HER LAST KILL Read online

  The Ghosts were their clean-up crew, their support team. Arguably, their work may have been worse, having to clean up after Reapers' messes. Dead bodies and blown-up buildings were a messy affair, particularly when the team was trying to remain a secret to the world.

  At least this job wouldn’t require bleach. She’d shot the fucker right between the eyes after she’d seen he was wearing a vest. He had just come home from another pleasant evening of trafficking in drugs and people, following it up with a night with a whore. In the morning, the household would wake up to find their master dead.

  She would shed no tears for that monster. She’d seen enough assholes like him that she’d never falter in putting a bullet in his head.

  “Is there a reason for this topic of conversation, Miss Li?” Nathan broke through her thoughts. “Are you having second thoughts about our arrangement?”

  “No.”

  “Because our contract cannot be retracted now,” he replied easily.

  No, that contract was ironclad and binding for the next ten years of her life. Nathan all but owned her soul. He couldn’t have that, though. She’d bargained that away years before she’d ever met Nathan.

  She bit the inside of her cheek as she ran down the deserted street to the airstrip where her ride was waiting. She really didn’t want to keep talking to Nathan, but he was in her ear, and she couldn’t really hang up on him.

  “As long as that fat bonus payment keeps appearing, I’ll do these side gigs for you, Nathan. Don’t worry.” Nathan did pay her extremely well for them. More than she’d made when she was a freelancer.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” he replied. She imagined the way his dark lips would curl up on one side the way it always did when he got his way. And he always got his way. “The transfer for tonight is already completed.”

  She reached the airstrip, seeing the plane up ahead. “I’m at the extraction point.”

  “Excellent. Get some rest, Miss Li. I'll have something for the team for when you return.”

  “Roger,” she replied. “I’m going dark for the ride home. See you in a few hours.” She pulled off the headset. The plane up ahead was already running, loaded and ready to go. Thank you, Ghosts, who would also be flying her home. This type of getaway was way better than her old method of hot-wiring a random car.

  She dropped the bag with her gear at the doorway to the plane as she got in, and the pilot took it wordlessly. The Ghosts never spoke, never interacted. They came in, did their job and were gone. She could really respect that if it wasn’t so creepy.

  She settled herself into the seat as the plane began to run through takeoff procedures. There was a black briefcase sitting in the seat beside her. She unlatched it and pushed the lid up. As usual, Nathan delivered. The stacks of cash were organized into bundles of hundreds. She’d put it in her rainy-day fund. When her time with Nathan was up, she had to make sure she had a plan to disappear into the world. Shit, if things got too dicey, she needed an out anyway and Nathan had long arms and fingers into everything.

  She closed the briefcase and settled back against the seat. She could never go back to her old life, even if she wanted to. Beatrice Li was dead and buried, at least as far as the world knew. But she could start a new one once Nathan released her after her contract expired. Retirement had a nice ring to it.

  She bounced her leg, tapped her fingers. She was antsy. She never could relax after a job, not until she set foot back in her own house in Jubilee. She had been staying in the spartan rooms at the office, but soon realized that she wasn’t going anywhere for a long time. She’d chosen to get her own townhouse in the middle of downtown Jubilee. And by downtown, she meant the cross streets of Main and Commerce. The only intersection in Jubilee that had a traffic light. And she was fairly sure that had only been installed so Sheriff Hannigan would be able to arrest someone for running a red light that refused to change at night.

  Actually, only Jack Allen kept his room underground now. The two other members of her team, Chris Hardy and Jordan Levi had apartments in the building next door to the garage where they all pretended to have day jobs.

  She ran her fingers over her caramel-colored forearm. Maybe it might have been better not to interact with the small town. The population there already found them all fascinating since none of them were natives to the town. The women drooled over her teammates. They tried to get her to talk if only to get her to open up about the guys. The old biddies of the town were a bunch of perverts in her opinion.

