by M. Malone
Blurb
I’m a bodyguard. I walk softly and carry a big...stick.
Too bad I have no idea how to use it.
I know what you’re thinking. How the hell do you end up a virgin when you live in a city known for easy access?
But my focus is protecting the women of New York...not fulfilling my every desire.
Then I meet her.
(Sin is Book 1 of the Sin Duet. The conclusion will come in Book 2, Sinful)
Sin
M. Malone
Nana Malone
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Excerpt of Force
More from The Malones
About the Authors
1
Matthias
“Bollocks! You can’t for the life of you actually think that the DC Extended Universe movies are better than the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. It’s just not true.”
Oskar Mueller shook his head. “Wait, DC… is that the one with Captain America?”
I groaned and threw my hands up. “Now you’re just taking the piss, mate. It’s as though you haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said for all these years.”
Oskar chuffed, his lips barely moving. That was his version of a chuckle. It was as if the show of emotion cost too much energy. “Nah, kid. I’m just fucking with you. I know that it’s Superman that’s DC. Of course, Captain America is Marvel. All those Avengers movies, those are Marvel. Superman is DC for sure.”
I shook my head. “I can’t even. I’m done with this conversation.”
“Don’t get your panties all in a twist. Oh sorry—knickers, right? That’s what you Brits call them?”
I just shook my head. I wasn’t going to let Oskar bait me. Although, that was the German’s favorite pastime. It was as if he sought me out just to poke at me. For someone who seemed so serious all the time, Oskar was always there for a prank or to impart some dry wit.
I was actually grateful for it. Oskar helped me feel normal. If that was even a thing. Most of the other guys were a little too careful around me. Jonas stayed ever watchful. Ryan and Dylan were cool, if not a little distant, with me.
Rafe was the worst. Despite the air of ‘cool, relaxed, and not giving a fuck,’ Rafe was always on high alert around me. But those feelings were mutual. Ever since Rafe tried to kill us all a couple of years ago, I didn’t trust him. It didn’t matter if he was Lucia’s brother and thought we were the enemy at the time. The guy made my skin itch.
Noah was different. He was… well, watchful. Considering Noah knew just how deadly I could be, I had always wondered how he could allow me around his family. But Noah had faith in me. He always had. And because of that faith, I worked hard at appearing normal. After all, I’d kept the monster at bay, hadn’t I?
Oskar playfully shoved my shoulder and the monster inside me twitched, as if trying to awaken from a long nap. I quickly shut that shit down, secured the locks again, and placed that thing from Alien in front of it on guard duty. There was no way I was letting that guy out.
Not with my family. There’d been a time when even the slightest touch meant it was time for blood. But you don’t live like that anymore. No. That had been a very long time ago. I was a different person now. This version of myself didn’t slice and dice my family for an affectionate shove.
“I swear Nerd Boy, you get wound up over the slightest things. Let’s both just agree that Wonder Woman is legitimately the hottest superhero we’ve ever seen.”
I pondered this. “Look, Diana is gorgeous but Black Widow… How can you not love Black Widow?”
Oskar frowned. “Which one is that?”
I dropped my hands. “Jesus Christ, now I know you’re a tosser.”
And then Oskar grinned. A full smile. No wonder the women fell at his feet. Even I was temporarily stunned.
You could learn a thing or two from him. No. No, I couldn’t. I wasn’t interested in any of that. Liar.
There had been a time when I had thought maybe Lucia… She was sweet, innocent—just the kind of girl I should want to go after, if I wasn’t tainted on the inside. But she’d been in love with Noah. Always Noah. So I’d shoved those feelings aside. Besides, it wasn’t as if I knew what to do with any of that.
Most women weren’t clamoring for a psychopathic former killer who liked to watch people bleed. Nope, that would make for one hell of a Tinder profile.
I started in on Oskar again just as the buzzer on my watch started to vibrate on my wrist. I had a series of alarms set just in case anyone tried to breach our security protocols. It wouldn’t be the first time. Most of the alarms were harmless. Some hacker kid was poking around in the wrong corner of the Internet. But if the secondary alarms went off as well, I had trouble.
I was so good at schooling my expression that Oskar kept prodding me as if everything was perfectly fine. Little did he know that I was silently letting out a little piece of my monster, the protective side, the one ready to kill to protect the new family I had carved out for myself. That monster, that little sliver of the death that was inside me, was all I’d ever let out. The rest of it was too dangerous, too ugly. That monster would leave me alone without anyone.
I inclined my head. “I want to go and check on something.”
Oskar nodded. “Yeah, you go ahead. I’m going to put on Wonder Woman again.”
“You’re seriously going to watch that without me?”
Oskar nodded and winked at me. “Yep, I swear, watching Gal Gadot wield the sword is almost as good as watching porn.”
