Page 646 of Rage

Good Villains

By: Jo Brenner

Chapter One

Kara

Iloved my job. Sure, it was challenging, and at times mentally taxing, and a therapist would have a field day if they knew what I did for a living. Not to mention that blood was hell to get out of fabric—especially the lace lingerie and silk robe I currently wore. But it turned out that writing highbrow fiction no one wanted to read—or creating marketing strategies for large corporations—werenotmy callings in life.

Killing evil men was.

It had only taken being kidnapped by three dark, handsome, near-but-not-complete strangers and pushed to take stock of my life as I was doled out orgasm after orgasm while fighting against a real enemy to figure that out.

And thank fuck for that—and for them.

“What are you smiling about, radiant girl?” Conor, one of said three kidnappers-turned-loves-of-my-life, asked into my earpiece as I kneeled in a bedroom of the Austin, Texas townhouse that housed our target, careful to keep my posture timid and my face demure.

“You,” I murmured, knowing the mic in my necklace would pick it up. Micah, another of my men, had designed the tech,camouflaging it within the lab-grown diamond they had gifted me for Hanukkah.

There was silence on the earpiece, before Conor’s voice turned warm. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Kara.”

A throat cleared.

“To us,” Micah corrected. He was in a van a few blocks away, keeping visual tabs on the location—and me. Even though my men didn’t have to, they worried.

A low chuckle sounded. It was Luke, the final member of our foursome, who was on a rooftop nearby with a sniper rifle in hand in case things didn’t go to plan. “I’m glad we’re taking a moment before shit gets bloody to share our feelings.”

“Fuck off,” Conor murmured, but unlike in the past, there was no tension, no heat in it, just humor. Luke and Conor had worked through their shit, and what used to be an unspoken battle for power and dominance had become good-natured ribbing.

“Never,” Luke laughed into my ear. I wanted to lean into it.

But I had a job to do.

“We can always do this differently, sweetheart,” Luke said, his voice now sober. “You don’t have to play the seductress to get this job done.”

But I wanted to.

Micah laughed in my ear. “Our little badass baby wants to do this, don’t you?”

I smiled to myself again. “Sometimes murder requires a feminine touch,” I said.

At that moment, the door opened, revealing the target himself standing in the doorway, and I fell silent, swallowing back the bile that rose from seeing him—and calming the sick anticipation in my chest. Our target had done horrible things and was positioned to do more. He was a serial rapist who’d usedhis tech money to get away with his crimes, consequence-free. And now he was running for office—and our client refused to let him win: a cause I could get behind.

Some men, you can smell the evil on them. It’s a stench they can’t hide under their expensive cologne, no matter how hard they might try.

The short, slim man was in a robe, already erect from the fun he assumed he was about to have with me. But the sight of his pale bare legs calmed me, a reminder that, despite the power and influence he wielded, he was still human.

After all, even the most powerful men can bleed.

“Good, you’re ready,” he rasped.

I didn’t speak. I didn’t need to. Not yet, anyway.

“I paid a lot of money for this,” he continued, lowering a hand to rub his penis. Once, the sight of a man thinking he could use my body for his own pleasure would have filled me with bile.

But I had my men in my ear, supportive, loving—ready to do what was needed to be done.

And I’d dealt with worse. So much worse.

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