  Plus, she didn’t really feel like she fit in with that town as her male counterparts did. With her pronounced cheekbones, her almond-shaped eyes, and straight-as-a-board black hair, her Chinese heritage was painfully apparent and the first thing everyone saw when they looked at her. At least she was fairly sure she was Chinese. She’d never met her parents, or anyone from her family actually. Her mother had vanished when she was seven and she'd been out on the streets until she was twelve and had first met Genevieve.

  What a mess that had turned out to be. If she never saw Genevieve again, it would be too soon.

  She leaned back in the plush seat and let out an exhausted sigh as the plane took off into the night sky. Fifteen hours until she set foot back in that town.

  Might as well get comfortable. She pulled the briefcase into her lap and rested both arms on top of it as she closed her eyes and leaned back in the seat. Maybe she’d just switched out one ruthless master for another, but Nathan had saved her from certain death. If Genevieve ever found out she was alive, she’d make it her mission to end Bea. But if there was one thing Bea was better at than killing, it was her own survival.

  2

  Over the last four years that she’d worked for Nathan Hawk, Bridget Muldoon had seen a lot of things she didn’t want to, and some she didn’t think she would have believed. Nathan Hawk—her boss—was a dangerous man. Intelligent, cunning, and wholly unapologetic about everything he did. People who crossed him the wrong way tended to have a way of disappearing, or just straight up dying, like that senator last year.

  Not that she was sorry about that one. The man had been a horrible person. And he’d dragged her own family into it. And now her brother was sitting in some cell by himself because of choices he’d felt he had no other recourse but to choose the ones that senator had wanted.

  She glanced at the tablet on her desk. She’d loaded up the transfer paperwork as Nathan had asked, but she’d not had the courage to take them in there to be signed. Not that he’d ever denied her requests before, but wasn’t that just how she’d gotten her brother into trouble in the first place?

  Normally, she was fairly certain that Nathan would have disappeared her brother for his treasonous activities, but he hadn’t, mostly because of her. Maybe he’d known that she wouldn’t be able to take it, that she would blame herself and wallow in the guilt if her brother was killed. Though Scott didn’t know she was alive, she knew he was, and he was the closest family she had these days.

  Which was why his betrayal laid squarely on her shoulders, despite Nathan’s assurances to the contrary.

  Perhaps she should have been more uncomfortable being alone most of the time with a man like Nathan Hawk, but she wasn’t. Somehow, she knew he’d never hurt her. Actually, he’d saved her when she’d been caught in a crossfire during a bank heist. A stray bullet had pierced her heart. She’d died instantly, or so everyone else thought. The truth was she was in the hospital for two weeks in a coma and woke up on the day of her own funeral, which she’d morbidly attended. She wasn’t even sure whose body they’d buried.

  The funny thing was she liked her new life. She’d gone from a lowly bank teller, handling people’s deposits and withdrawals, to working for a man that wanted to save the world.

  Or so he said. His obsessions ran far deeper than a better world. She knew that. She glanced around her office, which was basically the go between the hallway waiting area and Nathan’s office behind where she sat. This was just one of man
y satellite offices they visited, most of which had the same layout. He was never one to stay still so they had offices all over the world. But this one… he liked this one. It was close to Jubilee, close to his Reapers, and not even Ghosts were allowed in here.

  She logged into the computer station at her desk, intending to work, but sat there staring at it instead. She glanced back at the closed door. There was a certain fascination with Nathan Hawk. A man like that… She couldn’t help but fuel the curiosity that burned inside her, but the few times she’d researched him had turned up ten-year-old society news and nothing recent.

  He was a very private man, which she respected for the most part. He spent hours in that office alone, only coming out when she suggested food, or he had an appointment.

  Bridget pulled up the files that Nathan had wanted earlier and started attaching them to email. Once she was done, she filled in the TO field with his email and sent it off on its virtual journey to the next-door office. It was a strange way they communicated, emailing when she could have easily walked her tablet inside and Bluetooth’d that info right to his. His email was more likely to get a response than simply giving him the files, though. He tended to forget he had things that weren’t in his email.

