Page 106 of Reaper & Ruin
I grinned as a plan formed in my mind. Emilio didn’t know it yet, but he’d just become my ticket to Sergei Romanov. A man who’d been in hiding for over a decade.
A man who I could finally find.
The De Luca family didn’t mean anything to me—not really. I didn’t care about their drama, their power struggles, or their petty feuds. But if they were tangled up with the Romanovs, then I cared enough to investigate.
I’d stick around the bland city named Cherry Hill. I’d follow pretty little Emilio De Luca, dig into whatever mess he was caught in, and let him lead me straight to Sergei. And when I found Sergei, I’d finish what I should have started years ago.
I slipped back into the shadows as Emilio turned and headed back toward the house. The grin stayed on my face as I moved through the garden, silent and unseen like every ghost was.
I’d been free for a few days now, unsure of what to do. But now I had a purpose. A target… and it felt fucking brilliant.
Danika Smith wasn’t really dead. She was just a ghost. And the best part of being a ghost? You got to haunt your enemies and drive them insane.
And sometimes, you could do the same to your ungrateful little brother.
Epilogue, Existing
I’d been stuck in a motel for months. It wasn’t much, and sure it was better than the hole I’d crawled out of. Four walls, a bathroom that worked, a kitchenette to feed myself. I had windows I could open for some fresh air, and a bed to sleep in when the insomnia fucked off for long enough I could shut my eyes.
It was still a motel, though. Still not the same as the penthouse apartment I used to live in. Not the same as the vast estate I grew up on until I left home at sixteen.
When I got out of that dungeon alive, I thought maybe I’d start over. Find a real place. Try to be someone who didn’t live at the expense of others suffering.
That never happened.
I had no skills other than death. Pain. Taking things that did not belong to me. I had nowhere to go but back to the cesspit of a life I crawled out of.
The motel worked for someone like that. They had cash up front, wanted no names, asked no questions. The woman at the desk had stopped looking at me after the first week. Sure, the curtains didn’t close right, and the walls had water stains that looked older than the building. The shower ran brown for the first few seconds every morning, and the tap never ran cold enough. And the bed sagged in the middle, and the sheets never quite felt clean, even when they were. But none of it mattered. It gave me four walls and a door that locked from the inside. That was enough for someone like me.
For one of the worst people alive.
Most nights, I sat by the window. Same chair. Same view of the street outside. There was a takeaway shop across the road that stayed open late, but I hadn’t eaten there once. The man who ran it always waved through the glass, like he thought I was someone else. There was a broken streetlight two buildings down that blinked on and off through the curtain gap. It left a strip of light across the floor that I stopped noticing after the first week.
I still worked. The jobs were smaller now. People called, I went where they pointed. It wasn’t about the money, though I needed it. It was something to do between drinking and sleeping. The only rhythm I had left in a life where I had felt out of sync for months on end.
Sometimes I thought about leaving. I’d sit there with my bag packed and keys in hand, then end up right back in the chair an hour later. There wasn’t anywhere waiting for me. Nobody was going to ask where I’d gone.
Nobody was going to give a damn about me.
The phone buzzed on the table. I ignored it at first. But as I kept sipping my drink, it kept lighting up, so I reached for it with a huff, seeing a job offer sent my way.
The client offered five million. Half upfront. Half on completion. And to my surprise, it wasn’t even a murder. It was a kidnapping—a simple thing I could have done with my eyes shut tight.
The woman was twenty seven, and expected to have her bachelorette party in two weeks time. A lavish affair at a posh hotel in the middle of nowhere.
I already had a plan forming in my mind, knew exactly how I’d grab her and make it silent.
A photo came through a moment later.
She was on a beach somewhere, crouched in the sand with a dog leaning against her leg. A German shepherd. Pink hair cut to her chin, a brilliant tan, and a smile bright enough to blind.
I looked at it longer than I should have. There was a faint pull of something familiar that I couldn’t trace. Something about her face that I was too drunk and tired to work out. But the recognition passed as quickly as it came. The drink made everything slippery lately.
I couldn’t remember my own name most days.
I reached for the ashtray. The cigarette had burned itself out beside the bottle. I tapped another one free and lit it. The smoke moved toward the ceiling, then disappeared, as I waited for more information to come through. Most of it was nonsense I didn’t need to know yet. Some of it useful. Like her name.
I typed one word back.Accepted.
