by Penny Dee
But Taylor had changed all of it. And when I thought about her, I found myself grinning like a fucking teenager.
Slowly, last night came back to me in hazy images. Her turning up on my doorstep and wanting me so bad. The emotion in her touch. The need in her kiss.
The tears.
The realization came out of nowhere and hit me like a bolt of lightning.
I sat up with a rush.
Had she been saying goodbye?
I launched out of bed and flung open the bathroom door. The room was empty.
She was gone.
A sharp pain hit me in the gut.
She’d left without a word.
I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and called her. But it went straight to voicemail.
I tried again and again, but again and again she didn’t answer.
Panic unfurled in the base of my spine.
The more I went over last night, the more I was convinced that she was saying goodbye.
Her reluctance to talk.
Her emotion.
Her pulling away from me since the night of Maverick’s wedding.
For the fourth time before leaving my house, I tried calling her, but again there was no answer. I climbed on my bike and rode off into the early light to look for her.
By now the morning had woken up, the traffic was heavier and there were more people out on the street. I rode to her apartment and knocked on the door, my gut knotting when there was no answer. I checked the doorknob, it was locked.
Pulling my phone out of my cut, I rang Ruger and asked him if Chastity had heard from Taylor. But she hadn’t.
“Everything alright?” he asked.
“No.” I looked at my watch. “I got a bad feeling.”
“You want me to do something?”
“It might be nothing. I’ll get back to you.”
Fuck!
Somewhere in the back of my mind a little voice whispered. He has her. But I pushed it away. This didn’t feel like Martel. Didn’t feel like he was involved. Plus, I wasn’t convinced there was a hit on me. Because if he really had a hit out on me, I’d be dead already.
Or else, he needed to get himself another hired gun.
No, this was something else entirely.
This was about her. It was what made her come by my house last night and say goodbye to me with her body.
With alarm twisting in my guts, I broke the door lock and stepped inside.
Three suitcases and a couple of cardboard boxes sat just inside the door, confirming my suspicion that she was leaving. Running away. But it looked like she had been interrupted while packing up the apartment.
That little voice whispered in my ear again. He has her.
Pulling my gun from my jeans, I moved through the apartment, checking rooms and cupboards. It was quiet. Deathly still. And empty.
Suddenly, Wendy’s crumpled body and lifeless eyes swung before me and I faltered, a wave of fear crashing over me. If something had happened to Taylor…
My nostrils flared as I breathed out my fear.
I will rain down hell and fury if they have hurt her.
I gripped my gun, ready to unload my clip into anyone who touched her.
That’s when I noticed the file on her desk.
I flicked it open and my heart came to a grinding halt.
What.
The.
Fuck?
The file was thick with surveillance photos.
Surveillance photos of me.
TAYLOR
My front door was ajar.
I pulled the Beretta from my handbag and raised it as I stepped into my apartment, because whoever was inside that door needed to understand who I was, and they needed to understand quickly.
I moved quietly, each step placed carefully, my breath paused, my finger on the trigger. But I faltered when I saw Bull, standing in the middle of the room with his back to me as he looked through the file on my desk. The file full of information about him. When he heard me, he swung around, his gun raised high and in my direction.
Just as mine was aimed at him.
Our eyes met across the room, and in that quietly tense moment, I confirmed his suspicions when I didn’t lower my weapon.
His eyes darkened and betrayal shimmered across his handsome features as the realization sank into his bones.
For a moment we said nothing. Our eyes said it all.
His: why?
Mine: because I have to.
The air tightened around us.
“How much is he paying you?” His voice was rough.
Mine was tight. “It’s not about that. I don’t have a choice.”
His jaw tightened. Because I had just confirmed it out loud.
“That’s bullshit. We always have a choice.”
I shook my head. “That’s not always true.”
His eyes blazed across at me, his jaw tight, his body tense. “Why.”
“They have Noah.”
He momentarily let his guard slip.
“Who has Noah?” His voice was edged with alarm.
“Alex. Until I get this done.”
He didn’t move. Not an inch. Not a flicker. Nothing. He just stared at me with those beautiful, bright eyes.
And I stared right back, my broken black heart pounding in my ears.
I exhaled and dropped my aim.
It was time to come clean.
After all this time. After all the secrecy. Finally, it was time this ended.
I put my gun on the table and sat down.
Leaning forward, I raked my hands down my face.
This was such a clusterfuck.
I wasn’t worried about Bull’s gun pointed at my head.
He wasn’t about to shoot me, just as much as I wasn’t going to shoot him.
But even so, there was a good chance I wouldn’t live to see sundown.
Not because of Bull.
Because of Alex. Because I was going to get my brother back, and I was ready to die trying.
“Was any of it true?” Bull’s voice was cold, with the hard edge of a knife blade.
I closed my eyes. “Every damn bit.”
I felt him pause. Felt my words ripple through his body. Felt him lower his weapon. “You’d better tell me what the fuck is going on, Taylor.”
