Page 17 of Kissing Danger

Still, I needed answers from him, and since Interpol had already gotten involved, I needed to be extra thorough and handle things myself.

In a small shack out in the middle of the desert, the non-descript man knelt at my feet, hands restrained behind his back, and one of his eyes missing from its socket. The empty hole where an eye had once been slowly oozed dark blood down the side of his face, which caused his lips to stick together as he begged.

“Please. I didn’t know. I was just paid to kill the woman. I thought it was a jealous lover or something. I didn’t know she was involved with you.”

A drop of blood fell off his chin and nearly landed on my shoe. I pulled my foot away at the last moment to avoid the stain and kicked the man square in the chest to get him away from me. He fell on his back, sputtering as he choked on his own blood.

“That woman isn’t involved with me. Now, stop babbling and tell me who hired you, what exactly you were hired for, and why.”

With his hands tied, and disoriented from blood loss, the man couldn’t right himself on his own. A pair of the guards I’d brought with me were forced to gather him off the floor and place him back on his knees right in front of my chair.

“I-I-I never saw the person who hired me. They never gave me a name. Anonymous messages and payment drop-offs only.”

Using an old pipe I’d found in the shack, I tipped the man’s head up to face me directly. “I know that, but surely they told you something.”

I let the end of the rusty pipe hover just an inch from his remaining eye, needing no words to explain what I intended to do with it if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know.

The man was obviously a professional, who had probably claimed dozens, if not hundreds, of lives. Death wouldn’t scare a man like this. Disability, however, was a different story. The threat of living with a broken body could crumble even the steeliest nerves.

Watching the man’s resistance wither before my eyes, I nearly laughed. There were millions of people all over the world who lived their entire lives disabled in one way or another, and they managed just fine. Yet, to a man like this, whose ego and self-worth were tied explicitly to his physical capabilities, takingaway something that plenty of people lived without was worse than a death sentence.

“There... there was one thing,” he finally said, treating each word as if it was tearing out a piece of his soul on the way out of his mouth. “The person who hired me. Their last message had an extra note at the end. It said... It said, ‘The hidden wolf has no pack, but the blossom on the tree shares many roots.’ There was no explanation about what it meant.”

The man trembled, afraid that I would be upset by his nonsensical answer. However, I merely smiled and lowered the pipe. Such a phrase may not make sense to him—it probably wouldn’t even make sense to most outsiders—but I knew exactly what it meant.

The imagery of ‘the hidden wolf’ was easy. It obviously referred to me. Since my name wasn’t well known, I was often simply referred to as ‘The Wolf’ due to my home country’s symbolic animal.

Even the guards I’d brought with me today didn’t know my status within the Chechen Mafia. They obviously knew I was someone important, but had no idea they were standing beside their leader.

‘The blossom’, however, would have been more difficult to figure out if it were not for one crucial piece of information I already knew.

Caprice Vidales, the head of the Vidales family that D’Angelo had asked me to handle for him, was well known to most Mafia families. She’d put a lot of effort into spreading her name far and wide. However, most people didn’t know that she had not been born under the Vidales name. She’d married into the family andimmediately took over leadership as soon as her nuptials were finished. Before marriage, her name had been Caprice Fiore.

It was a small, almost powerless family whose surname meant “flower”.

Caprice had left this little message with the assassin to taunt me. She knew I was targeting her as a favor to D’Angelo, yet she was certain that no matter what I did, I would never be able to overcome her.

Killing the model had been a setup just to get Interpol on my case as a way to scare me off.

Never mind my promise to D’Angelo. Caprice had sealed her fate with this one sentence. She had challenged me, even gloated in my face, and I couldn’t abide such an act of disrespect.

Standing from my chair, I tossed the old pipe aside and wiped the rust stains from my hands.

“Thank you for your cooperation. I have what I need now.”

The man looked up at me with such relief in his one remaining eye, he probably would have clung to my pants like a desperate child if his hands were free.

“Thank you. As I said, I never would have accepted the job if I knew it would affect someone as important as The Wolf. I’ll do whatever I can to make up for it.”

“Of course you will,” I said as I headed for the shack’s only door. On my way out, I gave a backhanded order to my security team. “Tie him up and store him in that crate over there. Then, let’s go.”

As the members of my security immediately followed my orders, I could hear the man struggling behind me.

“Wait. I did as you asked. You can’t kill me.”

There it was again. People trying to say what I can and can’t do.

Stopping on the threshold of the door, I turned back to face him just as my security rustled the man into a metal crate barely big enough to hold him.

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