  She looked back at the closed door again and frowned. How long had he been in there? Four, five hours? She’d give him another half an hour and then she’d make him get some food. It had been hours since he had left that office. Probably longer than that since he’d eaten anything.

  The phone rang and she glanced at the caller ID. It was Axel Martinez again, which meant Nathan had not returned the phone call. She sighed and lifted the receiver.

  “Is he there?” Martinez’s voice filled her ears as soon as her greeting left her mouth.

  “He is… unavailable at the moment,” she replied. “May I take a message for you?”

  There was a heavy, agitated sigh on the other end. “Just have him call me, please. It’s important. Like there’s a body in my living room important.”

  “Of course, Mr. Martinez. I’m happy to take your message.”

  “How did you know it was me?” The man asked. “You know what? Never mind. I don’t want to know.” As the line clicked dead, Bridget set down the phone and stared at it for a long second. Then hit the intercom button. “Mr. Hawk?”

  “Yes, Miss Muldoon?” Nathan’s cultured voice broke through the silence of the office.

  “Axel Martinez called again. You didn’t return his call.”

  “Did we arrange clean up?” He said, absently.

  “Yes. There’s a team in route and I notified Agent Hardy the prisoner would remain in their custody for the time being as you asked.”

  “Excellent. Thank you,” he replied, and the line shut off.

  It was strange, she thought. Though she busied herself all day with the workings of Nathan Hawk’s office, she felt more alone than she thought possible. How did that man deal with the isolation of his work? He worked with no one, consulted with no one. Hours of research, combing through old files… She shook her head. That couldn’t be healthy.

  As she shot off a quick email to Agent Hardy explaining what was to be done with the guy in Martinez’s living room per Nathan’s request, her mind fell back on the man in the office. His dark chocolate eyes had a haunted quality to them when he looked at her. Hell, they always had it, not just when he looked at her.

  He lived in flannel shirts and hole-riddled jeans, looking more like a hobo than a billionaire. But she’d never seen a hobo that filled out those shirts like he did. Maybe in another life, she’d have been attracted to him. But here, in the aftermath of his grief, and her status as legally dead, they were each trapped in their own lives. Nathan obsessed with vengeance for those he’d loved and lost and she… well, she had no reason to obsess. She had lost no one. She’d left behind the life of a woman who had never done much with her life. Her one legacy was that she’d taken both herself and her brother away from her parents.

  ~*~*~

  Nathan swiveled his chair to the side as his tablet dinged with a new email. From Miss Muldoon, no doubt. Sure enough, there was her name in the From field. She’d sent the files he’d asked for on Senator Reilly. He supposed he could have just asked Sierra to do it, but he liked having Miss Muldoon do those things for him. It gave him a reason to talk to her.

  He looked over the email quickly and then turned back to his computer. He’d been working on the data they’d gotten from Daniel Lewis’s private stash to find out who had been holding Lewis’s leash. He hadn’t even realized that Lewis wasn’t acting on his own until much later in the mission. Perhaps having the man shanked in prison during a riot he’d had engineered was possibly premature.

  No use dwelling over it, though. You couldn't unkill a man, after all.

  The soft knock on the door made him glance at the clock. Had he really been in here for two hours? Nathan sighed. He already knew what she was going to say. “Come in, Miss Muldoon.”

  The young woman who entered carried a tablet she hugged against her chest. She'd piled her blonde waves on her head and stuck a pencil through the mass again. The messy style created little wisps of hair that framed her face, like angel hairs. The small tablet pressed against her breasts, pillowing the flesh inside her light sky-blue blouse. Unlike him, she chose to wear more professional clothing. Maybe it was because she never knew if he was going to show up in jeans, or that ridiculous suit he had to wear for business meetings.

  Sometimes, he wondered why he recruited someone like Bridget Muldoon, someone with such little confidence. No, that wasn’t it. She had confidence. She was damn good at her job and she knew it. She was just scared of him.

  Normally, he preferred people to be on the defensive around him. It kept them guessing, kept them struggling to keep up. He did it on purpose so that people would make mistakes.

