“Did you know what an Escort was when you took the job?”
I knew eventually she would ask me this. It was a natural question—did you know you were going to be a killer? Did you actually choose it?
“Yes,” I answered. “He told me what I would be doing.”
We both lay there for long moments, quiet. I wasn’t sure what she was thinking, if the realization—the knowledge that I actually chose this life—would be something she could ever accept.
And if she didn’t? my brain asked me.
But I think the real question was What if she did?
Because if she didn’t, I would understand. I could go on exactly as I had been before. Okay, not exactly as before because this had changed me—she had changed me. But I would go on, and I would continue to do exactly what I’d been doing for over ninety years.
But if she did… if she somehow found a way to accept me, I knew things—life—as it was now would have to change. Irrevocably and forever.
She lifted her head off my shoulder and propped her arm and chin on top my chest. Her blue eyes studied me and her wild hair was tangled around her chin. “So how come you agreed? Why do any of you agree?”
“I can’t say for sure about the others, but I do know that when you’ve just suffered some kind of violent or sudden death, you’re in shock. You find yourself basically a cloud of color standing in a room with a man and his closets full of bodies.” At this she lifted both her eyebrows and stared at me in disbelief, but she said nothing else as I continued.
“It isn’t really much of a choice. You can stay dead and be tossed into some kind of void that is a fate worse than hell for all of eternity, or you can take his offer, get a new body, a new life, and a shit-ton of money. Considering most people are still shocked that they’re actually dead, choosing to live isn’t that hard.”
“But it’s not living,” she said softly.
“No. It’s not.” I took a minute to brush some of the wayward hair out her face. “But usually by the time you realize that, it’s much too late. Once you make the deal, once you take on the title of Death Escort, there is no getting out.”
“Like Dex,” she whispered.
“Yeah, like Dex. You do the job or get Recalled, sent off to a place worse than hell.”
“When did you realize you weren’t really living?”
I brushed my thumb along the bare skin of her collarbone, back and forth, back and forth. Goosebumps broke out along her skin and I smiled. “Today.”
I caught the skepticism in her eyes. “Don’t try that charm on me,” she warned.
“Are you saying you’re immune to my charm?” I lifted a single brow.
“Oh yes,” she said, her lips curving secretly. “It’s your other, shall I say, gifts that I’m partial too.” As she spoke her finger trailed across my chest and down my stomach.
I laughed. But then I sobered up. I wanted her to know this stuff. “For several months now I’ve been feeling restless. I always completed the jobs I was assigned, but sometimes things fell through the cracks.”
“Money, you mean,” she replied.
“Mostly,” I rasped and rubbed a hand over my face. “It gets old… working for a man who can be as ruthless and cunning as he wants. He can play with your life, make threats, and withhold things that are rightfully yours.” I paused and glanced at her. She nodded and so I went on. “And then Dex came along… He figured out a way to get around G.R.’s game. I did nothing to stop him.”
“You helped Dex?” she said, her eyes going wide and her shoulders straightening.
“I didn’t save your friend.” I could see in her eyes that she was trying to make me into the hero. I wasn’t a hero. I never would be. I was the bad guy. The killer. “All I did was look the other way and maybe keep G.R. busy while Dex did his thing.”
She shivered.
“Are you cold?”
“A little.”
“Come on,” I said, starting to rise, but she made a sound deep in her throat.
“In a minute.” She pushed me back down and pressed herself closer against me. “There’s something else I want to know.”
“Hmmm?” I asked, paying more attention to the way her body felt against mine than what she was saying.
“Did you take the job because you were angry you died?”
“You ask the hard questions,” I murmured.
“Because those are the ones that tell me the most.”
“Does it really matter?” I asked then. “The reason I became what I am? The reason I became a killer? Because it won’t change the fact that I’ve killed over and over again for over ninety years.”
“It matters to me.”
I hesitated again. Was I really ready after all these years to tell my story to someone?
“Olly,” she whispered.
I wasn’t sure that I would ever get used to hearing her call me that. It brought a rush of emotion every single time she said it. “My sister used to call me that.”
“Tell me about her.”
I nodded. “Her name was Sarah.” It was another name, another emotion… another blast from the past.
And then it was like I couldn’t hold it in anymore. The words, the past came tumbling out of me.
“I died in nineteen twenty. The world was different back then. It wasn’t as free—as liberal as it is now. Women’s rights were on their way, but even still, women weren’t regarded the way they are now. They still needed the protection of a man, the income of a man. They were vulnerable, easily exploited and taken advantage of.”
