Page 5 of Assassin's Game
I look forward to working with you.
X
Fucking A. “Guys?”
Raucous laughter and good-natured scuffling registered in my shock-numbed ears. I glanced up, my heart in my throat. “Guys!”
Three pairs of male eyes jerked to meet mine. Maris peeked from around Monty to look at me.
I swallowed hard.
“I think we have a problem.”
OceanofPDF.com
Chapter Three
Nix —
The room erupted as the last word of the e-mail left my lips. Maris paused, quarter-pounder halfway to her mouth, with a confused, “What the hell?” Monty hit the table hard, curses tripping off his lips that were almost as colorful as Titus’s inventive contributions to the chaos. Rhys was the only one who remained quiet, his lips going tight as his eyes narrowed on mine.
This was bad. Very bad.
“Who sent it?” Monty finally asked.
I glanced from him to my phone and back again. “[email protected].”
Titus snorted. “Figures. Fuckin’ Yahoo users.”
I barely held back a smile despite the circumstances. As if the server they used mattered. “The account will be gone by now anyway.”
Monty had already headed for the computer he and Maris had set up on the flimsy hotel room desk. “We’ll check just to be sure.”
Maris raised concerned green eyes, identical to my own. “They want you to take a contract in order to keep your identities safe?”
“Not ‘your,’ sweetheart,” Titus assured her, reaching over to snatch a handful of fries from her plate—as if he didn’t have two larges already on his. I shook my head. The man had an iron stomach; nothing upset him enough for him to quit eating, even a firefight. “‘You’ are not the ones who did anything wrong.”
Except we had. Maris and I had taken the men in when the military had threatened to lock them in a bottomless pit somewhere and throw away the key. We’d grown up with them. No way had they done what they’d been accused of, what they’d been court-martialed for.
What they could still be punished for if they came to the attention of the US Army or the SOC now, despite the intervening five years.
“They’re accessories, Titus,” Rhys pointed out, echoing my thoughts like he so often did. “The military might not prosecute directly, but civilians would.”
“Always pointing out reality.” Titus shot his teammate double middle fingers. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
“Rhys is right,” I said, as much as I didn’t want to. Reality was all we had to work with. Ignoring it would just get our asses in a sling, as my father used to say.
“No sign of the account or any record of its deletion,” Monty confirmed, returning to the table.
“That’s not hard,” Maris said, grabbing a napkin for herself before beginning to pass the rest out. “Even I can erase an e-mail account without a trace.”
Despite being younger, Maris had been raised exactly like me, with a military father who had no clue what to do with two daughters on his own except drag them along as he trained himself and his men. But she’d always had a softer heart. She was the caretaker. But she’d also been teaching herself some basic hacker skills under Monty’s tutelage, wanting to be useful to the group for more than making meals and washing clothes. She had no clue that her most important role was as my anchor in the fucked-up world we’d landed in after our father’s murder.
“You can do much more than that,” Monty said, his dark tone warning her not to piss him off by minimizing her skills. It was an ongoing thing between them. He accepted a napkin as Maris passed it to him, but held on to it long enough for her to meet his eyes. My heart ached every time Montgomery Wolfe went out of his way to boost Maris’s confidence. Lord knows I’d had very little success through the years, and being thrown into a situation where physical strength and prowess were valued higher than emotional skills had taken a toll on her the past few years.
Rhys cleared his throat, breaking the moment. Maris glanced his way, her gaze staying just low enough not to meet his eyes, but I was certain she could see the rise of his eyebrow in her periphery. I knew because she flushed before handing the giant redhead a napkin too. He was turning away to find a place to sit when my steel-toed boot landed against his shin.
Rhys swallowed an angry curse when he met my eyes.
