“Of course.”
“You told me to lock the door.” She slings that like an accusation, though it’s soft and graceful, like she’s trying not to hate me. “Do you regret it?”
Do I regret it? Regret her?
Towing her against me, I sweep her hair back and move my mouth to her ear. “You could lodge a bullet in me tomorrow, Zara, and as I took my last breath, I still couldn’t find it in me to regret a single moment with you.” I pull away and drag my thumb over her trembling lip, my chest cracking wide open. “Go.”
She struts to her door without looking back while I hide in the shadows, and once she’s inside her suite, I whip out my phone and dash through the tunnels toward Magie Noire.
Pulling up my Contacts, I dial an enforcer who is skilled at hunting people down. He also happens to be part of my sister, Rena’s, family and KORT. But the latter would be a drawback if I didn’t believe he’d handle this precisely the way I asked.
“Yeah?” Gage clips. “It’s late. And I’m not who you’d normally call.”
“I see we’re starting with the obvious, so I’ll follow suit. The job I have for you requires the utmost discretion. For now.”
“Until it doesn’t,” he supplies, understanding that he’ll be both my clandestine asset and my intentional leak.
“Yes.”
“Shoot,” he says as I briefly hold the phone between my ear and shoulder so I can spin my watch, willing the ceramic ball to seek out the red pocket.
Come on, twelve.
“It’s regarding someone who worked with the assassin Stone Gallagher.”
“The legend.”
His realization arrives as my ball lands ontwelve, and tranquility washes over me.
“That’s the one,” I confirm before I provide the rest of the details, and he guarantees me that he’ll get me what I need.
Roulette is said to be the devil’s game. It makes sense that it’s what I find comfort in.
Never dismiss the house edge.
ZARA
The next few days pass like the blustery gale on a mountaintop. And all I can do is hold on, put one foot in front of the other, and try not to look down at my near-certain death while flashes of good flit in my mind’s eye.
Cherry lemonade and picnics with spring flowers.
The first time I was the last one standing in one of my father’s training simulations.
Musical acrobats with a family that melds the crime world with suburban ease.
Axel’s tongue and fingers inside me. His lips on my flesh. His teeth marks bruising my breasts. His filthy words and demands and the cord of possessiveness swirling in the deepest blue of his steely sapphires.
His arms and presence cradling me. Like I was precious. Like I belonged.
“You could lodge a bullet in me tomorrow, Zara, and as I took my last breath, I still couldn’t find it in me to regret a single moment with you.”
And yet the jagged points glare back at me, the ones that will scrape and stab and shred me on the way down, no matter how lovely the flashes of good are. There’s an urge inside me to get lost in the beauty of the descent—the spiral that will offer me a highlight reel to soothe the aching end—and ignore the way I’ll be skinned alive before the impending crash. There’s also an undeniable appetite to rejoice in the fade-to-black demise. For my soul to have a reprieve. To travel to another realm, even if the burn bites more there.
I’ve seen this before in other assassins—an awakening of sorts. A crisis of conscience and identity and the realization that the job will eventually become you. Or comeforyou. A craving for it all to be over. I should have seen it sooner. But mirrors lie better than windows. It was too hard to recognize it in myself.
The meltdown can’t irrevocably vanquish the spirit inside me though. I still can’t resist a fight—to play a game better than anyone else, especially when they believe I’m losing.
I won’t stop yearning to be the one they never see coming.