I was aware of Frankie’s fingers moving lightly over my chest, giving me courage to talk.
“My father wasn’t much of a man. He left us when I was ten years old. Sarah was only five. A baby. My mother did what she could for us. She worked herself until she had circles beneath her eyes and holes in the bottom of her shoes. Still, she always smiled at us, always told us how much we meant to her. It would have been easy, I think, to blame us, to be angry and make us the target for that anger. But she never once let us see her cry. I heard her sometimes, at night, when I was supposed to be in bed.”
Instead of saying she was sorry for what obviously had been something hard, she still said nothing. Instead, she kissed me just beneath my jaw and then pressed her face in the crook of my neck.
“I got my first job when I was twelve. I was bigger than most boys that age, so I lied and took on as many jobs as I could. It helped some and gave my mother more time with Sarah. When I was fifteen, I quit school to work fulltime. I brought home enough for us to live, but I wanted more for them. Mother was always there for us, and Sarah… Sarah was…” I swallowed past the lump that had formed in my throat. Thinking about my sister was something I tried to never do.
“She was important, huh?” Frankie said, sensing the emotion that welled up inside me.
“Yeah, she was,” I replied. My sister meant everything to me. “So I started boxing. I got beat up a lot the first couple years. It seemed I always had some sort of injury—a black eye, a busted rib. But I didn’t give up. I kept fighting. I liked it. I think I got all the anger my mother never seemed to carry. After a couple years, I started winning. You got a lot more money for winning than you did for losing. The night I died, I was fighting for the championship title. A title that could have made me over ten thousand dollars. I was naive to think someone wouldn’t kill to keep their title.”
“You took the job, you became an Escort for your family, didn’t you?”
“Without me, without my income, they would have ended up in poverty or my mother would have married herself off to someone that didn’t deserve her. So, yeah, I took the job. I killed and I sent almost all the money I made to my mother and my sister anonymously.”
“Thank you for telling me. I probably would have done the exact same thing in your shoes.”
She thought that was all there was to my story. That the killing machine I was today was solely based on the fa
ct my family needed to survive. It definitely was what made me an Escort… but the emotionless killer… that took something else entirely to create.
“Is your sister a Death Escort too?”
“No,” I denied. The thought of my sister, of someone so pure as her doing what I do made me sick.
“Well, that day at the café when you said you saw her… wouldn’t she be…?” Her words trailed away.
“Dead. Sarah is dead.”
“But you said you saw her…”
“The Reaper has her body. I have no idea how he got it or why, but he does and he was using it to throw me off, to mess with my head.”
“You said before he doesn’t want you to complete this job.”
“He wants me gone. For good. If I don’t do this job, he’s going to use it as an excuse to Recall me.”
Her arms tightened around me, and her face buried against my neck. “I’ve been trying to mess it up for you too.”
“You didn’t know any better,” I soothed, rubbing my hand over her back.
“I don’t want you to get Recalled.”
“That’s not going to happen. I have a plan.”
“What kind of plan?”
I shook my head. “The less you know the better. I don’t want you involved in this.”
“Charming?”
“Hmmm?”
“If your sister’s body looks as young as it does, then…”
I swallowed against the memory of that day. Of the day I killed my sister. “She died a couple years after I became an Escort. She was barely eighteen.”
I felt the breath she sucked in, but I was so lost in the memory of that day that I didn’t hear if she said anything.
“After I died, the boys started coming around. And I say boys because none of the guys that showed interest in my sister were man enough to have her. It drove me crazy, seeing her with guys that didn’t deserve her, that couldn’t give her the life I wanted her to have. But once I was gone…”
“She was trying to find someone to fill the hole you left behind.”
Yeah. Maybe. “She and my mother cried for weeks after I died,” I recalled softly.
“We don’t have to talk about this if it’s too hard.”
“No. I want you to know.” I blew out a breath and finished the story. “Sarah got serious with this guy. When he wasn’t around her, he gambled, he drank… he cheated. I couldn’t just knock on the front door and warn her away. I mean, she didn’t even know me. One night he showed up at the house after he’d been at the bar. Sarah told him she didn’t like his drinking. He hit her.”
I clenched my fist at the memory. I could still hear the slap against her skin. I could hear her cry.
“I killed him.”
“You were protecting your sister.”
“Yes, I was. But killing him is no different from killing anyone else. Except he wasn’t a Target. One of the Reaper’s rules is to never kill anyone but a Target. I walked around for days, terrified he would find out, that he would Recall me. But he never did. He never said a word. And so I went on killing and sending the money to my family.”