I wouldn’t know. I appreciated the female form as much as the next guy, but watching porn—that took me back to a place I never wanted to go again. So it was best if I just didn’t go near it.
All work and no play makes the monster hungry.
I swallowed hard and shoved the thought aside. I took a sharp turn at the living room, heading down the hallway toward my room when I saw Rafe coming down the hall from the other end from Noah’s office. I couldn’t help it. A part of me wanted to start a fight, to test my skills again against Rafe.
It was something that happened every single time I saw him. Like the fight-or-flight instinct flared, and I always chose fight. Things had gotten a little less tense with the two of us, but there was something about him. He always reminded me that I could die at any moment so I had to be ready… on the go.
Noah didn’t give me the same feeling. Even though he and Rafe had both been killers for the same government organization that had trained me, Noah didn’t trigger that instinct in me. But Rafe always did. Maybe that’s because the guy tried to kill you.
Yeah, tried being the operative word.
Maybe, but that was supposed to be all water under the bridge now. Noah had brought Rafe in from the cold.
I met his gaze evenly as we brushed past each other in the hallway. Rafe gave me a nod but I barely acknowledged him.
The alarm on my wrist went off again. This time three buzzers. Shit. Someone was really trying a breach. We were fucked.
As soon as I passed Rafe, I jogged down to my room and went straight for my monitors.
My room pretty much made up the entire center of the penthouse. It was the largest one in the penthouse but by necessity. I’d insisted that I needed to be c
lose to the monitors just in case anything happened. I had servers in here, hard drives that needed to be destroyed and wiped if they were breached.
Maybe you wouldn’t have so much trouble if you weren’t starting a war. Sometimes a war was necessary. I put on my earphones and quickly pulled up the monitors, checking to see where the intruders were.
Fuck a tit. Personnel files. This wasn’t the first time in the last several months that someone had tried to get access to who we had on our team. The Blake Security team information was public knowledge. Well, mostly public. Everyone’s backgrounds were so scrubbed and embellished by me that the people we described were hardly recognizable. But still someone wanted in. And so I desperately needed to keep them the fuck out.
My fingers flew over the keyboard as I fought the distributed denial-of-service attack. Fingers flew over keys from one keyboard to another. I knew who was doing this. I’d been warned.
I managed to shut down one attack. The other one was nearly close enough to penetrate employee records. Shit.
And then I had it. With swift keystrokes, I’d stopped the attack.
Bugger, that was a close one. The signature was familiar though. Something tickled at my memory as if I should know this hacker’s style… as if I should recognize it. As if it were me. The style was so similar to mine. I would have almost thought I was hacking myself.
Had the Family managed to get someone nearly as good as I was? Hell, maybe even better?
I didn’t get to dwell on that question though because Noah popped his head in. “Hey kid, everything okay?”
I was used to schooling my expressions. It was really easy when most of the time I didn’t have any emotions. “Yeah, fine.”
Noah studied my face. “Are you sure? Rafe said you looked… off.”
“I’m cool. I was running a diagnostics scan and my alarm went off letting me know that it was done. So I just came in here to check.”
Noah nodded. He looked like he believed me, but some emotional responses escaped me as I was so used to shutting people out, shutting down their emotional input. I just didn’t always know when to turn it on.
Noah was almost always easy. I knew my mentor’s ‘We have trouble’ face. I knew the ‘Get the fuck out so I can fuck my wife’ face. I knew the ‘Isn’t my baby gorgeous?’ face. I knew the ‘Let’s get down to business’ face.
Everything else was nuanced and in-between and so much harder to read. But for the most part, Noah was wide open. Rafe, on the other hand, was completely impossible to read. The others were easy. The women? Jesus! JJ and Lucia—I never understood what the hell was going on with them. Diana was a little easier. She tended to have an ‘Ask Kiki’ face. So I was down with that one.
I knew Noah was assessing me for a lie. But I also knew that Noah wouldn’t find one. The guy had trained me. I hated lying to him. After all, he’d saved me. But sometimes it was necessary.
When Noah left ORUS years ago, he’d made sure I could go with him. He had legitimately saved my life. He’d been clear that he wouldn’t be leaving ORUS without me, and Noah had gotten me out not a moment too soon. One more day with that shadowy organization and that monster would have taken over my life… entirely. There would have been nothing left of myself.
“Okay, if you’re sure. The whole family is in the living room. We’re going to watch Wonder Woman. Oskar insisted. Are you coming?”
I gave a nod. “Yeah, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Noah hesitated. “Listen, kid. I know you’ve been under some pressure with Rafe back. But you know that you can talk to me about anything, right?”
Oh yeah? Like how I think about all the ways to kill your brother-in-law on a daily basis? Like that? I kept that thought to myself though. Normal people didn’t think about killing people. That was the problem. At the core of it, I was a killer. Noah wasn’t. Noah had killed. He’d been an assassin just like me. The problem was, I liked it. And that made me the boogeyman.
