Death of an Assassin (Saint Roch City Book 1) (26 page)

I close my eyes and wince as I sit back on the chair, not feeling an ounce of guilt for ruining his furniture. My arm screams in pain at the slightest of movements, and I’m trying to figure out who I can go to now for a touch of medical care. Tim tosses a towel at me. I move to grab it and cry out in agony, the towel draping over my face.

“The guy keeps insisting he wasn’t the one who did it. He wasn’t the guy who robbed the bank, shot the night guard, and drained him of his blood. I mean, who does that, right? And then
wham
.” He grabs my hand and before I can react, pulls it forcefully out and drops it. I throw myself from the chair and scream, cursing at him, and choking vomit onto his floor.

He sighs and laughs. “Only way to do it. Sorry about that. Sorry I dislocated it in the first place, too, but I figured it was better than being eaten, right?”

Dropping to the floor, I catch my breath in gasps and heaves. I gather myself, and though my body is still in the throes of pain, it’s considerably better than it was. Cerb saunters over and nudges my face with her snout, at great personal cost to her sense of smell. I sit down, and when I reach up to pet the animal, she rethinks her decision and moves away.

“And the guy who killed the guard? I take it you finished him off?” I ask, a vain attempt to reassert my ability to handle this hellish situation.

Tim grins. “Nope. Gremlins got him. Nasty park to spend time in at night.”

A light plastic bottle hits my chest, and I glance up at Tim.

“Pain meds. And there’s a shower in the back. It’s a touch narrow, and the water’s not terribly warm, but it’ll help you clean up.”

Once I can finally pick myself up off the floor, I stumble back to where he’s pointed and crawl into the shower, beaten, bloody, burned, and caked in the shit of Saint Roch. All of this is done slowly and carefully so as not to jar my body anymore than it already is. And all of it is wasted as each drop of water makes me feel like a punching bag leaking its stuffing all over the floor. I don’t bother to look for soap. I just stand and let the water that smells strongly of chlorine wash over me, rinsing away the more glaring filth and blood on my body. And there’s plenty of both.

I dry myself off with a nearby towel and realize my clothes are destroyed. In my shower-loving stupor, I didn’t hear Tim come in, but the evidence of his presence is sitting on the small sink. Black tank, black pants, black boots. All strangely fitting me very well, but I’m too grateful to question it.

Popping open the door of the small bathroom, I find the cabin of the train car, now lit by the built-in electric lights lining the side. It takes me a moment to come to terms with the fact that it’s not a mobile train and I can in fact walk without steadying myself, but I do anyway.

Tim is stretched out on one of the couches bolted to the train’s side, digging food out of a can, and my stomach growls at the prospect. He hears it and grins, pointing to a hot plate on the other side.

“Made a can for you.”

“Thanks for the clothes,” I say as I walk over and pick up the can using a nearby towel to keep from burning my hand. One of the few parts of my body not completely defeated by the events of the past week. I sit on the other side of the car and eat quickly while Tim watches me.

“So you ran afoul of the Donahues? I take it you’ve been involved with their woes this week?”

I refuse to meet his eyes. “More or less.”

He nods, scraping his fork on the bottom of his own can. “Now, what I’m having trouble understanding is why you came to me. I mean, I’m grateful for a chance to waste some Inhumans and their toadies.”

“And about a dozen innocent people in the hallway?” I meet his eyes now. “And whoever was in the club before that?”

He laughs. “What do you think I am?
Your
kind? There was no one in those hallways when I blew it. Or the club.” He points to a pile of devices on the folding table in the corner. “Those are what I used to take Han’s little Club of Horrors down. At first, all they do is emit the foulest-smelling odor that gets most people viciously nauseated. Triggered that the moment I saw Han was big and leathery.”

“So it was empty? The whole building?” I’m only a little shocked at my own care for the people in the club. Something the Layla I was a week ago would not have given a second thought to.

He nods. “I always make sure the innocent don’t get hurt when I decide to blow one of your kind back to Hell.”

He sets his can aside, and it occurs to me.

Where’s the damned dog?

I sit forward and he holds his hand out.

“I wouldn’t. That couch is rigged to be triggered by a specific weight. You plus the can.” He points at the beans I’m clutching in my toweled hand. “You move too much, lose or gain any weight from that couch, and we both get turned into pretty little corpses for the Saint Roch Fire Department to study.”

Now I get to grip the can of beans like a freaking lifeline. “Thought we were partners?”

He scoffs. “We were. Now we’re not. You lied to me.” He stands up and moves around the car, fetching his crossbow and another can from a nearby shelf. “You lie to me again, and I’ll toss this can of the finest Boston baked beans for you to catch.”

“And you’ll kill us both?”

He shrugs. “I’ve had a good run. And you being a siren, I think it’d be damned poetic to take you down with me.” A joke I don’t get.

He sits down across from me and loads the crossbow. “I take it there was a ransom involved? When you snatched Thomas
Donahue
? Failed to mention that was the Thomas you were trying to fetch.”