  But… he didn’t want her to be afraid of him, especially since it was his fault that she was trapped in this life with him. That shooting at the bank had been meant to be a message to him, that he had been asking too many questions.

  She kept that tablet close to her chest, her arms wrapped around it like she was hugging it for dear life.

  Nathan frowned. “What is it?”

  “Sir, I need your signature on the transfer paperwork,” she replied. She swallowed like she’d gotten a bad taste of something.

  He had to think for a minute what transfer it was, but it dawned on him quickly. Her brother. He’d promised her brother would be moved to a facility closer to where they were most of the time instead of the one in South America. If Scott Muldoon hadn’t been her baby brother, he’d have gutted the traitor in a heartbeat. But he still remembered the look in her eyes when she’d found out what Scott had done. When he closed his eyes, he could still see how hurt she'd been. He’d do just about anything to never have to see that look in her eyes again.

  “Right. Where am I signing?” He asked her.

  She let out a breath like she was relieved he was still agreeing and held out her tablet. “Just there, where the highlighted sections are.”

  He took the stylus she held out in her slender fingers and scanned over the screen. Sure enough, there was a pink section with a long blank, waiting for his John Hancock. He glanced up at her, watching her. She was nervous. Her emotions were plain on her face.

  Though she’d undergone the same procedure as his Reapers to save her life, she had none of the training… In fact, she’d never have survived the training and he'd made sure she'd been knocked out completely during the procedure so she didn’t have to feel any of the more invasive parts. Her strength wasn’t in the physical. It wasn’t in her to do the lying and the stealing and the killing that he had recruited his Reapers to do. No, she was quiet strength and resilience. Maybe she couldn’t shoot a gun, but she’d never fail him.

  For that loyalty she freely gave him, he’d have given her anything in the world she wanted, including her brother. For the las
t four years, her brother had thought her dead, and even when Nathan had recruited him to the Reapers, she hadn’t broken his faith in her.

  “Sir?”

  “What?”

  Bridget blinked at him like he was a moron. “Your signature, sir? Unless you’ve changed your mind?”

  “Right,” he said, scribbling across the screen. He held it back out to her. “Thank you, Miss Muldoon.”

  She tapped a few times on the tablet and then brought up another screen. “I also need your signature to move him from maximum security after the implant surgery.”

  Nathan nodded and scribbled his name again. “Is that all?”

  Muldoon was going back to active duty as soon as he was sufficiently tagged. He had a mission for his hacking expert. It would actually be a benefit that he couldn’t put the man back in the Reaper team.

  She nodded, wisps of her blonde hair falling into her eyes, even though most of it was pulled back into that messy bun. He almost laughed. There were actually two pencils shoved through the mess of hair at the crown of her head, crisscrossing each other like swords. He wondered if she even knew she'd already put one in there.

  “I’ll get these processed right now.”

  “Thank you,” he replied as her heels clicked across the floor, echoing in the large expanse of his office. “Miss Muldoon?”

  She stopped, turning her torso at the door she’d just opened. “Yes, sir?”

  He wasn’t sure what he was about to say to her. When she turned and her hazel eyes met his, his mind went blank. They were like molten lava, waiting to pour over him. The effect was staggering, sending warmth over his cold blood like his body had just jumpstarted after a long period of time. How had he never noticed her eyes before now?

  “Sir?” She said again.

  He blinked. What was he going to say? “Ehm… That’s all. Thank you.”

  She nodded and left, the door shutting quietly behind her.

  Nathan leaned forward in his chair, steepling his fingers as his forehead came to rest against his thumbs. He’d have to talk to Muldoon about his next mission soon, but he had been avoiding the man since their last visit together, out of respect for Bridget. It wasn’t that he was afraid of Muldoon. Quite the opposite. No, it was remembering exactly the monster he’d been when he’d gone to see him last. Few things made him so angry he could not see anything but red. Betrayals were the worst crimes and he’d made Muldoon pay for his. What would faithful Bridget think of him if she knew?