Page 121 of Bad Men

I took a deep breath. The relief uncoiling the tension in my jaw. I felt my shoulders relax as I slid my arms around her.

“I can do that.”

Her smile made every ache and pain of the day dissolve to nothing. It trickled through me like a warm balm, healing years of emptiness and neglect. I would have given her my soul for a hit of that smile every day.

“Why don’t you get dressed?” Davien skimmed his fingers lightly over her naked thigh. “We’ll go out for breakfast.”

With a kiss for each of us, Mia slipped off my lap and padded in the direction of Davien’s bedroom without a backwards glance.

“Okay, now tell me all the things you didn’t say,” he muttered once she was out of eat shot.

My hesitation didn’t stem from not trusting Davien. It blossomed from fear that Alejandro might see him as a loose end, a threat. I couldn’t risk putting my best friend in danger. But I needed to tell someone.

“Alejandro killed Eduardo.”

Davien’s eyes widened. “You saw—?”

I shook my head. “Not exactly.”

In as few words as I could manage, I rehashed the night’s events. I left nothing out, not even my own doubts and fears. I laid it all out in quick, hushed whispers and furtive glances in the direction of the bedrooms.

“I’m not worried about him,” Davien muttered once I finished. “If he doesn’t like me being here, he can tell it to my face.”

I wanted to hit him for his arrogance, but we were running out of time before Mia returned. “Don’t underestimate him, Dav. The guy isn’t right. He’s dangerous and, if I’m right, works for someone a lot higher on the food chain than us.”

To my annoyance, he shrugged. “Look, we have a plan, right? As long as they keep getting their cut, who gives a shit? The whole reason we wanted Eduardo gone was to help the people of this city. Now we can. That’s the only important thing.”

He made it sound so simple, yet the assassin in me, the over compulsive planner writhed in agony at the prospect of facing something so unknown unguarded. There were too many variables, too many things that could go wrong, so many lives that I was responsible for if things went south.

“Hey,” Davien slapped my knee, “we got this, okay? It’s going to be fine.”

Chapter Twenty-Two — Alejandro

I never understood people who slept in late. The best part of any day was that sliver of time just before dawn when the very air seemed to shimmer. It’s always as if a veil were being lifted, parting reality from the surrealness of night.

I have always been a night person. Something about the absence of people and sounds, that void of shadows I can slip into and vanish. Nights were for shady people and killers, people with low morals and bad intentions. My kind of people.

The thought brought a humorless quirk to the corner of my lip as I wandered the glimmering sidewalks right at the very cusp of dawn. I couldn’t see it. The gleaming spears of glass and steel would continue to shield the city from the rising light, but I felt it, felt the pull moving through me, a familiar prickling more accurate than any clock.

Nevertheless, I glanced at the numbers on my watch, calculating my time before I would be meeting with my contact.

The car, an undescriptive Hyundai with a rusted bumper and dented trunk was exactly where the text had promised it would be — at the corner of First and Sutton. It was the only one parked beneath the shadows of a leaning oak someone needed to trim back. The tinted glass obscured the occupants. When I pried the door open and slid into the back, the overhead lights remained off.

The worn leather felt warm beneath me, but it was the mixture of stale Cheetos and gym socks that had me almost shifting uncomfortably. The man at the other end waited until I was properly seated and still before adjusting the cap on his balding head and lifting his face into the shadows.

“Has the matter been settled?”

The driver, a burly man in his late forties who had never said a word in the six years I’d seen him, turned his head to peer at his side mirror. I’d been watching the back through the rearview mirror and knew he’d seen a passing car along the street over.

“It has,” I told the man on my left.

Hamlet wasn’t much of a talker. It was the only thing I liked about him. He was direct with zero patience for complications. I appreciated those qualities in a person.

“Can we trust him?”

I hadn’t been sure in the beginning. I’d spent years watching for Eduardo’s replacement, years of eliminating obstacles and building an empire for a man who couldn’t find his own way out of a shoebox. Yet, despite my best efforts, he had run the sectors into the ground. He’d ruined the people and destroyed lives all to fill his own pocket. I may have been a killer, but even I followed a code of honor and watching innocent people suffer wasn’t part of my idea of a good time. Eliminating him had been a pleasure. I’d spent days thinking of different methods, some of them painful and gruesome, but it had to be quick and painless. It had to be clean. Overdose was usually overlooked and written off quickly. I made sure no one looked too closely, not that anyone would. No one had liked the man. But Nero…

Nero was a different kind of beast. He was clean and methodical. I admired his work, his unique talent that mirrored my own. But it was his heart that baffled me. He had one. It was evident in the way he cared for Davien and Mia, but also the people around him. I had never seen one of my kind capable of … love. The very idea was fascinating. What more, the notion that we could love and be loved … what a concept. I had to see it for myself.

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