Page 6 of Wrecked

“Oh that.” Dave gave a slight smile. “They broke ground on the new facility, and I’d probably be in the way at the moment.”

“Are you selling this place?” Stone asked roughly.

“No.” Dave sounded shocked at the idea of parting with his Santa Barbara residence.

“Good.” Relief swept through Stone and with an abrupt nod, he stood and stalked out of the room. Lately, he couldn’t stay long around Dave because he was afraid he would do something stupid…like kiss the guy or beg him not to move out of state.

Dave watched Stone stride like a jungle cat from the room. Closing his eyes, he leaned his head against the back of the chair and cleared his mind.

It was far better to do that than to think of things he couldn’t have.

Abig man caught the smaller woman by the back of her neck and guided her roughly into the rundown house before slamming the door.

Rebel caught the whole thing from across the street where he sat on a retaining wall in front of an abandoned apartment building.

Sitting there had been done on purpose, he needed to keep an eye on his mother. What he hadn’t expected when he got back into town was to find a man living with her.

Just last month, she’d been living alone and now this fucker had shown up. From the way the man put his hands on the back of her neck, Rebel knew the guy wasn’t a good man.

Well, neither was he.

Throughout most of his childhood, he had spent his years either being raped, tortured, or forced to kill.

That kind of thing changed a person.

Now though, Rebel killed for money or pleasure and he sure the fuck would take pleasure gutting that big fat fucker. A leaf crackled beneath footsteps on the sidewalk and Rebel dipped over the side of the retaining wall and melted into the darkness.

His heart pounded, but he stayed still. Nobody would ever make him panic again. After Wrath had killed the two men who had been raping him, Rebel was living a life of freedom.

He answered to no one and never would, not even Savage or Dave, who were constantly trying to find out why he’d moved out. So what if he didn’t want to live at Dave’s place right now? The man’s estate was rich, but he wasn’t comfortable there. He was always afraid of breaking something…not to mention the fucking rules and shit.

“Tell someone if you’re going to leave the house,” Dave had said.

What kind of rule was that? What kind of life was that? Life on a freaking leash was what that was.

His leaving Dave’s hadn’t stopped Savage and Dave from sending people to monitor him. A few had gotten close, but it had been easy to give them the slip. They were good, he’d give them that, but they weren’t small enough to follow into some of the tight spaces he used to escape. For a while, it seemed that every time he turned around there was someone else he had to ditch. Until a few weeks ago, when it had all suddenly stopped. Now, nobody showed up.

It appeared as if they had given up.

Good riddance.

Rebel wasn’t a newbie at being an assassin. He was a fucking pro and the sooner everyone else understood that, the better off they would be.

Thinking about Dave and Savage brought up Crow, but he squelched the vision. Crow was certainly eye candy with his rugged face, dark beard, and blond hair. Under normal circumstances, he would have flirted with the guy, but Crow operated within a set of laws and rules Rebel would never follow. Not to mention, the guy was a bossy SOB.

Why the fuck are you thinking abouthim?

One of the local crackheads stumbled past, shuffling on down the street, and Rebel let out a sigh of relief. From his new vantage point, he went back to watching the front door of his mother’s house and pushed away all thoughts of Crow.

It would be best to go in through the window and take the guy out. The place was old and so rundown that the screens were hanging off and the paint was peeling, but she owned it and had for all of his life. It was the house he had been born in, or so he’d been told.

This was the neighborhood he supposedly had lived in when he was younger. The place was rundown with neglect. One row of houses sat across the street from a long line of apartment buildings that had seen much better days—some of the buildings were occupied and several stood vacant.

Crime in this neighborhood was at an all-time high…so the police wouldn’t even blink at another dead body.

Rebel’s only dilemma was that he hadn’t honed any one particular skill. And while that made him pretty good at everything, he wanted this kill to be special.

He wanted the fucker to feel it.

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