“Where do I even start?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
I exhaled deeply and opened my eyes. “I’m the person who’s meant to kill you.”
“I figured that part out myself. The photos and the gun were a dead giveaway,” he said sharply. “But why you?”
“Because Alex said so.”
“Why? I don’t even know him.”
“No, you don’t. But you know his business partner…”
We said the name at the same time.
Gimmel Martel.
He looked away as he absorbed what I was saying, clenching his teeth so his jaw ticked.
I longed to tell him the full story. That my parents didn’t die when I was younger like I’d told him. That they were junkie scum who tried selling my virginity to their drug dealer, so I had run away to live on the streets. That Alex had plucked me out of the nightmare of homelessness, and sat me in an ivory tower in the part of town I could only dream about. How at eighteen, after he saved my brother from my mother, I had agreed to do anything for him, and as a result, became his kill girl. How I’d stealthily crawled through the shadows of the seedy underworld taking out whoever he told me to. How the targets were bad men. Every single one of them. Drug dealers. Rival kingpins. Human traffickers. Rapists. Men who had somehow made their way onto his hit list for one reason or another. And how I’d found satisfaction in it. Not because I enjoyed killing, because I didn’t, but because it made the man I idolized proud of me.
I wanted to tell him how he started to hire me out. A hired killer available for the right price. How, if you needed someone gone, I was an option to make it happen.
A psychopathic
night club owner you couldn’t forgive for raping your sister and putting her in the hospital for three weeks.
A corrupt senator with a taste for the younger kind who took advantage of your daughter, and who you knew was responsible for her body being found in Chesapeake Bay.
A cruel, corporate playboy who raped and killed your brother in a drug-fueled, sexual rage because he thought he could take whatever he wanted, from whomever he wanted.
How I would lure the target with the promise of sex. But end their life before they could lay a finger on me.
I wanted to tell Bull how I’d had my moment of clarity at the ripe old age of twenty-three years old, when Alex murdered my one and only friend in front of me because he was having an affair with his wife. How the veil had lifted, and I’d seen him for the monster he truly was. But how it was too late for me by then. Because I was already a lethal killing machine.
Bad to the bone.
A monster. Just like him.
And I had to live with it every single day.
I wanted to come clean to Bull. Wanted him to know me, all of me, and how remorseful I was for a past I’d never had any control over.
But even now as I lay my cards on the table, I couldn’t admit to him just how deep my own venom ran. Because I could already feel him slipping away from me.
I wasn’t insane enough to think that our love could survive this. I had accepted that last night when I decided I would kill Alex today. I had accepted it with every tear that fell down my cheeks when we’d made love. With our final touch. Our last kiss.
But standing here now, seeing him and feeling the gulf between us widening, I couldn’t find the words.
I hadn’t expected to see him today.
I thought I would be gone by now.
But he had figured out that last night was goodbye. And now here he was.
He moved cautiously, taking a step closer. But he said nothing, the cutting silence forcing me to explain at least something.
“I was a runaway when Alex found me on the streets. I’d run away from my parents when I was twelve because they were junkie scum. By the time Alex found me, I was jaded and sick. I’d been beaten. Abused. Raped.” Bull’s eyebrows drew in and his jaw tightened. “He took a broken fifteen-year-old and spent the next eight years taking advantage of her. Because he could. Because she was so grateful to him, so she never questioned his motives. Never told him no.”
I swallowed thickly, feeling the echoes of how I once felt about him. They were so foreign now, so alien, so wrong. My face stiffened with emotion and remorse.
“It was years before I realized the truth.”
“Which was?”
“That he was a psychopath who saw me as nothing more than an opportunity. That he had used me. But by then it was too late. He had already taken my anger and pain, and used it to mold me into what he wanted me to be. And I’d been so desperate to please him, I’d let him.” The bleak memories surged forward as if they’d happened only yesterday. “When I realized who he was, I took Noah and we ran. Because he wouldn’t let us leave. And if we’d stayed, he would’ve done the same to Noah as he did to me.”
“But he found you?”
“Twelve months ago.” I could still feel the fear I felt the night I walked into our apartment and found Alex waiting for us.
“And he sent you here to kill me?”
“No. I was sent here to watch someone. Not to kill anyone.”
“Then, what changed?”
“It was a lie from the very beginning. He dangled Noah and my freedom in front of me. Told me all I had to do was be his eyes and ears in Destiny. Report back to him if he ever asked. But he never did. It was a lie. Because the next time I heard from him, he told me I had to …”
“Kill me?”
My voice strangled in my throat. “Yes.”
“When did you know he wanted me dead?” Bull’s deep voice was clipped.
I looked at him. Watched him swallow deeply. His poker face firmly in place. As was the darkness clouding his eyes.
But I could feel his pain. And it was deep.
“I got a phone call…”
“When?” His voice was sharp.
