Nature? Nurture? DNA? Tobias had spent years trying to find an explanation for the madness that seemed to run through his family, the madness that he knew was deeply rooted within him. His mother had found his fascination with death morbid, rolling her eyes over the brim of her teacup as she lunched with her Daughters of the American Revolution friends.
“He’s such a strange boy, but what can you do? Did you hear? They’ve accepted him at Harvard. That’s right. Harvard at fourteen. You can’t blame him for being fascinated by death, not with all those ghastly rumors about his father.”
Rumors. Just rumors. It was amazing how people were willing to overlook the most disgusting things when it came to people with money. Killeen’s wife overlooked his many transgressions to make her house look like some kind of Roman ruins. His mother and her friends overlooked a pile of bodies where his father was concerned because of his grandmother’s name. Maybe he should have spent his time studying that. Maybe if his mother had been willing to acknowledge his father’s monstrous nature, she might have noticed the same compulsions building in her son. Instead, she did what she had always done: smiled and put a potted plant over the rust-colored stain on the floor, then wrote a check.
The task of managing his compulsions had fallen to Tobias. The tighter the grip on his life, the less likely it was he would slip. For most of his life, he believed that. Killing was wrong. Killing was what monsters did. As long as Tobias kept his hands clean, kept his impulses in check, then he was one of the good guys. He was better than a good guy, he was the guy who would find the key to unravel life’s greatest mystery. Why did people kill? Was it a lack of discipline? A lack of control, as Tobias posited?
But then he’d met John and Akil, though he was certain those weren’t their real names. Two assassins who killed monsters like human traffickers and rapists, the same people Tobias counseled. They hadn’t been evil men. If anything, the duo had been two of the most normal people Tobias had ever encountered, and it wasn’t an act. They felt no shame in their actions. These men were a poison on society, and John and Akil saw themselves as the antidote and it infuriated Tobias—not that he’d ever let it show.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years of his life wasted trying to determine what caused people to kill so he might one day be able to cut it out of them, to cut it out of himself. He’d sat listening to the transgressions of hundreds of hideous men—and even a few women—and never once had it occurred to him that, after all these years, he hadn’t been creating the perfect client list… He’d been creating the perfect kill list.
2
Soren
“Two o’clock. Got him?”
Soren spared a glance away from the body he was searching to a set of double doors that led into the main warehouse. Shadows flickered against frosted glass windows on either side of the doors. Guards. Ten feet in front of Soren, a man dragged himself along the floor at a decent clip, a trail of blood seeping behind him.
Soren frowned. He’d been damn near certain he’d gotten the guy’s femoral artery. He should’ve bled out forty-five seconds ago. “Got ‘im,” he commented mildly after a quick assessment, then turned his attention back to the body he was searching. Somewhere on the doughy dead man was the keycard he needed.
“Soren.”
Soren arched a brow at the strain in Ronin’s voice, his gaze flickering in the direction of the doorway where Ronin held a garrote tight around a struggling man’s neck. Ronin was a good partner, Soren had decided, just a little green.
And impatient.
“Don’t,” Soren warned when he glimpsed a tell-tale twitch of muscle, signaling Ronin wanted to go for his gun and take care of the crawling man himself. That would blow apart any further attempts at stealth, though, and Soren preferred the dwindling handful of men they were currently dealing with to an early encounter with the army outside the double doors—if he got to choose.
Sometimes, he didn’t.
Another demo job on a trafficking warehouse in Cape Town a week ago had given Soren the closest experience he’d ever had to being in front of a firing squad when he’d been forced to rescue one of his team members who’d dropped into the wrong sector of the building. It’d been a bloody mess, but they’d managed to complete the mission, and Soren couldn’t deny the residual thrill of adrenaline that kept him awake half the damn night afterward. It’d been a long time since he’d gotten that worked up over a job, and he wasn’t sure whether that was a good or bad thing, considering that he was technically retired.
“Told you, I’ve got it,” he drawled, grinning at the thick line of tension etched in Ronin’s brow. He patted his chest, then his thigh, before coming out with a throwing knife that he winged toward the crawling man just as he reached for the door handle. He grunted in satisfaction as the knife buried itself in the side of the man’s neck and he collapsed in a heap. “There we go. All better.”
Ronin rolled his eyes.
On a whim, Soren stuck his hand just inside the waistband of the man on the floor in front of him.Bingo.He brandished the plastic keycard triumphantly at his partner. “We’re all set.”
The man Ronin was holding had stopped struggling, and Ronin eased him to the ground before carefully coiling up his garrote and tucking it back in his pocket. He shook his head at Soren, that deep furrow still marring his expression.“That could’ve been bad.”
“The guy was already half dead. He was running on the last dregs of adrenaline. I probably could’ve blown a kiss in his general direction and he’d have keeled over from the shift in air current.”
“Or he could’ve opened that door and exposed us to a small, but underpaid, army of mercs too early.”
“We’d have handled it.”
Ronin chuckled in disbelief. “How the hell are you so casual about this? If we fuck this one up, it jeopardizes the whole operation.”
Soren shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve been around a while.” That wasn’t the full explanation, but Soren figured Ronin would suss it out eventually. He’d completed probably a hundred similar ops over the course of his life. This was one of the easier ones because the trafficking ring had already been dismantled by a conglomerate of his fellow mercs, leaving a bunch of mostly disorganized low-level criminals running around, trying to figure out what to do.
Soren eyed Ronin up and down. He was tense enough that Soren probably could have picked him up and used him as a blunt object. He chuckled. “This next part is gonna go a lot easier if you unclench a little.”
“Usually, I’m the one saying that,” Ronin grumbled, but Soren noted some of the tightness in his shoulders eased. Ronin was probably a decent lay, and Soren gave him some consideration in that regard for a handful of seconds. He didn’t do the green types, though. He liked experienced partners, the well-oiled machinery of an uncomplicated fuck between men who knew how all of this worked.
One last glance at Ronin’s broad shoulders and Soren dismissed the thought.Way too complicated.
They both turned their attention to the ten bodies sprawled around them. Not too shabby for two men using anything and everything but guns. In the interest of stealth, they’d managed to incorporate knives, a garrote, a metal pipe, their bare hands, and the cement floor they stood upon, which was stained red with evidence of being used to its full potential.