“And then Sarah died.”
“She didn’t just die. She killed herself.”
Frankie sucked in a breath. “But why?”
“Because I killed her boyfriend. I heard my mother talking to one of her friend’s right after the funeral. Seems that losing me and then losing the only other man she ever loved sent her over the edge.” Why she loved that jerk was beyond me. I thought she had better taste than that. Maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought. I was silent for a few minutes. “Because of me, my sister killed herself.”
Frankie pushed up against my chest to stare down into my eyes. “You are not responsible for what your sister did.”
There was no point in arguing what I knew to be true. “After that, I stopped caring. I figured out a way to shut down my feelings and just focus on my job. On death.”
“What about your mother?”
“I sent money every week right up until the day she died at age eighty-five.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, stroking my cheek. I liked when she touched me.
“Don’t be sorry. Everyone dies sooner or later. My mother lived longer than most.” I wasn’t about to let this conversation turn to pity. I wanted Frankie to know my story, but I didn’t want her to pity me for it. I realized my life hadn’t been easy, but it certainly could be worse.
“Come on, love,” I said, reaching down and patting the side of her ass. “We’re naked and you’re cold. Why don’t we take this conversation to the kitchen where the coffee is?”
She made no attempt to get up.
“Frankie?”
“I’m afraid the minute we step out of this ring that Olly is going to disappear. That Charming is going to come back.”
Her words caused something inside me to tighten. “A part of me is always going to be Charming. I’ve spent more time as him than I ever spent as Olly.”
“I know,” she said softly, “and I’m sure you’re going to drive me insane.” She flashed her teeth at me. “Just promise me you won’t let Olly run away from Charming.”
I laughed and got to my feet, pulling her up alongside me.
“I’ll make you a deal. You walk around naked all the time, and I’ll forget Charming ever existed.”
“Spoken like a true man,” she said with a sigh. “I need coffee. With sugar.”
I jumped out of the ring first, landing like a cat, and held open the ropes for her to step through, and then I lifted her off the platform, letting her body slide down mine. Just before her feet hit the ground, I caught her and captured her lips with mine.
She had full lips and she kissed like she did everything else, with passion and attitude.
It turned me on.
Her laugh caused me to break away and look down.
“You keep kissing me like that and we’re never gonna leave this room.”
I growled and bit her bottom lip. She returned the bite with one of her own.
I sat her down and grabbed her hand. “C’mon.” I held the door open and she went ahead of me into the hall. Before stepping through, I looked back.
Our clothing and my gloves still lay scattered in the ring.
I lost my life in a ring a lot like that one.
It somehow seemed appropriate that was where I got it back.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Gone - being away from a place; absent or having departed.”
Frankie
My legs were still trembling and every other part of me tingled with pleasure. The butterflies in my belly were still fluttering wildly, but now their wings no longer felt sharp. I knew sex with him would be amazing. My body practically screamed out for him whenever he was near, but I had no idea it would be like that. If I never had sex with Olly again, I would spend my entire life trying to find someone who would make me feel the way he did.
And I would fail.
There was no one else on this earth like him (which probably was a good thing).
I groaned and stuck my head under the insanely large waterfall showerhead that was raining water from the ceiling. I was in so much trouble.
He was completely maddening. He was selfish, spoiled, looked like a Ken doll, didn’t like sugar, and constantly had to have his way. Not to mention he worked for the Grim Reaper, killed for a living, and kidnapped my best friend at gunpoint. He was practically the poster guy for guys a girl shouldn’t bring home to Mom.
I grabbed the shampoo (which smelled insanely good and probably cost a hundred dollars a bottle) and started washing my hair.
He was all of those bad things and more. But there were other parts too.
Parts that he hid from most of the world because they made him vulnerable. Parts of him that if he allowed out would slowly kill him. I had a feeling that when Olly hurt, he didn’t just hurt. He bled. If he allowed himself to feel everything that everyone else felt
, his entire world would come crashing down. A Death Escort couldn’t afford to feel—to live.
He made my heart race. He made me feel challenged, like every day wouldn’t just be the same as the last. And he confided in me.
He told me things about his life, his family, that he hadn’t told anyone. I realized that he could be lying, but I didn’t think he was. It would have been easier to make up something simple or to say nothing at all. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to die and then trap himself into a job that would never end to be able to take care of the women he left behind. And his sister… God, he’d walked around for years and years thinking she died because of something he did. And if that wasn’t enough, the Reaper was using her against him, bringing it all back up, taunting him.
Charmed (Death Escorts) Page 22