Den of Mercenaries

by London Miller

  Luna could almost hear his voice in her head, repeating words he lived and breathed.

  Manners—like saying please and thank you.

  Remembering just how he liked for her to use those words made her skin flush, but she quickly shoved those memories away.

  Donna Marie was older, in her late fifties if Luna had to guess, with white-blond hair and pale, porcelain colored skin. She wore a sharp two-piece suit, and a pair of cat-eye frame glasses adorned with small pearls at the corners.

  “Kit, always a pleasure,” Donna said with a warm, familiar smile.

  She spoke his name with a familiarity that had Luna glancing in his direction. How could she have known the man for seven years, married to him for more than half that time, and not know this about him?

  But, Kit had always been rather good at keeping his secrets—his secrets were the reason they were there in the first place.

  “And Mrs. Rune—”

  “Santiago,” Luna said quickly. “Luna Santiago.”

  This was enough to inspire a reaction from Kit. “You haven’t been a Santiago for years, Luna.”

  “I’ll always be a Santiago,” Luna returned, “but I won’t always be a Runehart.”

  His expression was cold, though it melted as he shook his head. “Don’t count on that.”

  Donna, who had probably seen far worse in her office, didn’t seem fazed by their exchange. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just call you Luna. You’re welcome to call me Donna, Kit already does.”

  “I didn’t know you were seeing a shrink,” Luna said, her statement pointed.

  From the look on his face, she didn’t think he wanted her to know now. “It wasn’t relevant—and isn’t relevant to why we’re here now.”

  “Isn’t it? You hiding something like this from me is part of the problem.” His secrets were the biggest hurdle they couldn’t jump. “But I shouldn’t be surprised—I’m the only woman in your life you don’t confide in. Where is Aidra, anyway? She’s usually close by.”

  Aidra—the woman who took her role as Kit’s “assistant” seriously. She’d been there the day Luna had been deposited on Kit’s doorstep, and there the day she left him. Some days it felt like she was just as much a part of their relationship as they were.

  “I thought it best this stay between us, and I do confide in you, more than I have any other person in my life.”

  She wasn’t so sure about that. “It wouldn’t be the first time she’s heard us argue,” Luna noted.

  Nor the second, or even the fifteenth.

  “Can you not accept anything I say without being combative?” he asked, adopting that tone she had always hated.

  Glaring at him, she folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not.”

  “How about,” Donna interjected, “we start at what brought the two of you here today. Kit, since you were the one to arrange this, would you like to start?”

  “Luna believes I have betrayed her in some way.”

  “Right, because taking on a contract with the woman that attempted to have me murdered is just a ‘misunderstanding’?” Luna mumbled, trying to decide whether or not she was ready to leave.

  She didn’t think there was any other way to explain why what he had done was wrong, and if he couldn’t see it when she explained it to him, then he wasn’t going to understand at all.

  “What I said was not meant to negate your feelings—I merely attempted to answer the question before you interrupted.”

  “Then by all means,” Luna said with a wave of her hand. “Continue.”

  “What she fails to realize is that there is, and has always been, a reason for the things that I do. When she left me, I wasn’t prepared to explain it then.”

  Luna couldn’t help herself. “And you think that whatever you say will justify what you’ve done?”

  “I like to think so.”

  “Fine. Then tell me, I’m all ears.”

  Donna made a note in the leather notebook she held. “Before we speak on that, Luna, would you mind sharing why you’re here?”

  Because she desperately hoped that this crazy relationship between them could be fixed. “He asked. When he gives a command, I follow it.” She glanced in Kit’s direction with a sardonic smile. “It’s who you trained me to be.”

  Physically, mentally, and sexually.

  “Have you no interest in trying to understand your marital problems?” Donna asked with another scribble. “I can only help if you let me.”

  “Oh, I understand what the problem is—he’s a liar.”

  Kit sighed. “Once was unintentional.”

  “But it became intentional the second you learned the truth and didn’t share it with me.”

  “I was protecting you, Luna.”

  “Lying to me is never protecting me—you were protecting yourself.”

  Kit ran a hand through his hair, his frustration showing, but she refused to feel bad about that. “It’s not that simple.”

  “It never is with you.”

  Their relationship could never be seen as simple, not with the way it started, or even the way it ended.

  Even she didn’t understand it sometimes.

  “How about we start at the beginning?” Donna said, setting her pen down. “Sometimes, it only takes a little clarity to better understand someone else’s perspective. So, if you both are willing, then we can start there.”

  “It’s a long story,” Luna said.

  Years’ worth of a story.

  Donna nodded once. “Take as much time as you need.”

  Luna looked to her husband, the man she had vowed to love, honor, and obey. She tried to think of the right words, where to start when it came to their relationship. There was so much.

  “If it’s all the same to you,” Kit said, noting her unease, “I’ll start.”

  She nodded.

  Kit sat back, resting his arm along the top of the settee. “It all started when my brother called to tell me he’d bought a whore.”

