Death of an Assassin (Saint Roch City Book 1) (6 page)

Why didn’t you just kill them both? You had him. You had him…

“My jacket? Where is it?”

I grab my own shoulders like it should be there, but I spot it behind the brothers, dangling on a wooden slat. I point.

Thomas grabs my hand and pulls me down. “Try to keep pressure on… on something.” He dashes away to his jacket and jerks a cell phone out of the pocket.

I’m leaning over Andrew, my hands pressed tightly on his chest, trying―for some reason―to stop one of his wounds from bleeding so much. Beneath me, his mouth moves and his voice falls silent as he tries to accuse me of doing this to him.

By the fence, Thomas frantically yells into his phone and he hangs up, coming back to me and his amputee brother.

“The ambulance is on its way, Andrew, just hold on.”

Ambulance? Damn. Ambulance means cops. Cops mean questions…

Even though the police force of Saint Roch City is as clean as the sheets in a rent-by-the-hour motel, there is the off chance I won’t be able to seduce my way out of this.

Splish.

Splosh.

Andrew groans beneath us as Thomas falls silent beside me.

Splash.

The placid surface of the cove is broken, turbulent waves moving of their own accord. The water’s edge is forty feet before us, and though we’ve dragged Andrew’s body far enough away from being a tasty morsel ripe for the picking, I don’t know that it will matter.

I stare at the water, and when I clench my hand again on Andrew’s body, I feel Thomas’s hand slide over mine.

“What the hell is that?” Thomas asks.

Beneath the polo shirt, my heart is crashing against my ribs, trying to escape while the rest of me sits crouched over my mark. The one who is supposed to be dead. The one who is supposed to have satiated my silent partner.

I swallow hard, and the soft sound of snow packing the earth is dwarfed by a low grunt and burst of water, like a whale clearing its throat.

“That… would be Bruce,” I say in a soft breath, more to myself than Thomas.

I’ve never been near a bomb going off, but I have to assume this is similar. With the terrifying speed of a torpedo, Bruce leaps from the water. Where once was a snow-speckled beach, now sits a thirty foot crocodile, and he’s eyeing the three of us with such hatred that my body begins to burn on the cold night.

Don’t ask me how a crocodile can survive in cold waters. I have no fucking clue. All I do know is that the other inhabitants of the waters off Saint Roch keep Bruce around as a pet. And they must know something about crocodile care that the rest of us aren’t privy to.

A guttural growl emanates from Bruce as he lumbers, watching us.

“The… hell?” Thomas says next to me.

“Don’t run,” I whisper. I don’t know if that really will pose a danger, but I know it won’t help. And my knife will be little more than an inconvenience during Bruce’s next bowel movement. I already know we’re screwed. Andrew mutters beneath us, and Thomas slips a hand over his mouth.

In the distance, the wail of ambulance sirens is getting louder, and Bruce tilts his head at the noise. He lifts off the ground and shakes his great body, the snowflakes falling on his back seeming to cause him discomfort as his hot breath―fetid even at this distance―makes clouds of smog in the air around him.

Behind us is the picket fence that we’ll never get the meat sack that was once Andrew Donahue over. I glance at Thomas and wonder if he’d be willing to leave his brother behind.

What do you care? Stab him and let Bruce finish the job.

I shake my head at the thought. This entire night went from stunning to complete clusterfuck in no time. When I meet Thomas’s eyes, I can see he’s doing the math, too. He bites his lip and looks down at his brother as Bruce growls again, no longer distracted by the growing sirens.

He lumbers like the killer in any teen slasher movie. No matter how fast you run, and no matter how skimpy your clothing, he’ll catch you. You’ll be nothing more than a notch on his dinner table. Thomas grabs Andrew’s arm.

“Help me,” he says quietly.

My eyes can’t decide if they should focus on the giant crocodile advancing on us, or my quarry, who should be traveling through the first problem’s digestive system right now.

“Layla, please…”

I grab on to Andrew’s free arm, and together Thomas and I drag him toward the picket fence. Behind us, Bruce grunts and I hear him kicking up sand. We reach the fence, and Thomas gives it a stiff kick, hoping that it might tumble at his non-Herculean strength. The boards stop just shy of laughing at his attempts when we see the bright red lights of the ambulance tearing up the driveway of the country club.

“Shit!” Thomas kicks the fence again. Again. He tries to lift his brother up and over, but the dead weight―not dead enough for me―is not giving.

Bruce roars behind us, two tons of pissed off crocodile moving even closer, and I can feel the warm, putrid breath of the beast as I look back to see his open jaws. See the flakes of snow melting just before they can land in his open mouth. He’s not aiming at Thomas. Not even aiming at the crippled meal he was robbed of. No.

He’s only feet away and with one twist of his head, his jaws move to snap down on
me
. He hasn’t even bitten down and my mind already concocts the feel of his teeth digging into my leg. The sensation of being pulled to the water. Drowned. Eaten.

My arms tremble and knees turn to little more than jelly as I drop Andrew’s body, Thomas straining to hold up his dying brother as the crocodile rumbles forward.

