Death of an Assassin (Saint Roch City Book 1) (9 page)

A pair of strong hands snakes under my arms and lifts me up. Lawrence stands behind me, handling me like he might someone’s coat.

“Bring her upstairs,” Sophia spits, her eyes never leaving Nox. Lawrence drags me so that at a distance it probably looks like I’m at least partially under my own power, my feet scraping on the floor. He walks past Sophia, parting the tapestry to access the small doorway behind the owner’s table.

I say small in relation to the owner, because of course Sophia can’t make use of the door. Behind the tapestry, dozens of feet of thick, coiled muscle sits in the dark. Sophia is one of the last in an ancient bloodline, a creature that is―as far as I know―without equal. At her waist, the beautiful woman ends and the body of a snake begins, going back far longer than I’d ever like to know for sure.

Lawrence drags me past the gargantuan serpentine body, careful not to brush against his mistress’s scaled skin. He wraps one beefy arm around me and opens the door, bringing me through. Beyond the door, dusty stairs lead upward and Lawrence mounts them, dangling me over his forearm like I’m a wet towel. My mind is back online, and I can register everything happening, but my arms and legs just don’t want to respond.

My lips move in defiance of being handled like some child, but no words escape. Twitches and flopping seem to be my only communication methods and they’re happening without any say from my brain.

Lawrence spills me out into a room of light and air devoid of any smoke. My body hits something soft, welcoming. A couch. He grunts as he adjusts me to a sitting position.

I’m in Sophia’s home, a place I’ve only been in once before. The room is dimly lit, but with every blink, the warm light seems to blind me in pulses. Gray shapes move ahead of me as my eyes adjust.

“Layla? Layla? Jesus, what happened to her?”

Cassie’s voice undulates in the watery cavern of my hearing, finally solidifying at her question.

“Mister Nox is in the club,” Lawrence’s booming voice says.

“Nox?” That one is Garth, his glib tone of earlier replaced with bared disgust and just a taste of fear.

Cassie’s hand, ice-cold but soft, presses against my cheek. “Layla, can you hear me? How long did that bastard have her?”

Lawrence shrugs. “Not long enough to kill.”

Cassie, thankfully with well-manicured hands, peels one of my eyelids fully open. My hand, of its own accord, reaches up to swat away the pestering insect.

“She lives,” Garth says with a grim laugh.

“The fuck?” I mumble. Though, I’m pretty certain it sounds more like “da fud” to those present.

Cassie lets out a breathy sigh of relief as she pulls a blanket from the back of the couch and covers my slumped form. Lawrence, seeing he’s no longer needed to haul prone women about, leaves through the door we entered.

“What made you decide to socialize with a friggin’ incubus, mystery girl?” Garth asks, standing beside Cassie, a new cheap cigarette burning away between his fingers. The smoke does more for bringing me back to my senses than anything else could have.

“Incubus?” Not unlike “phoenix,” the word is familiar to me. But this one tastes far viler in my mouth as I speak it. And as it comes across in my voice, it awakens some memory of having heard it before.

Cassie sits beside me and puts an arm around my shoulders to steady me as my stomach roils, threatening to empty itself in protest of the night’s events.

“Nox and his kind drain energy from people. Sap their life force. Humans or otherwise,” Cassie says. “Garth, go get some food from the kitchen.”

My knees shake, my legs slowly returning to use, and I hobble up off the couch. “No. I can’t stay.”

Cassie stands up, and though I hear her arguments against it, and the pointless quips coming from her boyfriend, I stumble toward the general direction of the exit I know empties out behind Naja. My drug-dealing contact is in the wind, and I still need a gun to clean up this shitshow of a hit.

shift on the cold, skeletal leaves of the woods, the snow of the previous night having melted in the oppressive fog that filled the day. The fog has left, though, and the puffs of my breath drift and dissipate before they can reach the piercing floodlights of the massive estate that lies before me. My personal clouds aren’t the only ones filling the night; the suited men patrolling the Donahue estate’s lawn leave their own exhaust trail in the night sky. One of them, cigarette twinkling even in the blinding house lights, is dragging a German shepherd behind him. Every time the balding man stops to take a drag off his cigarette, the dog tries to sit down out of complete boredom.

My knee is sore, only slight less so than my ankle extended behind me. A sniper’s stance is not one I take often. With a breathy curse at the unreliability of Saturday night special dealers, I stroke the unfamiliar metal of my assault rifle, hastily purchased from a dealer on the Westside of Roch, the only side of town I’m known and welcome in. I’m no racist, but it’s probably because I stick out like a sore thumb in the East Passage. Even with my siren blood, I can’t shift my ethnicity enough to suit them, and they’re not very friendly with outsiders.

I check that the gun is loaded, safety off, but in reality I’m just praying I remember to do everything Jonah, the dealer, told me to do.

