Page 1 of Assassin's Game
Chapter One
Eli —
Good evening, Assassin.
I’ve been an admirer of your work for some time. The problem, of course, is exposure—you don’t want it, but I have the means to make it happen. The tie between Hacr Technologies and the Assassin might be well-hidden, but for someone like me, with my connections, they are both easily uncovered and easily exposed.
Neither of us want that, I’m sure. A partnership would easily solve the issue.
Your target is Bram Sullivan, CEO of BSGA Holdings International, headquartered in Atlanta. Natural causes are imperative. Contact me within two weeks when the job is done, and the information I have will remain between the two of us.
I look forward to working with you.
X
“Son of a bitch! You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
I reread the e-mail one more time, as if the contents might change between one second and the next. I wished they would.
I wished a lot of things, but apparently they weren’t going to fucking come true.
I mean, I’m the contact for a well-known—and feared if not respected—killer. I’d received some freaky e-mails in my time. Most crazies aren’t savvy enough to find the site on the dark Web, much less brave enough to actually make contact with the boogeyman of the US criminal world. But this particular crazy, X?
He’d not only made contact; he’d threatened to expose everything we were if we didn’t work for him.
Assuming he was a “he.” He or she, the fucker had signed their own death warrant.
The bat cave was dark, the thump of old-school Metallica reverberating off the concrete walls. I shoved back from the computer, spinning as the chair moved, and pushed to my feet seconds later. Ignoring thebangof the chair as it hit the edge of the desk, I stalked toward the elevator and access to my brothers. Some things I wrote off on my own, but this required a family meeting.
The first floor was quiet as I exited. Dark. The mansion our parents had raised us in until their deaths had become a home, the walls drawing me in instead of keeping me out. Sometimes I didn’t think I deserved it. After all, I’d been nine when our uncle murdered our parents in cold blood, right upstairs. I had memories of them, sure, but as the years passed, they became more and more fuzzy. Sometimes I couldn’t remember my mother’s face.
No, I definitely didn’t deserve to be here. But these walls accepted me anyway, just like they accepted my brothers.
These days Remi was in bed early, and not only because his woman was now sharing it. Between his new day job at Hacr, preparing to take over security, and the fact that he and Leah were managing an almost seven-year-old still in school and Leah’s nursing position at Fulton County Memorial, late nights weren’t even on their radar. And a new baby in six months. All that shit hadmyhead spinning, and I wasn’t in the middle of it. Remi had gone from stone-cold killer to slavishly devoted family man (with the stone-cold still there, just on the side) the minute the opportunity had presented itself. I couldn’t blame him, either. He and Leah belonged—there was no other word for it.
I wouldn’t wake them if I didn’t have to. Remi could declare war on the asshole targeting us tomorrow just as well as tonight.
After scanning the living room and kitchen just in case my oldest brother was skulking around, I took the front stairs two at a time up to the second floor where Levi and Abby lived. They’d talked about trading their floor for Remi’s given that he would soon have four people in his half of the third floor, but Remi had refused. Said they would probably be filling up their floor with kids soon anyway. Levi had actually turned green at the thought, a fact I gave him shit for, for a solid week.
Levi could be an ass. No matter how much I loved him, I was always looking for something to rag him about.
Tonight his floor of the house was dark too. Down the hall I saw a flicker of light coming from the living room doorway, and headed that direction. Looked like the TV was on. Bracing myself in case Levi and Abby were gettin’ freaky on the couch—not unlikely, but I’d rather not be exposed to my brother’s hairy ass—I stepped inside.
The TV hanging on the wall was running some movie with Sandra Bullock on silent. Hot chick. I checked out the rest of the room, but it wasn’t until I gave up and turned to leave that I caught sight of the huddled figure in the wide recliner to one side. Levi’s recliner. I never thought my badass assassin brother would have a favorite recliner, like some creaky gramps who had to steal little blue pills just to get it up, for fuck’s sake. But damn if he hadn’t claimed that thing in a hot second. I tried not to think about what he’d said he’d do with Abby in that chair. There was a reason I was cautious when entering.
Right now it wasn’t Levi sprawled in the recliner; Abby was curled up in it, the sound of her crying reaching me as I crossed the room.
What was that line from Stephen King’sIt? “Your hair is winter fire, January embers.” I thought of it every time I caught a glimpse of Abby’s auburn hair. Even now, in the dim light of the flickering TV, it shone. It wasn’t just her hair that sparked warmth, though; she wrapped anyone in her vicinity up in that shit the minute she got close. She’d made us a real family instead of a collection of dickheads who didn’t really know how to love. How to settle. We might’ve wanted it, but it was Abby who showed us the way.
She’d earned my loyalty before my brother had ever gotten his shit together and gone after her, just by loving him. Us.
My sister. Always.
Yeah, she tended to make me maudlin. It was embarrassing and I tried to hide it, but really, who gave a fuck?
“Hey.” I knelt in front of the chair, my heart contracting at the sight of her flushed face and the liquid pain in her eyes. Those eyes flared as they settled on me. “What’s going on? Where’s Levi?”
Abby’s lips twisted. “Who the hell knows anymore?”
