Page 53 of Assassin's Game
Damn. I couldn’t imagine facing that kind of loss, much less now, when an enemy had set their sights on your family.
“I like them, Mikaela,” she said again. “But…”
“But what?”
Another long silence. Then, “But I think I found something you should know about.”
I squeezed the bridge of my nose, wishing I’d had that hot shower already. Maybe then my head wouldn’t feel like it was in a damn vise. “Tell me.”
“Okay.” More shifting, then I heard a creek. Maris had her laptop with her; picking it up, maybe? “So, a couple of hours ago, Abby started…feeling bad…so Leah showed me to a room.”
Where she’d have privacy. I got it.
“By then the little bug I’d set found the frequencies the jammer was letting through.”
Of course. I was an idiot. I’d known our phones were blocked while at the mansion, but it had been Maris’s cell number on my phone, not another line. If the Agozis even had one of those available to her.
“Good work, Maris.”
“Yeah.” Somehow she didn’t sound enthused. “So I went back over what we’d found about the brothers, and nothing new was popping up—dead end. So I took a different tack and began digging into Abby’s background.”
I could hear a tinge of guilt in her voice, because Maris knew we needed all the intel we could get. It couldn’t have been easy for her, especially with the things Abby was facing, but she’d done it anyway. For her team, her family. “What did you find?”
“We know she was already with Levi when he re-emerged last year to claim his inheritance. About the same time, her house was firebombed.”
Her car had been bombed as well; I remembered reading that. The culprit had never been found. “That’s about the time of that problem at Hacr, right? The lawyer was implicated both in the deaths at the office and the attacks against Abby.” At least that was the official story.
“Right. But a little over a year before, Abby was in an altercation with her father, Derrick Roslyn. The man was supposedly abusive. At first he filed a missing person’s report on his daughter. Her fiancé at the time, from a prominent political family in Atlanta, even held a press conference with her father begging for her return.” The tapping of keys came through the phone, then, “There’s some confusion after that, differing stories, but about a week later Abby was found in Roslyn’s mansion with her dead father. She claimed she’d been forced to kill him because he tried to kill her.”
Talk about a messed-up family. “Sounds convenient, but okay.” We’d probably never uncover the truth of that situation without Abby’s cooperation, not if Abby and her father had been the only ones in the room.
Assuming they had been…
“You’ve met her, Maris,” I said. “Do you think she’s capable of killing her own father?”
“If the man killed her biological mother and buried her in concrete like the papers claimed? I think anyone would be capable of that.”
I considered the scenario a minute. “But you think Levi was with her, don’t you?”
“Alone or with his brothers, yes.”
“Why?” Maris would have a reason.
“I started looking for events occurring around the same time in this area, looking for connections. Earlier that week, in an abandoned warehouse downtown, shots and an explosion were heard. When authorities arrived, they discovered the bodies of a well-known merc team from DC. All dead. The place was bare of any evidence, but a witness later reported seeing a couple running down a nearby alley not long after the explosion. He only saw them from the back, in the dark, but the woman was petite with dark hair, and the man was, and I quote, ‘a dark-haired, big mofo I wouldn’t want to mess with.’”
That sounded like Levi, all right.
I did believe Levi could take out a merc team, but none of this was really any cause for concern. “We know Levi’s deadly. What about it?”
“No one has ever officially been identified, but unofficially, sources I was able to dig into tied the incident at the warehouse to the Assassin.”
A chill skittered down my spine. Like a target moving right into my sights, the pieces of the puzzle that was Levi Agozi fell into clear shape for the first time since I’d heard his name. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
She wasn’t, I knew that, but… Holy shit.
The Assassin was a killer for hire, one with a long reputation for being both lethal and unstoppable. In the underground, he was known as the best, not just in the South, where many thought he might focus his hits, but in the entire US. The few hits that had been connected to him had seemed impossible, but the man—if that’s who he was—had been a ghost for over a decade. Better than any assassin I’d ever heard of. Maybe as good as my team.
Even though we focused on working overseas, we’d heard of him. There were plenty of killers out there. The Assassin was special.
