She lifts her hand and curls her fingers, rings blinding in the light.
“Come here, Ekon.”
From behind her, her right-hand man steps forward, his long white locs covering his chest and those unblinking blue eyes fixed on me.
“I didn’t formerly introduce you last time, but this is my counselor Mirror.”
Mirror? If that shit is on his birth certificate, his mother must’ve hated him.
Abena glances at the still-silent man and says, “Tell him the news you brought me not too long ago.”
“Eshe hasn’t been killed. She’s alive.”
Since that ain’t news to me, I don’t say shit.
First, I don’t owe her an explanation. She gave me a week to kill her niece, and it’s been three days. Second, rage wraps around my voice like barbwire, tearing into it, shredding it.
She’s violated me. Her and her man. They’ve violated my space.
Doesn’t matter that this room is nearly empty and reveals nothing about me. Doesn’t matter that the few precious things I own are locked away behind a steel-enforced door in my closet that’s only accessible by retina scan.
This world hasn’t given me shit. Everything I have, I’ve fought, stolen, and killed for. I’ve bled and have been broken for. And for her to touch it, to walk up in it like she owns it, like she has rights to it? This woman who has never known what it is to sleep in a gutter with only a stolen magazine for cover? Never known what it is to paw through a restaurant’s trash and fight rats for dinner? Never had to wear shoes until her toes pushed through the soles and were scrubbed raw by the pavement?
Yeah, she’s violated me tonight by being here. This is my shit. And I don’t know how she found the place I lay my head, and I’ll figure that out later. Right now, though, the only heart she needs to be worried about beating outside its chest is hers.
“You want to explain to me why I received word less than an hour ago that my niece was spotted riding through downtown Boston? I paid you to get a job done. To carve her fucking heart from her chest and give it to me in a box. This shouldn’t have been too hard a job for the gotdamn bogeyman of the underworld. She’s one woman. You mean to tell me the Huntsman can’t kill one fucking woman?”
The question ends on a shrill scream, and my fingers ache to wrap around her skinny-ass neck and snap it like a fucking chicken’s. She knows as well as I do that Eshe isn’t just any woman. If she were, Abena would’ve sent one of her bitch-ass boys after her niece. But Eshe would’ve sent them hos back to her in pieces. Probably with smiley faces carved in them. After officially meeting her, I don’t put it past the crazy bitch.
“That whole selective mutism shit might work when you don’t have five million of my dollars with nothing to show for it.” She tilts her head, a sneer riding her face. “I guess underneath the reputation and all-black clothes, you’re just like any other man. Get right up to the edge but, when it comes down to it, can’t get a woman off. I’m sorry—I mean, can’t off her.”
She smiles, but there’s no warmth there. Whoever gets fucked by Abena deserves whatever they get. When you get in bed with a cobra, you’re knowingly taking your life in your hands.
“Did you even find her?” she presses.
I continue to stare at her, mentally counting the seconds it would take me to cross the space separating us, snap her neck, disarm her underboss of the Heckler & Koch P30L under his suit jacket, and blow his jaw off with it. Four point seven, max.
Abena chuckles, slightly shaking her head.
“What? Are you too good to speak to me? To acknowledge me when I’m talking to you? You’re a fucking killer. An assassin with no loyalty, no family, no goddamn name, and you stand there and disrespect me? I’m a fuckingqueen, Huntsman. I wouldn’t even have bothered to come to this hole you call a home if not because I wanted to see for myself the look on your face when you’re humbled because you failed. The great Huntsman who never misses his mark, never quits until the job is done is afailure.”
Better people than her have insulted me, hell, tried to kill me. But…
An assassin with no loyalty, no family, no goddamn name.
That, for some reason, strikes me dead center in the chest, right over an atrophied heart that stopped beating years ago in a filthy, reeking rowhouse. Because I once had all three. And all three were stolen from me in blood and screams.
Whether I put my mouth on your dick? That’s completely your choice. So yes or no, Malachi?
That voice of whiskey and vice whispers in my ear as if she’s standing right next to me. Reminding me that I do have a name. And she knows it. Reminding me that she calls me by it. Reminding me that she knows who I am.
“And just think,” Abena continues, dragging her gaze down my body, “I was going to offer you this pussy as a congratulations for a job well done.” Her lips curve in a grin, her eyes narrowing, taking on a cold, calculating gleam. “I still might get the dick. But as I fuck your cold, dying body instead. The only good man is a dead one, after all.”
My blood freezes in my veins.
And though I fight it, flashes of images bombard me, oneafter the other. Only I’m not thirty-three but nine, scratched up and bleeding with a whimpering Miriam behind me as I jab a sharpened broomstick at foster father number three. The powerlessness and fear of the kid transforms into the icy rage of the man.
The demon I invited inside me as a child that refused to be exorcised raises its head, sniffs the air, and stretches in glee.