Damn his thick Irish accent.

Cigarette Puffer and his plucky sidekick lean up against the brickwork of the northern side of the mansion, and I sight him through my rifle crosshairs. The disturbing nature of my tactics tonight crawls up my body from the inside much more than the cold.

Always accidents, Layla. They can’t trace it to you.

Mommy Dearest’s instruction.

You need to be a ghost, fade away until you’re not even a memory…

Bullets are proof. Bullets are more than memories.

My heart vibrates against my ribs, the cold being blameless. I’ve been moving the sights over the windows of the Donahue home, waiting to spot the youngest―now the only―son. But thus far, the house has looked like little more than a lit-up model home. Apart from the guards walking around the outside, none of the Donahues have appeared in the windows.

After checking hospital records, I found that Thomas Donahue was checked out against medical advice early this morning. I know he’s in the house, but he hasn’t popped up yet. I feel like a kid with a BB gun, waiting for the paper target to pop up at the shooting gallery.

But instead, I watch Baldy looking away as his dog squats in the middle of the lawn.

My knee aches beneath as I take stock of what my glamorous lifestyle has decayed into. It took three separate hour-long showers to make me feel clean from my beach escapades of the night before, but whenever I start to feel comfortable again, the rotting flesh scent of the crocodile crawls along my senses like a menacing insect.

This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

And it has been for only four hours. I’m not at all comfortable, but as my finger strokes the trigger, I try to fall in love with the unfeeling beast in my arms.

The guards start to branch out indiscriminately, shining flashlights into the foliage of the woods, and I realize my position isn’t exactly discreet. The crickets around me, the last remnants of the autumn that refuses to die in the face of the winter, chirp as I try to back farther into the darkness, dodging crisscrossing beams from inept bodyguards.

I take up my pointless game of searching the Donahue windows for signs of Thomas.

Get it out of your head. Put him down. Clean up your mess.

Even as I recite the words to myself, I can’t help but add the menacing tone of my mother to them. When we lived closer to the Westside of town, she trained me as any predator might. By bringing back live prey.

Bootsie. I have no clue why I knew the cat’s name. It belonged to the little girl who lived in the penthouse apartment of our building. I don’t know how Mom caught it, and thinking back, I’m not entirely sure why.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat…

She was leaning over the bathtub as she said it, the cat howling and screeching in pain as she systematically taught me which joints you had to break to immobilize prey.

Hand me my knife, sweetie?

The very blade strapped to my ankle on this cold winter night.

She showed me the areas that would ensure an eventual death. Slow, torturous, but inevitable. These were less desirable. I had trouble hearing her over the piercing cries of the animal, our white bathtub anything but now.

And then she passed the slippery knife to me. With her hands in red liquid gloves, she motioned to my options to finish the lesson. Like a good little girl, I did.

I had to watch, she said. Watch to make sure the light was gone. That what was left was nothing but proof of my skilled work. I was never told to watch the little girl, whose name I didn’t know, putting up fliers on lampposts and riding her bike up and down the alleys of our borough, looking for her best friend. I always waited until I knew Mom was asleep to cry about what I’d done.

It wasn’t until years later, when she was bringing home vagrants, hookers, and a few random men, that I was able to look back and wonder why I cried. Of course, by then, she didn’t have to hold the animals down while I finished them off.

My neck creaks a bit as I shift, pointing the rifle about as I scan windows. I let out a sigh of relief as I note that the hired guns have moved off the lawn and around the other side of the house.

Like dawn breaking on the horizon, the large picture window before me lights up, and despite the floodlights pouring over the grass, I see figures moving about inside.

A large one, possibly Donahue senior. Unimportant.

Beside him, several smaller shapes flicker. I blink, eyes watering from the blinding lights, and lean into the rifle’s scope, praying I remember how exactly to squeeze the trigger. The largest of the shadows steps toward the window and peers out on his dominion. It doesn’t matter who he is, because he’s not Thomas.

To my left, maybe a hair farther than a hundred feet, Baldy steps forward with his furry companion, perfectly blocking the nearest floodlight and giving me clear sight.

The older Donahue stands before his family, glass of liquor clutched in his hand and wearing a suit that cost more than I was paid to kill his sons. Beside him, a woman, young enough to be his daughter, but probably his wife.

Past him, seated in an armchair that looks much more comfortable than the near frozen ground I’m sprawled on, is Thomas.

Line him up in the sights. Adjust for distance. There’s not a bit of wind.

Wait for it. Listen to your heart and wait for it.
Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump…

Click.

The hammer of a pistol pulls back. And it’s not mine.

“Ya lucky the Old Man wants you alive. ‘Cause I’ve plastered many a bitch out here,” a thickly accented voice says above me. I weigh my options, and as my hand drifts to my ankle, the world erupts in stars and then darkness.