Page 11 of The Forbidden Secret

Clearly, it hadn’t happened that way.

“I had my reasons.”

“Okay…” she drawled. “You’re not interested in art, so why were you at the gallery that night?”

I shook my head and tucked my hands in my pockets. “I had my reasons.” I narrowed my eyes. “You want to know about me, but you’re only asking questions related to the one-night stand. You’re not doing a good job of getting over it.”

She rolled her eyes. “What do you do for work? Hitman. Mercenary. Whatever you want to call it. Do people just contact you to kill their enemies?”

“I don’t want to talk about my job, Evelina.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not exactly a pleasant conversation.”

“And?”

I glanced over at her and found that she looked entirely unfazed by the conversation. “You want to talk about the way I get paid to kill people?”

A man passing on the sidewalk did a double-take before lowering his head and rushing by us. I didn’t bother looking at him for too long.

“I would like to know about the person I’m spending all my time with, and you’re not exactly forthcoming. If there is another conversation you would rather have, I’m all ears.”

“I don’t just kill people,” I told her, scanning our surroundings. “I do protection details and occasional deep cover work. I do whatever I am hired to do, but I have become areliable killer. My name is out there, and it’s what most people reference.”

“You just kill anybody? Indiscriminately?”

“What kind of monster do you think I am, Evelina?”

She looked over at me, her left brow raised. “Did I insinuate you were one?”

No, she had not. She had only asked the questions, and I had been answering them. I saw the monster in myself. The killer. Myfather.It was hard to believe she didn’t see the same person. She thought I was an asshole, sure. She had never looked at me like I was evil.To her, I was the man who slept with her and left her.

Now, I was the person who protected her.

She had no idea that I had been hired tokillher a year ago.

“I’m hired to take out criminals. People who do really, really bad things. I don’t kill innocent people, and if I were contracted to do so, I wouldn’t take the job.”

“A hitman with morals,” she teased.

The first thing I noticed was the sinking in my stomach. The sensation that something was either wrong or out of place. We were a mere block from the driver, but…

I didn’t allow my steps to falter as I placed a hand on Evelina’s back and moved a bit closer. “Something’s wrong,” I told her. “Follow my lead.”

I wrapped my arm the rest of the way around her and pulled her closer, almost as if we were lovers. I looked down at her with a smile, taking the opportunity to glance over her shoulder.

The same man who had been walking in the opposite direction—the man who had given me the double take—was casually strolling behind us, glancing down at his phone inconspicuously. But I recognized him. I didn’t forget faces.

I veered to the left, tugging Evelina into my side as I whispered. “Go behind the dumpster.”

For once, she listened and did so quickly. The second the man walked into the alleyway, his eyes scanning it as if looking for us, I took in his lean profile. A gun was tucked into the waist of his pants. The second he met my eyes, his expression hardened, and he reached for it.

I didn’t let him.

I charged forward and slammed him into the wall hard enough to disorient him before dragging him back and away from the opening of the alleyway—out of sight from passersby. He swung a fist around, but I easily avoided it as I pressed him into the wall behind the dumpster, using my body to secure him in place as I twisted both arms behind his back, pressing one upward hard enough that he released a hiss of pain.

“Who are you?” I asked.

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