Page 1 of The Assassin
Chapter One
The damp night air felt heavy with suspicion—mine. My brothers would tell me I was crazy, but I knew what my senses were saying. They’d been honed over years on the streets to keep all three of us safe, and right now they were screaming.
Something wasn’t right.
“Where the hell is this fucker?”
The words came out a low growl, but I had no doubt Remi and Eli heard them throughthe communication device in my ear. It was Eli who answered.
“On his way here, maybe? It’s not even a quarter till, Levi. Not everyone’s got a stick up their ass like you.”
I shot a bird toward the window of the office two buildings down where my youngest brother was working his magic with the surveillance equipment. In our business, you better have a stick up your ass when it came to detailsor you were dead. Easing deeper into the shadows of the overhang I stood under, I scanned the street once more. “I’m telling you, something’s not right. I don’t fucking like it.”
“When do you ever like anything?” Remi asked. He waited on a second-story balcony directly across the street, hidden behind a brick column, his favorite Remington 700 pointed in my general direction. Watching my back—andgiving me a hard time. My relationship with my brothers in a nutshell.
“Never,” Eli said in my ear, proving my point.
“Just keep your eyes on the screens and the streets and shut the fuck up, both of you,” I barked.
There’d been something off about this op from the beginning, but then first-time clients always made me antsy. We were meeting in a deserted office park with plenty of places foran ambush—typical for us—but an ambush could go either way. I scanned the empty street again, feeling the animal need to hunt rise inside me, tensing my muscles and sharpening my senses.
“Remi, stay sharp.”
I heard his inhale, the start of his warning not to run off half-cocked, but the instant he saw me move, the words died. All I heard then was the faint crunch of my boots as I moved fromconcrete to the broken blacktop of the adjacent parking lot. My eyes penetrated the dark, straining for the faintest hint of movement, the smallest indication that a threat waited, needing to be eliminated.
I would be the one to do it.
Empty warehouses like the one at my back interspersed the offices along the street. Trees grew unchecked, their branches like ghostly fingers against the nightsky, leaves blanketing the ground like a crunchy carpet where they no longer clung to their parents. Just enough cover to be dangerous, but I trusted Remi’s eyes on my back and Eli’s in front of me and kept going, kept searching for that one whisper of a sign that would give me a direction, give me—
A flash of dim moonlight off metal caught my attention. I dropped to a crouch in the shadow ofa tree, my heart kicking in my chest as it picked up its beat. Not because I’d found the enemy, but because of his location—rounding the corner toward the back of the building where Remi waited.
Shit.
Remi’s location overlooked the parking lot where our meet up would take place. Having him on the balcony might seem too obvious, dangerous, but being outside and low gave him more than one escaperoute should he need it. I did my best to make sure he never needed it, but I’d also taught him to be as efficient a killer as I was. Always be prepared; that was the Boy Scout motto, right?
We were anything but Boy Scouts, and our preparations were lethal.
“Levi!”
Eli had seen the man too, then. He wouldn’t distract me otherwise.
“I’m on it,” I told him. “Remi.” I dared to glance his wayand saw nothing.
“Yeah.”
“Coming around your back. Is it clear, Eli?”
“Nothing that I can see except your friend.”
“Keep an eye out. If something comes up, you know what to do.” Eli was the youngest of us three, and maybe that’s why he’d ended up the computer specialist; our way of keeping him out of danger. But that didn’t mean he was ineffective. He was our last line of defense, and if hethought I needed it, he’d be flanking any additional threats to our safety.
Knowing that, I forced everything away but the target. The street was dark where I crossed, following the enemy’s trail around to the side of the building.
I pressed the button on the outside of my earpiece, letting my brothers know all was clear so far. The building covered half a block, backed by an alley that separatedit from another empty structure on the other side. We’d scouted each building in the area earlier, and other than evidence of a few squatters and the occasional iffy street-corner deal, they were all empty. Remi’s building contained four stories, and the fucking target could be on any of them.
I looked forward to making him pay what he owed for wasting my time.
The door halfway down the side,the one we’d locked behind Remi, had been jimmied open. No electricity running to the building meant the inside would be almost completely dark, so I flipped down my night-vision goggles, took a deep breath, pulled the door open just enough to admit my broad shoulders, and rolled inside.
