CHAPTER 1
ALEXA
“That’s enough; you can go now.”
“Mais mademoiselle, il nous reste encore trente minutes.”
“I’m done.”
I hadn’t wanted a massage in the first place, but Chase—my companion, Man Friday, assistant, bestie, whatever you wanted to call him—had insisted. “You’re stressed,” he told me. “You need to learn to relax.”
As if relaxation were something to be studied like French or coding. Not that I’d ever really needed to study coding—I spoke programming languages better than I spoke human ones.
“Hey, wait. Wipe the oil off before you leave, okay?” I gritted my teeth. “S’il vous plaît?”
Politeness didn’t come naturally to me. Peopling in general didn’t come naturally. Apart from Chase and two sets of colleagues, I avoided company as much as possible. Why sit in a restaurant when I could get food delivered and spend the evening with me, myself, and I? Restaurants were full of micro dangers—drunk people, weird men hitting on you, questionable bathrooms, cutlery that didn’t feel right in your hands…
As of today, I’d been hopping around the world for six weeks straight. From Austria to Poland to Japan to Argentina to Jamaica to France, never staying in the same place for long. Why was I hopping all over the world? Because I’d hooked my bestie up with a hot guy, and now she was mad at me. Sounds crazy, huh? I mean, she should have been thrilled.
But no, she was more focused on the fact that I’d tricked her onto an airplane with him when they were on a break than on the happy ending I’d gifted them, so now I was waiting for her anger to simmer down. Jerry Knight didn’t like being tricked. She didn’t much like anything, if her resting bitch face was any indicator, but now I was hanging out far, far away until she accepted that I had, in fact, done her a favour. Oh, did I mention she was an assassin? Yeah, she killed people for a living. Okay, I killed people too sometimes, but not with guns and blood and stuff. That was gross. No, I merely finagled them into situations where they stopped breathing.
The masseuse wiped gloop off my back and then scuttled out of the room without another word. Was I mean to her? Chase said I should be nicer, and I tried occasionally, but I wasn’t always sure it worked. It was easier to stay away from people. They gave me the ick anyway. Unfortunately, I couldn’t avoid human interaction completely—I had a business to run, plus hotel staff had an annoying habit of buzzing around me like pesky mosquitoes. Is everything okay with your room? Our concierge is here to help you with whatever you want, ma’am. Do you have enough towels? Maybe I should have rented actual houses instead of penthouses, but when Chase went out, the houses felt empty and weird and a little scary. Having no people around was worse. They just needed to stay on the periphery of my world, that was all.
I shrugged into a fluffy white robe and tied it securely. Only a shower would get the rest of that oil off, but first, I needed to check my email. My company more or less ran itself, but I still liked to stay in the loop, plus I was messaging back and forth with a romance scammer who thought I was a lonely middle-aged nurse from Wisconsin, and I was so freaking close to turning the tables. I already had his real name, his address, and his banking information, but I was almost certain he had a brokerage account, and I wanted that too.
Not for me, you understand. I gave away as much cash as I could, but I was still stuck with a lot of recovered funds, especially in crypto. Do you know how hard it is to give away a million bucks? Folks asked awkward questions, like “Where did this money come from?” And I wasn’t going to answer those. Anyhow, I figured it was better squirrelled away in my offshore accounts than funding a shitbag’s luxury lifestyle, so I carried on.
Where was Chase? I checked my watch. Why wasn’t he back yet? He’d gone out to pick up a late breakfast half an hour ago, and the boulangerie was only two streets away. Yes, the hotel offered a serviceable breakfast, but I liked my pain au chocolat from Le Plaisir. Not only did they sell the best macarons in Paris, but their pain au chocolat was excellent too—not too flaky, and you could really taste the butter. I glanced down and poked my stomach. Dammit, I’d have to do more exercise. And I hated exercise. Yoga was okay, a walking desk was fine, but running? No, thanks. Once, I’d burned off the calories through nervous energy, always looking over my shoulder, but my life had gradually settled down over the past few years, and now?—
Wait.
Why was there a package of crackers on my desk?
They weren’t even French crackers, they were graham crackers, a snack so tasteless they were barely edible even with chocolate and marshmallow sandwiched between them. Chase would never soil my palate that way, which meant…
No.
Oh, no.
I clutched the robe tighter around me as Jez stepped off the balcony.
“Nice view,” she said. “Being a conniving little bitch does have its perks.”
I groaned as I remembered the message she’d sent me last month, right after I routed her through secondary screening at Miami International in order to delay her boarding until the last possible second.
Jez
I will hunt you down. I will hunt you down and force-feed you dry crackers until you choke on the soggy crumbs.
And my reply?
Me
Gotta catch me first. Enjoy San Gallicano.
Now she was here.
Fuck.
