Page 27 of The Faceless Omega

He met her still-clearing gaze with a frown. “We have company. Sit up slowly.” He wanted to offer her more, but he still wasn’t sure if she even knew about demons as a concrete existence. This event would change that either in the moment or immediately after, regardless.

Brinley began to push up and froze again when she laid eyes on the figure still in the chair. “What … what the hell?”

The demon in the chair chuckled. “Almost positive I’m not royalty. Name’s Hiryu.”

Lennox felt his blood run cold. He’d heard of a demon named Hiryu before. And he couldn’t think of one single good damn reason why a being rumored to be the world’s top assassin would be sitting across from them.

Chapter 11

Loose Ends

Brinleywasbarelyawake,and highly confused, but she hadn’t quite registered the sense of fear until she felt a rush of cold dread wash over her from the other side of the mate bond. Lennox was afraid—of the strange male figure who didn’t belong in the room, of hispresencein the room, or something else perhaps, but it was all the same. The realization made her pull the comforter up to her chin as she put her back to the headboard. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.

“’s what the file’s for,” Hiryu replied, as calmly as if she’d asked about the weather.

Lennox grunted and stretched forward, gathering up a plain manila file folder that seemed to have been tossed onto their bed. She hadn’t even seen it there. “If this is some intimidation tactic to get me to pay you tonotkill us—”

Hiryu barked out a loud, grating laugh. His head tipped back, his shoulders shook, and he finally stopped twirling the dagger over his thigh.

Brinley felt her stomach roll.Kill us?

“That’s not how I work,” Hiryu said before he’d finished catching his breath. He let his head fall slightly to one side, grinning at them. “I don’t offer my targets the chance to outbid the contracts on their heads. Bad for business.”

Brinley was still struggling to process the words in conjunction with the too-casual tone when Lennox let out the kind of growl that wasn’t sexy at all. It was angry.

“But youarehere to kill me,” Lennox said. He raised his narrowed stare across the room and simultaneously passed the opened folder to her, seeming to instinctively know she would want to see what had upset him.

Which she did. She needed something she might be able to latch onto, to focus on for more than one single second. So Brinley adjusted her grip of the blanket keeping her debatably decent and accepted the precariously balanced file before it could tip and spill again. And her heart lodged in her throat.

There was a printed photo, zoomed in and faintly blurry, of Lennox and her. She recognized it immediately. It could only have been taken the previous day, outside her former employer’s building. The building itself was too cut off to be distinguishable unless someone knew what to look for. She and Lennox stood face-to-face, his car behind them, their hands pressed onto each other’s bodies in some way.

She remembered that conversation as almost desperate. To the camera, it looked intimate.

“I was,” Hiryu said, his voice a backdrop in Brinley’s ears.

Someone was stalking us?

She remembered, after a second, having felt like someone was watching her—watching them. It was highly disconcerting to realize she had been right, in a much worse way than she’d considered.

Lennox and Hiryu continued to speak, but she tuned them out as her gaze shifted to the letter beside the photo. Her vision unfocused, her brain immediately failing to properly comprehend the meaning of the words.

When they’re together.

Stab him. Slit his throat.

Make it bloody.

Leave her alive.

Brinley didn’t realize she’d broken into a sweat or that she was breathing too hard, not until the first of her tears dripped onto the paper and smudged the ink. Instructions. A request. The letter—if she could call it that—was a bitter, hate-filled request with disgustingly specific instructions on how to fulfill the murderous desire of the person who’d penned it. More than likely the same person who’d taken the picture.

“Well, now you know.” The abrupt change in the pitch of Hiryu’s voice jerked Brinley out of her deepening despair and she snapped her head up in time to see him standing and stretching as if he’d been sitting a while. Which was an uncomfortable thought. “I’ve got things to do.”

He was leaving? Was he trying to lull them into a false sense of security?

Lennox growled low. “So, someone bigger and scarier chases you off a scent, you go running like it’s no big deal, and in the meantime, we’re left to look over our shoulders for however long it takes to handle this fucking mess?”

Hiryu took a single step forward, his pale brows furrowed, and held up two fingers. Brinley highly doubted he was offering them the peace sign. “I don’t leave loose ends. Ever. So there’s no looking over your shoulders, little alpha. And I think we both know your mate would prefer I don’t get more specific than that.” He lowered to one finger. “I lost respect for Fates and their plans a long fucking time ago, so you’re just gonna have to take my word for it when I say that having one of the newbies stomping her foot in your favor does diddly squat with me. She’s not what spared you this morning. I don’t kill one half of a fully bonded pair, so congratu-fucking-lations, you saved yourselves.”

---