I didn’t even have clothes.
I’d been at Golden’s for the weekend and then some, and as the middle of the day Tuesday rolled around, my trigger finger started to itch. I wanted to go home, but I needed to be sure I was right about who wanted me dead before I stepped foot out of this house. Leaving prematurely would have been a bad decision, but Golden knew the longer I stayed, the more likely a target was to end up on his back.
Judging by all the information he had about me in that slim manila folder, though, he walked around with a permanent target anyway. That kind of news didn’t come cheap and it rarely came easy.
I sat in an Adirondack chair on Golden’s back deck and stared out at the planked fence that marked the end of his property. It wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t quite cold, and his sweats were baggy enough on me to give a little extra warmth. I cradled a mug of coffee in my hands—black with two sugars, just the way I liked it and exactly how he’d handed it to me—and took a breath.
My ribs didn’t hurt as much as they had the day before, and I took that as a sign I was healing well enough. His doctor friend, Ronan, had dropped off bandages and medicine, but the man had managed to evade my line of sight. I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a lineup, but I would have made a bet he was one of them who’d been at Rapture with Golden the week before.
Behind me, the sliding glass door pulled open and my heart skipped.
“It’s me,” Golden said, his voice quiet.
He closed the door and lowered himself into the chair beside me. I cast a glance in his direction, finding his stare focused on the same fence I’d earlier been contemplating.
“This is too domestic,” I remarked, and he answered me with a rough sound in the back of his throat.
“I’m not always tied to a bed and pried open for someone’s pleasure.”
“That’s a shame.”
A flush crept up Golden’s throat, but he didn’t look my way.
“So,” he said, offering me a hint of a glance, “what’s your plan?”
My plan was to make it out of his house alive, find whoever had put the hit out on, me and put them and everyone they loved into the ground… not necessarily in that order.
“Am I going to get out of this in one piece, Golden?” I asked, leaning back against the chair with a groan.
“Do you mean my house or the whole thing?”
“Let’s worry about the here and now first,” I suggested.
“I have a job,” he answered, frowning at his coffee.
“You can’t possibly hit everyone you’re assigned.”
He shot me an affronted look, all wide eyes and scowling mouth. “You think that because you’re alive that I’m an amateur?”
He set his mug on the arm of his chair. Before I realized he was moving, he was up and out, on top of me, with the edge of a knife blade pressed to my throat. His knee had knocked my mug and the hot coffee poured onto my lap, the mug clattering onto the deck.
Golden fisted my hair, yanked my head back and shifted his angle, the tip of his blade pressing cold and hard against my neck.
“You’re alive for now, because I want you alive for now,” he hissed, tipping the blade forward.
Pressure, pain, then the hot trickle of blood as he punctured my skin. I sucked in a breath and held his stare, letting the blood slide down my throat, staining the collar of the clean white undershirt he’d let me borrow. The tension in his jaw looked like it was going to shatter all of his teeth, and for the first time since I’d found out he had the contract, I worried for my life.
I’d grossly underestimated Foster Thomas Golden.
I swallowed, the movement pushing against the blade. His hand was steady, his stare more calculating than I’d ever seen, and I found myself wanting to know how two different people could exist in this man’s body. He would kill me if it served him. I knew that now, but fuck… the way he’d knelt for me, the way he’d done and said all I’d asked of him. The way…
“Get off me, Golden,” I rasped.
He glowered at me, shifting his grip on the handle of his knife.
“You’re making me bleed.”
“Nice change of pace.”