The gaping mouth opens, and I’m much too close to seeing the throat of a crocodile when my arm jerks back and I’m pulled against the fence. My shoulder slams against the wooden slats that tear at my skin as I topple over, and my head hits the frozen ground behind it.

My eyes are filled with stars, and I hear an alarm clock screeching, plaintive and piercing all at the same time. As I slowly regain my senses, I realize it’s not an alarm. Not a siren. It’s Andrew Donahue, screaming as Bruce takes better hold of his leg with a bite that was meant for me. Andrew vomits blood over himself, and in the moonlight, Bruce jerks, whipping the poor kid down the beach with the glee of a child and his toy. The night cracks with the sound of splintering bones and purrs with the grumble of a satisfied reptile.

Bruce looks like an overgrown―vastly so―house cat, playing with a caught mouse. Andrew can do little more than squeal with all of the grace of a stuck pig as the crocodile gathers him up again in its massive jaws and lumbers to the water’s edge, so easily bored with his own game. Before slipping back beneath the frigid surf, there’s a soft
whumpf
of his jaws closing a final time. Andrew is no longer screaming.

My heart drops from my throat a hairsbreadth at a time. Only a few seconds have passed since my trip, and I crane my neck. My entire body is sore and when I lift myself up, the stars come back to my eyes, the dizziness overtaking me. Giving my blurry eyes a moment to adjust, I see Thomas crumpled beside me, his hand extended to my shoulder.

He pulled you over the fence.

His eyes are closed, and I see the blood seeping down his forehead, his coordination enough to sacrifice his own brother to save a stranger, but not enough to avoid the only rock on the beach―diving headfirst into it, in fact.

From the ballroom, the doors open and people surge out. The flashlights come up—Saint Roch police issue. The pulsing lights of red and blue in the driveway of the Manchester only make my stars and blurriness that much greater.

I wrap a hand around my knife and focus on the prone form of Thomas Donahue at my feet. The last kill I need under my belt to earn a cool eight hundred grand.

It’s not until ten minutes later, when I’m loping down the beach―keeping fences and dunes between myself and the shore―that I realize I shouldn’t have checked Thomas’s pulse to make sure he was alive before I fled. I should’ve slit his throat. I should’ve slammed his head back against the rock as many times as it took. I should’ve made sure to finish the damn job.

Instead, I could only wonder why some kid would save a girl he just met instead of his own flesh and blood.

don’t sleep that night, the evening flashing over my eyes brighter than the strobes of the ambulance waiting to whisk my quarry to the hospital. My quarry who I helped to save. Or at least prolong the life of. Someone willing to pay a million dollars to kill a kid is probably willing to try again.

My body throbs at every inhalation. Not at the pain of the evening, but the facts. What I did and more importantly, what I didn’t do.

By the time the sun is peeking over the tenement buildings of the distant East Passage, filled to the brim with every flavor of Asian you can imagine, I’m on my sixty-seventh rollover in the sheets. The soft, cool fabric is anything but, swimming in a brine of my sweat and aggravation. At this point, I’m better off burning them than trying to wash it out.

I know I should be scared. Terrified, really. I skipped out on a contract. In every way possible, I failed. My reputation is shot. But more than that, whoever put the million-dollar price tag on the Donahue boys will be wanting an explanation.

And retribution.

Clutching my pillow in a clawed fist, I dwell over the tar pit I’m in. I haven’t spent a dime of the money, so that’s easy enough to patch up. There’s enough cash squared away to keep myself afloat until someone gets desperate enough to use an assassin that occasionally screws up. In my cruelest of thoughts, I realize the reason for having a broker. I’m safe in my crappy apartment, unknown to the rest of the world. Well, apart from my neighbor who doesn’t mind joining me in my midnight bathrobe strolls.

The only person who can possibly take any fall on this is Malcolm, and fond though I’ve grown of my handler, this is not a business of sentimentality. My nails dig into the fabric of my down pillow, threads of the sweat-soaked satin tearing beneath my nails. My semi-manicured-looking nails. Because I didn’t bother changing at all after I left the Manchester.

Should’ve killed him…

“Why the hell did you freeze up?” I ask the empty room. It’s what my mother would have asked. Would have scolded over.

You cannot have a conscience in this world, Layla. It is eat or be eaten. Morality is the thing that separates you from them. The humans. Your prey.

I have to assume not many kids get told stories that end with that lesson at bedtime. It wasn’t until my mother was gone that I realized not every kid was given a new blade on their birthday or recited Machiavellian tenets for their evening prayers.

So why didn’t I sink my blade into Thomas and push both of the brothers into the surf? Bruce would probably have loved to get both of them. Even then, it would still be seen as an accident. Brother trying to save brother from drowning. It would be heroic. Honorable even.

Hell, they might get a parade.

A beam of sunlight cuts through the glass of my double-door balcony exit, setting small flecks of dust glowing in its path. I blink and a sigh escapes me.

Stop. You can’t think about him like that. He’s your meal ticket. He’s just
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