“Ransom?”

He stops loading the crossbow. “Don’t test me, bitch.”

I take a deep, but careful breath. “I don’t know anything about a ransom. I can tell you everything you want to know, just please turn this… thing off?”

A dark laugh escapes him. “Hell no. Your only option right now is to tell me everything with that bomb still set to blow you to little pretty bits. Because either way, you’re not leaving this car alive. But if you talk, that extends your life. And who knows, maybe even ups your chance of getting the drop on me.”

I close my eyes. It seems the appropriate thing to do when I’m spilling my guts. The thugs at the Donahue Estate could do with learning Tim’s methods.

“I was hired to kill Andrew Donahue and Thomas Donahue. Andrew was easy, scumbags always are. Thomas, not so much.” I peek out to see if he’s upset by my admission of killing Andrew.

“Old Drew had himself a rap sheet,” Tim comments, his crossbow pointed at my chest. “I almost capped him myself once. Go on.”

I sigh, but I’m terrified of the air I’m losing, worried that it will be just enough to kill me now. My eyes close again.

“When I couldn’t kill Thomas, they sent someone else to do it.”

“
They
?”

I resist the urge to shrug. “A good assassin doesn’t ever know who ‘they’ are…”

“Good to know.”

“I stopped them.”

“Because it was your contract,” Tim says―practically spits.

“No! I… I don’t know why. Thomas is… He’s not like his brother. And then they came after me, and Thomas tried to give himself up so they’d let me go. But they took him and tried to kill me, anyway. It didn’t take.”

Skipping over my stay with the Westies, I open my eyes to watch Tim.

“In my line of work, I’ve become good at spotting liars. Interrogation is my bread and butter,” he says. “Gets me to my next target.”

The silence of the car is such that I can’t even hear the two of us breathing. Statues on a train.

“You’re full of shit. You killed his brother, his parents, and then tried to ransom him, didn’t you?” He lifts his crossbow and aims.

“Then why the hell would I kiss the dumb bastard?” I ask―screech―maybe even cry.

Either I’m so hopeful that I’m delirious, or his aim falters. His finger rests on the trigger and he watches me.

“Well, I know you did. So why?”

Lie, lie, lie.

“Because I thought it would kill him.”

Or be suicidally honest. Well done.

His arm stops moving low. “Yep. You’re gunna die.” Finger to the trigger.

“I don’t know! My mother told me if I ever kissed someone, they’d die! I was trapped… I didn’t… please! He’s still out there. Someone has him.” I relax when I find myself lifting from the couch too much. I freeze, terrified to sit back or move forward.

Tim watches me and smirks. “When a siren kisses someone, two things happen. And only two things. First, you’ve immunized your boy from your wiles. Just yours, though. He can resist you all he wants. And second, it lets you feel for him. Maybe a little more than you even should. I don’t really know what it feels like, but I know you do. So if you’re telling the truth, your mother lied to you.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that,” I say, my legs beginning to ache at holding such an awkward position of mid-rise, mid-fall. “She also tried to kill me when I was a kid, so it wouldn’t be the first time she tried to destroy my life.”

This has Tim blinking as he lowers his crossbow.

“Huh.” He shakes his head and groans. “It’s a shame, Layla. I was just getting to like you.”

He sets the crossbow down and I breathe a sigh of relief.

Then he lifts up the can of beans and throws it to me. Shit.

e won’t stop laughing. “You really should’ve seen the look on your face. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hate your scum-sucking kind with every fiber of my being, but this might be the first time I’ve ever truly enjoyed letting one of you live.”

I’ve only just stopped my knees from dissolving to jelly, and Tim cracks open a beer bottle before passing it to me. “Why in the hell would I blow up a perfectly good train car when I could put a bolt through your chest?” He laughs at his own sick humor as he pops open his own drink and takes a swig.

“You are a sick, sick man.”

“I’m a vigilante; it comes with the territory.”

I nod, taking a cautious sip of my drink, desperate to get away from the man who’s held my life in his hand far more times than I’m comfortable with over the course of a night. He’s moving about the car, and that in itself makes me nervous. Eventually, he comes back to the small folding table, now gratefully free of his explosives, and sets a laptop down.

“There’s something you need to see.” He boots it up and loads up a local news site.

A reporter, much too peppy to be anything but human, is standing by a structure I know all too well. The gates of the Donahue estate.

“This news report was from a few days ago, but I’m assuming you haven’t had the pleasure.” Tim sits down on the far side of the table and flicks his butterfly knife silently while I watch the video.

“Thanks, Paul. I’m at the Donahue home where only hours ago shots rang out as this family, a paramount of morality and charity in our great city, was torn apart.”

The camera pans the outside of the great house, as though the building itself will tell the story of all of the death it contained.

“An unknown number of assailants armed with automatic firearms and what one source is calling a ‘biological weapon’ attacked this family, only twenty-four hours after their oldest son, Andrew, tragically drowned in the Swift River at his own engagement party.”