But you don’t do that anymore. No. No I didn’t. That was the reason for my locked up monster, after all. Now, the things I cared about were protecting my new family and taking down my old one.
My old “family” had sold me to ORUS like I was nothing… like I wasn’t worthy of living. They had taken the only person I’d ever cared about in my life and killed her. And then they’d sold me off. So my slow, deliberate dismantling of their empire? That was payback.
And what if that payback blows back on your new family? The family I’d carved out for myself. The family I fought to protect.
I never thought of myself as capable of love. Maybe at one time I had been. But that love had died with that girl. I might not be capable of that emotion, but I felt strong affection and a need to protect my family. They were everything to me.
My watch buzzed again and I groaned, turning my attention back to the monitors. This time, it wasn’t an attack. It was a message written in one line of code in my command window.
We’re coming.
Well, they were welcome to come. I would kill them all before I let any of that filth touch anyone I cared about. They were all going to die.
Gemma
I adjusted my sunglasses on my face. I knew exactly where the cameras were, and I managed to avoid the majority of them. The ones in the luggage area were the more difficult to avoid.
But I knew the rules. Stay hidden and stay alive.
JFK was as busy as usual, a horde of people easy enough to get lost in. Once I had my bag, I deliberately separated myself from the throng and then made my way to the ladies’ room. After waiting in line for nearly thirty minutes, I bounded into a stall, changed my clothes, and dragged off the blond wig I’d been wearing before shaking out my dark locks.
After I was done, I studied myself in the mirror. Anyone looking for me would completely miss me. I’d traded the wig for my natural hair. Well, my naturally dyed hair. My natural color? Red. When was the last time I’d seen that?
I missed it sometimes, but while I was undercover with the Family, black was better. They might have recognized me as a redhead. Maybe not, but better safe than sorry.
I picked up my rental car and tossed my roll along bag into the trunk. The moment I was in the driver’s seat, I took out my phone and made a call. “I’m in.”
The voice on the other end of the line was terse. “You understand what you need to do.”
“Yes, I understand. When will I get the target?”
“We’ll give you the target when you’re all settled. We don’t want you getting all excited now. There’s a plan in motion.”
I was already regretting this. When I’d been asked by the government organization that I worked for, ORUS, to go back undercover in the one place I’d vowed I would never return, my answer had been an all-encompassing “Fuck, no.”
But they dangled the carrot of all carrots: revenge. And now I was a double agent. Every day was a big game of Russian roulette with my life. Oh the good times. But if I wanted access to the head of the criminal organization known only as the Family, then I was going to have to complete their stupid initiation rite. Stupid or not, it means killing someone. Are you ready for that?
As an ORUS agent, this wasn’t my first kill. But it was the first kill where I knew nothing about the target. ORUS targets were sanctioned by the US government. They took out the worst of the worst. Scum of the earth. ORUS was the cleanup crew.
I didn’t know who the hell the Family was sending me after. Although, whoever it was, if they had an association with the Family, it meant they weren’t clean. But still, can you know that for sure?
I shoved that thought out of my head.
“Of course I want everything that you’re offering, but to be successful at my job I do need some information.”
“Ah, Avery, you’re always so intent on doing a good job. Not to worry love; you’ll get to meet Father. You’ll get what you’ve been looking for this whole time; to become a fully pledged member of the Family. You j
ust have to carry out this one last job.”
I knew what wasn’t being said. If I didn’t do what I was told, they were going to hurt my friend.
I’d known better. Befriending people in the Family could get you killed. But the moment I’d been back undercover, I’d seen her. I remembered her from before when I was a child. And I hadn’t been able to shut her out.
But of course, those wankers had seen my soft spot for the kid. So to make sure I carried out my job, they’d taken Sabine away to a safe location. Somehow, I was sure Sabine was anything but safe. But they’d taken her to ensure I was serious about becoming a member of the Family.
Sabine worked as a drug mule for them. She hadn’t been sold into prostitution yet, but I was terrified that was what was going to happen to her. The guilt from leaving her behind that first time ate at me.
I needed to do this job, get to Father, and get Sabine the hell out of there. Thanks to my job at ORUS, I had money, plenty of it. I could give it to Sabine to start a whole new life, but first, I had to do this. And if my target was innocent I had to find a way to save them too. Easy as pie. This is the job. Too late to back out now.
“I’ll do what you say. I’ll be at the safe house.”
After hanging up, I took the SIM chip out of the burner phone, slipping it back into the case into the little protector slot labeled A, for Avery. My code name with the Family.
Then I took out another SIM chip from the slot marked G. I grabbed my other burner phone and slid the chip inside.
When I was abroad, this was how I kept my two mobiles separate. I found it funny how neither of my two cells were my original self.
