Page 10 of The Assassin
“How did you do this thing?”
I might be young, but I was already strong, my muscles hard from both work and fighting. That’s the way it was on the streets—you used what you had, and I had strength.I’d used it to avenge Sarah’s pain, to stop the agony that pierced me every time I thought about them hurting her. “Don’t worry about how I did it. Just know you won’t ever have to worry again.”
Garrett stared at me for a long time, his grave eyes weary down to his very soul. Then he opened a drawer in the bottom of that cramped desk and pulled out a lockbox. Didn’t even open it, just handedit over. “For you.”
“No.” I hadn’t done this for money.
“Take it, Agozi.” Garrett’s gaze bored into me, old to young. Both with too much knowledge. “You do the work of a man; you get paid like a man.”
This desk was nothing like Garrett’s. Far bigger deals and far bigger payouts had crossed this desk, none of them as sincere or as worthy as the corner convenience store owner’s had been. AndI wasn’t the man who’d walked out of the tiny office with a thousand dollars in cash either. Nowhere near as altruistic, definitely not as caring. We lived by rules, my brothers and me, but emotion didn’t come into it. We weren’t animals; that’s what the rules gave us. Some semblance of humanity.
Here, now, I was saying fuck the rules. This was about vengeance, plain and simple, about makingsure no one dared come after my family again. Roslyn was a dead man walking, and I was going to enjoy taking him down.
The laptop on the desk was useless; I’d hacked it through the Web hours ago. I added two bugs to the office space, one inside the top drawer, attached to the underside of the desktop, and one across the room in a not so obvious place in case Roslyn’s security found the firstone. The files in the cabinet I ignored—anything not pertinent to right now didn’t matter. I riffled through the ones on his desk but didn’t find anything any more interesting than the bank statements I’d already seen via his computer. Taking one last look around, I stepped through the door and closed it carefully. Quietly. Made my way back to the door I’d entered from.
It was time to go upstairs.
