Page 69 of Falcon's Prey

I was so fucked.

The taste of Ember’s pussy was still on my tongue when the door to the main house opened.

“Where the fuck have you been?” I gritted out when Pam strolled in.

“Oh, I’m sorry. While you went to get your little puta, I was out trying to figure out how to get out of our mess!”

Pam was killing my vibe.

“The mess you made, you mean?” I asked, and she flinched.

Pam glared at me, her eyes becoming tiny slits taking in my appearance.

“I hope her pussy works miracles,” Pam said before she walked to her room.

“It does enough to take off the edge,” I bit back.

I was aware Pam’s eyes were on me as I took a seat. I took another drag of the joint I was smoking before I made Ember come on my tongue. That was a mistake, one I couldn’t take back, and fuck if I wanted to.

“There’s a fight,” Pam told me while she grabbed her laptop.

“Who’s hosting?” I asked.

I told Ember some of the truth, but not all of it. We came from different worlds, and even though her world and mine often crossed, I wasn’t sure how much she knew. In my world, nothing came without a price, and power always did.

Pam and I had grown up on the streets. Our dads were in the same gang, and our whores of our mothers dipped before we could even remember them. When my old man overdosed and Pam’s landed in jail, it was just the two of us fighting tooth and nail for a place to rest our heads at night. Since an early age, Pamela was good with numbers and shit while I’d made a name of myself solving my anger with my fists. Blood was fascinating to me, how just nine pints kept us human, alive. Take a little too much out of our fragile bodies, and that was it, game over.

How did someone get as fucked-up as me? Life. Streets. Shitty foster parents, you name it. My first kill was at fourteen. I killed the foster dad I had at the time. You’d think Pam would be the one who would have gotten in trouble, but the fucker preferred little boys. It was a messy kill; if it weren’t for his wife helping us clean the mess I’d made, shit would have gone downhill fast for me. She was tired of his abuse and was glad her old man was dead.

Killing was an addiction. It gave you a high that you couldn’t get anywhere else, and the thrill of not getting caught, well, that shit, you couldn’t get it in any dime bag or shoot it in your veins. It had to be experienced with a blade. Any fucker could grab a gun and kill someone, but to cut them open, letting them bleed—you had to mean it.

“Are you even listening to me?” Pam huffed.

“Who?” I asked again.

“The Estacados.”

The underworld was like the one percent. It was exclusive, and once you were in you were in, and we didn’t get disgraced if we fucked up—we paid with our lives. If you didn’t know someone, you’d heard of them. And in my world, the more people who knew of you, the more power to your name.

Power was never something I coveted. I had my jobs and had enough money to live comfortably. Greed wasn’t my problem—it was Pam’s. It was the reason we were in exile right now. There was an organization that was not spoken of. The government probably knew about it, but they buried it in files with a lot of red marker.

Once you belonged to them, you didn’t have to worry about anything else. They were the crème de la crème. You didn’t buy your way in; you had to be invited, and to score an invite, you had to prove your worth. If you failed, then you had to pay a fee for your life, or else it was death for making them waste their time.

So here I was, back to square one, trying to come up with cash to save my life. I was a killer, a hitman, a gun for hire. Pam was good with computers, but she was also a con. The bitch had charisma in spades.

“How much is the buy-in?”

The Estacados had one of the strongest operations in the world. Three brothers, each with their own kingdom to control, and lucky for us one of them happened to be here in New York. It was fortunate because they didn’t care for laws other than their own, so the predicament Pam and I found ourselves in was of no importance to them.

“Fifty,” Pam said. She at least had the decency to look remorseful.

“I have like twenty stashed here. The rest is back on the west coast.”

“I have five,” she told me.

I glared at her.

“I could hack—”

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