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Driving around the snow-capped embankment, Kit Runehart tuned out the click of the windshield wipers as they swept back and forth, clearing the flurries that collected there.

  The woman sitting next to him—Aidra, her name was—held a tablet in her lap, scanning over the ten requests that had been sent over the last twenty-four hours.

  “Here’s one you might want to consider,” she said, using two fingers to enlarge the text and picture. “Do you remember Martin Fitzgerald? He’s asked that you find his missing shipment of weapons.”

  Kit glanced in her direction. “That doesn’t sound terribly interesting.”

  “His fourth shipment in as many months, but he can’t find where the problem is. He fired the movers, even killed a few of the dock workers, but no one has any new information for him.”

  That was because he was looking in the wrong place if the guns were where Kit thought they could be—this wouldn’t be the first time someone double-crossed their partner. “Send him our fee—tell him I’ll take it.”

  “Of course.”

  Another fifteen minutes in the car and they were finally arriving at the picturesque cabin, nestled deep within the mountainside—if one weren’t looking for it, it could have easily been missed.

  Pulling around, parking directly in front of the cabin, the SUV trailing him followed suit. Kit climbed out, foregoing the heavy gray coat in the back seat of his car despite the chill in the air.

  The cold assaulted him the moment he was outside the car, his riding gloves only helping slightly, but Kit didn’t let the frigid temperature bother him as he headed around to the boot of the car. With one press of the button on his key ring, it popped open, revealing the man inside whose wrists and ankles were tied together and a strip of duct tape covered his mouth.

  Reginald Branson was a wanted man, not just by US authorities, but by the very couple Kit had brought him to. There were questions that needed to
be answered, and he’d taken the job so they could be provided.

  “Get him out,” Kit directed one of the four enforcers he kept with him.

  The Wild Bunch, they liked to be called—though once, in a different life, they had been known as Winter’s Children. But Kit understood the need to bury one’s past.

  Especially when it was as dark as theirs had been.

  Though he didn’t need the extra level of protection—he had spent more than a decade training with the Lotus Society—it made his life easier when he didn’t have to get his hands dirty anymore.

  Up the stairs they went, the door already swinging open before Kit cleared the landing. The security who opened it barely made eye contact—probably remembering the last time they had met like this.

  The man had thought to disarm him, so Kit made it a point to show him why that wasn’t such a good idea.

  A fire raged inside the hearth across the room, flames licking at the iron that encaged it. Two other guards in dark suits, wired comms in their ears, stood on either side of it, but it wasn’t to the pair of them that Kit directed his attention, rather the man he had come to see, and his wife.

  The two were as clean cut as they came, and didn’t look anything like the people Kit ordinarily dealt with, but their case had been special—and for once he lowered his fee and accepted their offer.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Clarkson, so sorry we had to meet under these conditions,” Kit said with a wave of his hand to the door.

  He didn’t think they truly cared that it was snowing outside and below freezing temperature, their attention was on the man currently on his knees, wide eyes darting around the room.

  He might not have known why he had been targeted, at first—or he might have, considering his crimes—but he was probably wondering why he hadn’t been handed over to the legal authorities.

  But he didn’t know that Kit had never cared much for doing things the legal way—or he’d be out of a job.

  Mrs. Clarkson was the first to speak. “How did you … No one has been able to find him.”

  “A friend of an enemy, I should say,” Kit answered, while not giving an answer. “Old habits die hard—isn’t that right, Reginald?”

  Kit didn’t usually involve himself too deeply in the contracts he decided to take, rather enjoying the hands-off approach that had proven lucrative to him over the last couple of years.

  But there were some men that just needed to die, and he was willing to offer a helping hand.

  Reginald Branson was a case he had taken on two months prior, nearly to the second that it had taken the man to flee the country. The Clarksons were upstanding citizens—at least they had been—that had fully expected for justice to be served against the shaking man on the floor.

  He was arrested, and meant to be tried in a court of law for his crimes. But the criminal justice system didn’t always ensure justice for the victims—and it was for that reason that men like Reginald got off on technicalities and fled before minds could be changed. By the time anyone had realized he was gone, he was already far enough away that he couldn’t be found.

  He had been a ghost in a matter of twenty-four hours.

  But Kit was in the habit of finding ghosts—it was his specialty.

  Kit snapped his fingers, setting his enforcers into movement, dragging the man further onto the tarp covered floor. It was only then that the Clarksons seemed to realize just who they were in the room with.

  His enforcers wore masks that ensured their identities weren’t compromised, especially considering when they weren’t working for him, they robbed banks in their past time.

  Had they not been as good as they were—and they only made it a habit to steal from those they knew wouldn’t report it—Kit might have been worried that they would compromise his operation.

  Two held Reginald in place while the other duo guided the Clarksons forward, taking one of the guns from each of their belts to slap into their hands.

  Mr. Clarkson stared down at the weapon as though he had never seen one before, his tremors visible. “Perhaps we should turn him into the police?”

  Kit didn’t get upset by the man’s hesitation, he understood that the decision he’d made was not one that was easy.

