biggest problem is that we don’t know where Natasha’s been moved to.”
“Yes we do,” she said. “Ambrose and I were looking at the building schematics, and it’s labeled. High security is those cells that we thought she would be in at first.”
“That’s labeled?”
She nodded.
“Huh,” I said. “No wonder they didn’t put those schematics online.” I rubbed my chin. “So, how do we get her out of there?”
“I don’t know. I hoped you could figure it out.”
I blew out a noisy breath. “I can try. But I don’t know.”
“You’re in, though? You want to save the girls?”
“Of course I do.” I nodded. “Yeah, I’m in.” And I felt different, somehow. Before, whenever I’d taken a job, there was a desperation in my subconscious. It drove me to be perfect, to be focused, but it also made me panicky and crazy, because I always felt like my father’s life was on the line.
Now, for the first time ever, I felt peace about that. That was the past. I couldn’t change it.
But doing this job to save these women? That was a better motivation than anything I could cook up in my twisted, personal pain.
“Good,” she said, smiling.
I smiled back.
* * *
Kiera
But no matter how I tried to make it work with the three of us, I couldn’t. I kept coming up with ideas that involved Danger, that involved Blaze. It seemed to me that the job was impossible with three people. It was only doable with five.
I thought about calling some of the other men who worked for the organization.
But I didn’t know them well, and they were contract killers. That meant that I didn’t exactly trust them with something like this. I might have been able to keep them in line. I wasn’t sure. I knew that they all subscribed to the code of our organization, and most of them had been nothing but polite to me. However, that didn’t mean that I wanted to be buddy-buddy with them either.
In the end, the only thing that I could think was that I was going to have to go back and try to get Demetrius back on board. Actually, I thought he might have a few ideas for smoothing over the rough spots in my plan.
But.
The thing was, I basically never wanted to speak to him ever again.
So, I didn’t go talk to him for a while. Maybe it was a couple of days. I went back to work at the office, as usual. The only unusual thing was that Danger wasn’t there, following my every move.
I realized that I’d gotten used to seeing him.
Even though I didn’t want to see him, it was weird that he wasn’t there. I was relieved. I was also disappointed.
Overall, it was better that he wasn’t around, I decided.
Until Cass came to see me and told me that Matteo had come by to tell them to leave the hotel. He was dejected, she said, and she had promised him that they were still going to get Natasha out. That had cheered him up, and he told them to stay in the hotel as long as it took.
However, Cass said she wanted to get moving on this thing, so I needed to tell them how to proceed.
That was when I realized that I was going to have to talk to Demetrius, no matter how badly I didn’t want to.
Part of the problem was that I had no idea where he lived.
But I had skills, and I knew how to find information when I needed it. Getting Danger’s address really wasn’t that hard.
He lived out in Bethesda, in the suburbs. I had to drive all the way out there, which took forever. I really hated driving in the D.C. area. Whoever designed this city was seriously smoking crack or something, and even though I’d lived here for two years, I still routinely got lost.
But thanks to the help of Google maps, I made it to Demetrius’s house.
All things considered, it wasn’t where I would have expected him to live. He was on a crowded street in a planned community. His two-story house looked exactly like the other two-story houses on the street, except they all had different color siding. Of course the colors were complementary. He had a well-manicured square of a lawn in front, and a deck hanging off the back, and the whole thing was very disturbing. Why the hell did he live here? Soccer moms lived here. Not ex-mafia hitmen.
I banged on the door.
Maybe I’d gotten it wrong?
No, I was pretty damned sure this was his address.
I waited.
I knocked again.
The door opened. Demetrius was standing there in a pair of sweatpants. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he was all sweaty.
Damn it. He looked gorgeous. And he smelled all rough and manly. My heart did flips in my chest, and the muscles between my thighs clenched. This wasn’t going to be easy.
“Kiera? What the hell?”
“We need to talk.” I pushed past him into the house.
“I’m in the middle of lifting weights right now,” he said.
I looked him over. “Oh? I would never have guessed.”
“We’ll talk another time.”
I made my way into his living room and sat down on his couch. The place was sparsely decorated. It was serviceable, but bland. I sat down. “We’ll talk now.”
He scratched his jaw. The muscles in his arms gleamed with sweat. “Let me get a shirt.”
“Please,” I said.
He ducked up the steps and reappeared a few minutes later. The shirt was white, and it was clinging to his chest. Not really much help there.
I decided I would talk to his couch, and not even look at his body. I didn’t care how sinfully delicious he looked. I’d had enough whiplash there to last me my whole life. No more touching Demetrius.
“Look, if this is about what I said to you, I’ve been feeling bad about it ever since I said it, and—”
“It’s about Natasha,” I said. “It’s about how we can get her out.”
“We don’t even know where she is.”
I passed on the information about how the cells were labeled high security.
He nodded slowly. “No wonder those schematics weren’t online.”
“That’s what I said.” I looked up at him, grinning. Big mistake. I snapped my gaze away. He was just too hot. It should be ille
gal or something. I cleared my throat. “Anyway, I think that your original plan could still work. We’d just need to make some adjustments.”
“Nikolai’s gunning for us now, though,” he said.
“Well, but that’s the beauty of it,” I said. “He thinks he shut us down. He thinks we’re down for the count. He won’t expect us to try it now.”
Danger considered. “Maybe not.”
“The bottom line is,” I said, “there are women in there who don’t deserve what’s happening to them, and we can’t leave them there. One of them is your cousin’s girlfriend.”
He rolled his eyes. “Look, I don’t know about all that, huh? That woman is just a picture he’s been emailing. For all we know, some other person is answering those emails.”
“Who cares?” I said. “Whoever she is, we can’t leave her in there.”
He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Yeah, okay, you’re right. I guess not. So, what were you thinking we’d do, then?”
“Well,” I said, “everything would stay the same, except we’d need to get to Natasha’s cell.”
* * *
Demetrius
I banged on the door to Blaze’s apartment.
He opened it. “What the fuck? What are you doing here? How do you even know where I live?”
“Kiera figured it out,” I said. “She tracked you down.”
“You think about calling?”
“Only left you ten messages,” I said. I peered around him. “Can I come in?”
“No,” he said. “I have company right now.”
“Is it the Chinese?” called a female voice from within.
Blaze made a face, stepped into the hallway, and shut the door behind him. “What do you want?”
“The explosives? The charges you set on Nikolai’s office building? Will they still go off?”
“Yeah, if I detonate them,” he said. “Which I been thinking about doing on my own and collecting the money.”
I gave him a sour look. “You would.”
“Someone’s gonna kill him. Might as well be me.”
“Look, we’re back on. Going to do the job after all. You in or not?”
He surveyed me. “We’re back on?”
Rough: A Hitman Romance Page 16