Page 12 of Twin Deception

All this negativity had to stop. Now. Regardless of whether I gave up on this vacation-for-one adventure I wanted to have to ignore the loneliness consuming me, I had to quit this habit of irrationally jumping to conclusions.

It was time to really let loose, to shake things up and purge these dumb ideas.

Going out for a drink last night hadn’t done anything for me.

Maybe it was time to really try.

I eyed the neon signs for a club down the street. It didn’t glow yet as it was too early in the day to be open for business, but I lockedmy sights on it and planned to hit up a club somewhere and have a good time to get out of my head.

5

MIGUEL

Isabel Flores was the focus of my entire day.

And I couldn’t complain.

I still wanted a break after this. The urgency to get a job over with was still there. Done and dusted. Then I’d take off somewhere and figure out whether I wanted to keep at this nonstop pace of working one job to the next. If I disguised my break as a holiday effort, then whatever.

But my patience returned. I wasn’t in a rush.

Instead, as I followed the one and only lovely Isabel Flores around the tourist-clogged parts of Acapulco, I planned to take my time, to treat this as a leisure to follow her around.

Because the more I got to know about this mural painter who seemed more familiar with nonprofit agencies around the globe than she did fashion or anything that would mark her as a member of the elite upper crust of society, the more I wanted to know.

It started off as curiosity. Last night, I headed back to my room to have a drink and pore over her file that Drago sent me. This morning, it was as if all the exposure I’d given to myself had seeped into my brain and revved me to want to knoweverythingabout her.

When she stepped out of her hotel lobby wearing a short white dress, clunky pink necklace, and her hair tied back in a loose ponytail, I had my first real look at her.

It was a sucker punch to the gut. Never before had the sight of a woman affected me like that. Like I was ensnared. Like I was ruined if I couldn’t follow the temptation to watch her move.

The grayscale still shot from footage in New York City hadn’t done her justice. None whatsoever.

In the flesh, Isabel was a fucking goddess. Stunning, confident, and so damn gorgeous.

And the tattoos? The sleeves of ink? That hadn’t shown in her photo. It wasn’t in her bio, either, under the area where physical features were supposed to be listed.

They were either new or she often covered them up.

All I knew was that they made her hotter than hot. Too sexy to handle. Irresistible, as if her getting tattooed gave her an edge of rebelliousness.

The tats went a long way toward tossing out any expectations someone could’ve had about her appearances as the daughter of a wealthy businessman. But there was something more about her that set her apart from Louis Flores. She didn’t look like a spoiled, haughty daughter of the elite. She didn’t act like a brattystuck-up who looked down her nose at everyone deemed too inferior for her socio-economic status.

She looked, on the outside, normal.

Like a woman simply out on vacation and intent on sightseeing. The fact that she was alone and remained alone was a bonus. If she was here with a lover or friend, I’d need to account for how I’d get her away from them. It wasn’t an issue. She was, fortunately for me, alone.

The theme of her outing of the day was clear. Art.Allthe art. I didn’t mind it, but I’d never spent an entire day only checking out the art scene of a new location. Granted, this was her specialty, her chosen field or industry. Mural painting was an odd one.

I couldn’t say I’d ever been asked to eliminate an artist, certainly not one who would apparently have no problem with heights or getting down to the dirty work of using spray paints.

Most of the targets I was ordered to kill were deviants. Murderers. Rapists. Rats who’d threatened the Cartel. Any enemy of the Cartel or another crime organization was likely to get a hit put on their back. Others, too. Politicians, up and coming influencers in the government. Even more petty individuals like bitter exes, lovers who’d rejected someone, and some cases of bitter jealousy within the Cartel.

Never an artist, though. Never a seemingly normal yet alluring woman who just wanted to walk around an art museum and consider all the pieces stored there.

She’d captured my attention, that was for sure. It didn’t distract me from remembering that I was supposed to kill her, but for the first time in my career, I wasn’t in a hurry to take her out.

I’d never failed to take out a target. No matter the details of the hit, I never, ever failed to claim another person’s addition to my kill list.

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