  Everyone had last-minute doubts.

  “We could, but he was acquitted once, no? I would hate for it to happen a second time.”

  Their case was recent, within the last year, but Reginald hadn’t become a predator overnight. No, his predilections went years in the making.

  Five years ago, he had been charged with the rape of an underage boy, but he had been found not guilty because the boy had been drunk and disoriented. Unfortunately for the rest of society, he was released and free to do as he pleased.

  And years later, he had struck once more.

  Except, this time, he hadn’t stopped at rape when it came to the Clarksons’ son.

  No, in a bid to keep his victim silent, he killed him.

  That was his mistake.

  Because had he not taken the only thing that mattered to the Clarksons, they might not have set Kit onto him.

  Reginald jerked his head back and forth, screaming behind the tape, turning pleading eyes to desperate parents.

  But he would find no sympathy in the eyes of Mrs. Clarkson.

  The second they made eye contact, his muffled pleas fell on deaf ears. She was thinking about her son, Kit knew—the boy who would never grow up and experience everything life had to offer.

  She raised the gun, a single tear falling before she pulled the trigger, then again, and one final time until Reginald was slumped on the floor, no longer fighting, no longer pleading.

  Kit barely blinked, though he did pull his vibrating phone from his pocket, checking the caller ID.

  Unknown.

  Which meant it could only be one person.

  “My men will clean this up,” he said gesturing to the body, “and Aidra will walk you through what happens next.”

  With a nod, Kit walked back out the way he came, accepting the call before he’d even made it out the door. “Uilleam.”

  There was a smile in his brother’s voice as he said, “Must you always sound cross with me, brother?”

  Though they shared the same DNA, Kit didn’t think they had much else in common besides their predilection for certain work. When Uilleam said, “brother,” there was no affection in his tone, but rather a hint of wryness that always made Kit frown.

  “Only when you call me while I’m working. What is it that you want?”

  “I need a favor.”

  Absolutely not.

  The last time Uilleam had asked for a favor, an army of men had been taken off the grid and slaughtered—he was in no mood for whatever his brother was intending to do.

  “You’re all out of those,” he settled on saying, watching the bird overhead swoop down before perching on a branch.

  “I assure you it is nothing like the others,” Uilleam returned. “I’ve bought one of Emmett Kendall’s girls, but I’ll explain everything once I see you.”

  Kit cast his gaze skyward, as though that might provide him answers. “You bought a whore, Uilleam? What on earth for?”

  “Whore is such an ugly word, isn’t it? But, as I said, we’ll discuss when I see you next.”

  For fuck’s— “My answer is no now, it’ll be no later. There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “We touch down in four hours. I’ll see you then.”

  Kit didn’t get a chance to say anything more before his brother had hung up. There was no point in calling back—Uilleam wouldn’t answer.

  Tamping down his annoyance, Kit turned back to the cabin in time to see Aidra walking toward him with a curious expression on her face.

  Already, he didn’t like the sight of it—he knew that expression spelled trouble. “What’s happened?”

  “The Kingmaker,” Aidra said—she never called Uilleam by his name. “Apparently, he took out Emmett Kendall.”

>   Now more than before, Kit knew that whatever favor his brother would ask of him, he wouldn’t like.

  Chapter 2

  2009 October 31

  1,038 … 1,039 … 1,040 …

  Each of those seconds passed with excruciating slowness, but Luna Santiago counted each of them from the very first when she had been forced to her knees, to the very last—a moment before the bitter taste of semen spilled on her tongue. Even three years later, she still had to fight the urge to vomit as soon as the milky liquid hit her tongue.

  She refused to swallow, letting it drip from her mouth instead, as Lawrence Kendall—her captor and abuser— grunted his approval, eyes riveted to the disgusting sight she must have made. He breathed rather harshly as he jerked his pants up around muscled hips, carefully tucking his now flaccid penis away.

  Her job done, Luna waited until his back was turned before she grabbed the towel he allowed her to keep nearby, dragging the rough material over her face.

  As he turned back to look at her, she saw the fine mist of sweat coating his brow, his eyes shining with a mixture of glee and dark amusement. Despite the last half hour he’d spent in the room with her, he was ready to go again.

  Once, that had been the most disgusting part about him—the casual way in which he went about preparing to leave as though he hadn’t violated her without care—but then she had learned to avert her gaze, pretending like he didn’t exist for as long as she could.

  But then she had learned that it was nothing compared to the way he came toward her once they were finished and pat her head like a good little pet—or sweeping his fingers over her skin as though needing to remind her of what they had just done.

  It wasn’t nearly as vomit worthy as the actual pain that came when she clutched at sheets to keep from screaming out in pain as he grunted in her ear, but it was a close second.

  “Get yourself cleaned up,” Lawrence said running thick fingers through cropped blond hair. “You’ll be with me today.”

  Luna didn’t respond—she didn’t even blink.

  She knew better.

  Instead, she just waited for him to go before stumbling to her feet and going about her routine.