A thick knot of remorse lodged in my throat. “The day after Maverick and Autumn’s wedding.”
His face tightened and his jaw popped.
He was thinking about that night on the River Queen after the wedding, and how it wasn’t just sex. How we’d admitted our feelings as we made love, losing ourselves in the exquisite touch of each other’s body. I could see it written all over his face. It was hurting him. Deeply.
I wanted to look away so I didn’t have to see the hurt in his eyes. But I wouldn’t. Because I did this. I hurt him and I had to face up to it.
“When did you decide you weren’t going to kill me?”
“I would never hurt you,” I whispered.
“You expect me to believe you were never going to go through with it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I lost the ability to do what I used to do a long time ago. And…” I looked away and let my voice trail off.
“And what?”
“And I could never hurt you.” I raised my gaze to meet his. “Because you’re the reason I breathe.”
BULL
Because you’re the reason I breathe.
Her words were like a kick behind the knees.
And they almost brought me down because I desperately wanted to believe her.
“I know this is a lot to take in. But I need you to understand that I never intended for any of this to happen. I couldn’t tell you why I was here, or what was going on. Alex told me there would be grave consequences if I did. And he doesn’t make idle threats, Bull. He’s cruel. He took Noah because I didn’t do what I was sent here to do.” She shook her head, drawing her brows together. “Plus, I didn’t want you to know who I was. Not in the end.”
My voice was alien. Cold. Hard. With an edge as sharp as a knife. “Why?”
“Because I love you,” she said, and my heart ached for it to be true. But it wasn’t. Because this was all a part of the bullshit façade.
“If this is you being in love with me, then I’d hate to see what you’re like if you weren’t.”
She ignored my sarcasm.
“I know it looks bad, and I don’t expect you’ll believe me. But I fell in love with you. If you believe nothing else, please believe that.”
I didn’t.
She took a step toward me but then stopped, and for a moment I thought I saw a glimmer of regret on her beautiful face. But then it was gone.
Because she is a cold-blooded killer.
“Am I your first?” I asked, and when she looked away, I knew the answer. Jesus. This wasn’t a one off. She’d done this before. “How many?”
“Enough.”
“Did you make all of them fall in love with you before you put a bullet in them?”
“That’s not fair.”
My temper snapped.
“Don’t talk to me about fairness.” I spoke through gritted teeth. “What’s not fair is living in darkness for eighteen long, goddamn years, only to finally fall in love with a fucking lie!”
“It’s not a lie.”
Agony swept through me like wildfire and I gripped my gun. Inside my skull, I was screaming like a madman.
Because you’re the reason I breathe.
I wanted to release my pain in a roar. I wanted to fall to my knees and pound the floor until my hands were black and bloody, and so goddamn numb that I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her until she fought against me, breathless and wild, and make her tell me why. Why did she have to break my fucking heart?
We looked at each other, and the air between us snapped with tension. My heart was wounded and bleeding. But the armor was already beginning to attach itself to the breached walls and harden like cold steel again.
“What happened t
o Noah?”
I thought about the kid I was growing close to as I sat down at the table next to her, and a weird stalemate settled between us.
“Last night…after I saw you at the clubhouse…when I came home, Alex was waiting for me.” Tears glimmered in her eyes. “But he had already taken Noah. Because I hadn’t done what he told me to do.”
I thought about her turning up on my doorstep. About the emotion pouring out of her as we’d made love. The goodbye. The packed suitcases by the door. She was going to run. But not before she got Noah back.
I glanced around the apartment. “What were you planning to do?”
“I’m going to the lake house where Alex has Noah. I know where it is because I followed him there last night. And I’m going to make him see reason and ask him to let me and Noah go.”
“And if he doesn’t.”
“Then I’m going to kill him.”
Jesus Christ. Who the fuck was this woman?
“Either way, I’m going to get Noah back, and we’re going to leave town. Start all over again.” A tear broke free and spilled down her cheek.
“You’re leaving me?”
Another tear spilled down the other cheek as she fought her trembling chin. “Please believe me, it’s the best thing I can do for you. After all of this, you deserve better than me.”
I shook my head.
“You’re going to break my fucking heart…just like that?”
“Only to protect you.” She was crying now.
I felt my own emotions overpower me.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve helped you and Noah. You knew how I felt about you. Fuck, I would’ve done anything to protect you. Anything!”
Before she could answer, the front door opened, and as quick as a whip, we both raised our guns and pointed them at the doorway.
Both our killer instincts were razor sharp.
“Jean-Paul…” Taylor said the name as if it left a sour taste in her mouth.
The man standing in the doorway with his gun pointed at us glared at her.
“Well, well, well, doesn’t this look cozy,” he said.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Taylor replied, wiping her wet cheeks.
“Alex begs to differ.”
“It’s under control.”
“Doesn’t look like it from where I am standing.” He gave me a dark look, but it was Taylor he spoke to. “Are you going to introduce us?”