Page 54 of Hell and High Water

I swore an oath to him, to Damon, and the rest of the old crew.

When one of us broke it, it was unforgivable. The only response was death. Painful, vicious.

Maybe I should let it go, just leave.

Thing is, I've never been good with quitting anything unless it's cold turkey or I do it to death. Absolutes have always worked best for me.

I go in, all or nothing. I train hard, or I don't train at all.

I kill for a living or I give it up for good and never touch a gun. It’s even worse when I fall in love. When I fell in love.

Game over.

But I can't think about that. I shouldn’t.

I have to block it out, because that's the past and it's a hard past, something that's done completely. Just like he was supposed to be dead, just like he thought I was supposed to be dead.

Funny how that works out.

Then again, when the same person who hired me to kill Damon’s competition hired me to kill his sister…

No such thing as coincidence.

Usually, I don't ask those kinds of questions about my jobs, but pieces have been falling into place ever since I've gotten back into town. It made me do a little more recon.

This city has secrets galore.

I remember Granddaddy’s eyes always lit up when he talked about Sanctum Harbor, like it was some mysterious place from a storybook. Boy, was he right.

Bikers. Drug lords. A visiting mobster, bent on infiltrating the town’s secret leadership.

Which is the strangest thing of all. These ‘Sinful’ legends might actually be true.

An honest to goodness mystery.

And it’s all tied into my kill contract on Rachelle Tyson. A woman who turned out to be tied to the Sinful, related to a man I killed. Which is exactly where I first encountered the Sinful outside of my grandfather’s stories. Damon was one of them.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. I thought it was some Elk Lodge bullshit. But then I go digging on the client who hired me back then, the links between three of my kills.

And what do I find on his computer?

The original orders to hire me, each one over the years passed on to him by some mysterious leader type, only went by Voracity. Sent by the Sinful.

All except for this last order.

His payment was the red flag. It wasn’t anonymous. It was abnormal. It was traceable to my client directly.

And to me.

I do not like sloppy mistakes like that.

So I decided to improvise. I let Rachelle live.

Because I really want to see what happens when Rachelle turns up alive. Assuming the trio of good-looking guys who rescued the girl and her auntie got her to a hospital in time.

Mostly, I just want to stir the pot, to poke the anthill.

But more than that, I also want to know why Gavin's name is at the top of my client’s personal hit list.

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