“What do you think it was for?” I said. “You’ve seen how I can fight. I was learning how to kill. Once I was older—starting when I would have been around eight or nine, I think—they started sending me on missions. Small local ones at first, then farther out.” I wrapped my arms around myself instinctively. “They told me I was taking down bad people—that the world was an awful place and almost everyone in it was awful, and getting rid of the men and women they pointed me at would make things a little better. Make the household a little safer. I never saw any reason to believe anything different…”
Because the people who’d taught me hadn’t allowed me to. Until now. Until their carefully constructed façade had crumbled when these men had blasted into the household and blown them all away.
I still didn’t totally understand that either, even if I believed the guys that they’d been hired by a client to do it, that it hadn’t been personal for them.
I sealed my lips as I looked over the four imposing men at the picnic table parallel to mine. Blaze was still jiggling his knee. Garrison sat on the bench, his ankles crossed as he watched me intently with his piercing hazel eyes. In the sun, they appeared lighter than usual—a pretty, almost green color.
Julius leaned against the side of the table with one foot propped on the seat, his massive, muscular frame giving off a typically commanding air. With his military short hair, he looked every inch the ex-soldier. Talon was poised on the far bench with his elbows braced against the tabletop, his icy blue gaze fixed on me beneath the sheen of his pale, shaved scalp. The coldest killer of the bunch had the look of a lion ready to strike, but I didn’t think any of his animosity was directed at me.
“It makes sense that they could have convinced you,” Garrison said, somewhat grudgingly. The lanky blond man had tried to rankle me with his snark nearly every time we’d spoken to each other in the past couple of weeks. I didn’t think he liked offering any sympathy. “You had them brainwashing you from when you were so young. Even older kids are pretty impressionable.” Then he shut his mouth tight as if he’d said more than he thought he should.
Blaze frowned. “They started sending you off to kill people when you were still just a kid? That’s—”
His voice halted abruptly at a sudden movement from Julius. The crew’s leader straightened up. He took a step closer to me, peering at me with his deep blue eyes. Something in them sent a weird but not totally unpleasant shiver over my skin.
“I knew we’d met before,” he said with a startled expression that looked odd on his normally assured face. “I helped you once.”
I blinked at him, and a twinge of the unexpected sense of familiarity I’d felt here and there before rose up inside me again. “If we’d actually interacted, I would have thought I’d remember that.”
“Maybe not, given the circumstances.” His surprise faded away, replaced by his usual confidence—and a warmth I wasn’t totally used to. “It was more than a decade ago, not long after Talon and I had started the crew. Blaze and Garrison weren’t in the picture yet. The two of us were working a job in Miami one night. I had a bike back then—a Triumph. I was just getting on it in the alley where I’d parked when this girl who wouldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve came running down the alley toward me. It was dark—you were frantic—but it must have been you.”
Talon lifted his head to look at his boss. “That’s what really happened to the Triumph? You told me you totaled it.”
Julius shook his head. “She was bleeding from a cut on her side, and I could hear people running after her. The alley was a dead end. I wasn’t going to leave some kid for a bunch of creeps to find. So I told her to wait there and marched out, told the people who were charging over that I’d seen her running off in a different direction. And right when I went back to check on her, the bike came roaring out of the alley with her perched on it. She left me in the lurch.” He chuckled, seemingly unoffended in hindsight. “I figured I could always get another one. She obviously really needed it.”
My mouth fell open. I did remember him now that he’d pieced the details together. I’d partly bungled a mission, caught a trip wire on my way out of the house where I’d made the kill and gotten several guards on my tail. One of them had shot at me and nicked the side of my chest. It was the first time I’d had a mission go haywire, and I’d been freaking out underneath. In the darkness and the haze of my panic, I’d barely registered the facial features of the stranger who’d protected me.
Then cool logic had kicked in thanks to my training, and I’d made use of the resources available to me. A.k.a., his bike.
“I did,” I said. “Need it. Thank you. I probably would have figured out how to get out of that mess one way or another, but… you made it a lot easier.”
Once I’d left the city well behind, I’d ditched the bike at a junkyard and called the household to orchestrate my pickup. I’d never mentioned that anyone other than me had been responsible for getting me out alive. Julius couldn’t have known that story unless he’d really been there. And studying him now, I could easily superimpose his authoritative presence over the shadowy impression in my memory.
And now we’d somehow stumbled back into each other’s lives when it turned out I might need him again—in a much bigger way. The realization brought a strange mix of relief and unease.
Garrison let out a light snort. “What kind of mission did they have you on at eleven years old? Did you kill your mean science teacher?”
My gaze darted to him, and the uneasy sensation within me expanded, twisting around my gut. “The household never told me any details about the people they sent me to kill other than what I needed to know to get the job done. That one… That one was a rich man who had a big house guarded by men with semi-automatic rifles. He kept a pet bearded dragon in his bedroom. I slipped in through a back window, dodged all the guards, and cut his throat in his sleep. I just… ran into a little trouble on the way out. I didn’t have as much practice then.”
Garrison blinked at me, his smug smile vanishing. “Okay, I stand corrected.”
Blaze’s eyebrows leapt up. “Twelve years ago in Miami? Was he an older man, in his 60s, with a house in North Beach? Big stucco number with bizarro gargoyle mounted over the door?”
I stared at him. He hadn’t even been in the crew yet then—how did he have any idea about this? He couldn’t have been out of his teens back then himself. “Yeah… How did you know?”
The hacker let out a disbelieving guffaw. “That hit still gets talked about in the circles we run in. That was Milo Evangelez—the gemstone baron of the southeast.”
Something shifted in Julius’s expression. He cocked his head. “What are some of the other missions you carried out? The particularly memorable ones?”
My skin started to itch with a deeper discomfort. Noelle had drilled it into me that I wasn’t supposed to talk about anything I did outside the household. And… a gemstone baron… Why would they have wanted to kill him?
Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to hear what else the guys might tell me.
But I couldn’t be a chicken about this, and Noelle didn’t dictate my life anymore. I wracked my brain for missions that stood out more than the others and forced my mouth to move.
“Like I said, I wasn’t told things like names. Even if I overheard information like that, I put it out of my mind.” Probably thanks to all Noelle’s hypnotic suggestions, I realized now with a grimace. “There were three businessmen in Italy who always went everywhere together. That made them difficult to take out. They acted all jovial and friendly in public, but in their hotel room, they were assholes to each other. I half-expected them to kill each other themselves before I poisoned them. Managed to sneak some special ice cubes into the drinks in a room service order they placed.”
I paused for just a second, pulling my lower lip under my teeth before I continued. “Another of the harder ones was this man in Osaka. I had to kill the guy in a bathhouse, and he was as big as a sumo wrestler. Do you know how hard it is to strangle someone who outweighs you by five hundred pounds with nothing but the towel they walked in with?”