Page 12 of Agent vs. Assassin

Wonderful. My pain-in-the-ass brother is already here. Enrique fails again. I stick the paper in a sealed bag before it goes in my bag, but don’t rush downstairs. What’s the point? Enrique failed and clearly isn’t as gangster as he pretends.

I walk into the closet and start checking pockets, but find nothing of interest. My phone buzzes with a text from Tic Tac:It’s a burner phone that’s presently located in Mark Walker’s house.

“Holy hell,” I murmur and check my call log. It’s the same number Ghost has been texting me from.

I rush down the stairs to find my brother waiting at the bottom, and I bypass him, ignoring him, as I walk to the couch and kneel beside it. I punch the number into my phone, which Ghost has communicated on, and a cell rings beneath the couch. I bend down and retrieve it, aware that Ghost has just won the game, at least this round.

I’m questioning why Mark has his number, which, of course, was Ghost’s intention. Ghost claimed he didn’t kill the directors, but what if he did? And if he took the jobs, if Mark and his sister were paying him, why did he kill Mark? Did he kill Mark? Or was he here to save him?

Did the sister hire him to kill Mark?

In which case, is he really, truly still the number one assassin in the world and on the way to kill my father?

Chapter Eight

I pocket the phone and push to my feet to find my brother and Enrique standing in the room behind me, staring at me. “Is the door unlocked?”

Enrique goes all thin-lipped on me while Andrew offers what he thinks is a salutation. “I told him our guys can handle it.”

If I could remember the Spanish curse Kane favors, I’d mutter it now, but I can’t. Because I don’t want to. Because it’s usually used in relation to me. Since Enrique needs to have Little Bitch written across his forehead right now, I motion to my brother and then walk through the doors where Ghost disappeared, which delivers me to a fancy chef’s kitchen. The island is huge. The pans dangling above it shiny and fancy. The granite on the counter is an impressive smoke shade with black lines streaked throughout it. Does Mark have a wife who cooks or a housekeeper? Or does he blow things up and then whip up fancy veggies no one will ever eat? And why am I here and don’t know any of this?

I whirl around as Andrew joins me. “We have a situation, big brother. Ghost was here.”

“As in the assassin? Do I need to lock down?”

“Not us.”

He squints at me. For a relatively decent-looking guy, he squints a lot—ugly squints, like the sun is in his eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It means that as I sat down to share pie with Ghost—”

“What the fuck do you mean, as you sat down to share pie with Ghost?”

“Irrelevant outside of the fact that he took my pie and I somehow made him want to kill Dad. He vowed to kill him as soon as he’s the number one assassin again, which is tricky since I’m fairly certain he’s that now. And always. He was always number one.”

Andrew slashes his hands through the air. “Backup. Why does he want to kill Dad, aside from him being a piece of shit? Dad. Not Ghost. Or maybe both.”

“He thought I wouldn’t kill him because I’m an FBI agent, and—”

“Which would be a normal assumption, if you weren’t you. He has no idea what it’s like to have a sister who’s basically Dexter in high heels.”

“Okay, smartass. I’m not Dexter. I’m an FBI agent bad at arresting people.”

“Because you kill them.”

“Which is what I told Ghost.”

“How did Dad come into the picture?”

“I wanted him to understand how easily I could kill him, so I described Kane pulling the guy Dad sent after me off of me and what ensued.”

“Meaning what?”

“I stabbed him over and over and over until Kane pulled me off of him.”

“Why would you tell him that? Now he has that over your head.”

“Because neither of us thought the other was going to leave alive. And I fully believe he meant to kill me, as I did him, but then something about Dad sending that man after me hit a nerve with him.”

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