Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
About the Author
Reaper
A Dark Assassins Novel
Book Two
Valerie Ullmer
Reaper (A Dark Assassins Novel Book Two)
Copyright © 2016 Valerie Ullmer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in either print or electronic form without written permission from the author. Quotes used in reviews are the one exception. No alteration of content is allowed.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, places and locales, or events, is purely coincidental. All characters and events portrayed in this book are completely fictitious and dreamed up by the author.
Cover Design by Melody Simmons
Copy Edit by Faith Williams from The Atwater Group
Chapter One
Reaper
It had been close to a month since he last spotted the curvy brunette who had come to occupy his waking thoughts, and if it weren’t for his flawless memory, he would have thought she had been a figment of his imagination. An emotion he couldn’t pinpoint clawed inside him, a sense that he needed to find her before another danger presented itself. That feeling led him to stand outside a deserted neighborhood, his breath visible against the cold night, at close to midnight. If he didn’t find her soon, he would have to give up his search and go back to work.
Every night since he had lost her trail, he would scout a different neighborhood in the mountain town of Snowfall, Colorado that contained vacation homes, empty because of the off-season, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. He had found evidence of her overnight stay at several, but he hadn’t been able to track her until after she’d left. Although he sensed that he had been getting close, the time he’d spent searching passed with excruciating slowness with no trace of the woman.
Reaper had first spotted her when his team had raided Standard Biotech to rescue several immortals who had been imprisoned, and to his surprise, the make-shift prison also contained…her.
Hell, he didn’t even know her name, but he knew her to be human.
The moment he walked into the glass enclosure that held her and the other prisoners, he smelled her fear. It took him a moment to locate her with her back pressed against the opposite wall, trying to hide in the shadows. A low growl escaped his throat as the guard in the room reached for her arm, wrenching her closer, as he walked backward toward another exit. Reaper took a step toward her, ignoring the insignificant human with the weapon. At his advance, the guard released his hold on her to grip the gun with both hands. Reaper’s mouth twisted into a smile that promised pain.
The guard reached blindly for her the moment he spotted Reaper’s sneer, but she held herself out of his reach, and at that moment he realized that her fear had nothing to do with their raid. Her eyes darted to the door, as if she expected someone to walk in and kill her. Protectiveness swamped him, and that unknown feeling had him wading through his own thoughts, too slow to reach her before another tried.
I got her. Kai started forward. The guard flinched at the quick movement, and he emptied the magazine into the vampire’s chest. Kai grunted in pain, but kept his progress until he reached the woman. Reaching an arm out, Kai gripped the hem of her shirt. Before he could yank her close, the guard smashed the butt of the gun down on Kai’s forearm, breaking several bones and the vampire dropped to the ground.
Reaper darted forward and grabbed the guard by the throat, easily crushing his windpipe, before he tossed him to the side without any further thought. His eyes scanned the area because he expected the woman to be right in front of him, close enough to touch, but when he searched, there was nothing.
Mine! He raged inside his own head, not letting the others know about the fear shivering over him at the thought of her gone.
“Fuck, Kai, can you see her?”
The vampire grunted as he righted himself, bleeding profusely from close to a dozen bullet wounds, but he glanced around and he shook his head, confirming that the woman disappeared.
“I can smell her. I still sense her fear,” Reaper said.
After searching for close to a half hour, Kai hadn’t healed enough to continue, and Reaper had been forced to give up his search for the woman.
They carried Kai back to his house where he could drink from his mate, Liv, and regain his strength, but every instinct inside him told him to keep searching for the missing woman. But without an idea where to start, desperation and hopelessness made his muscles and brain lethargic.
Destiny had given him a second chance later that same night. Liv had been kidnapped by the now dead Dr. Ames, the one who had captured and tortured the immortals. Reaper tried to suppress any thoughts about why they’d captured the human woman and what they might have subjected her to during her captivity. It was the only way he could keep his instincts sharp as they raided the warehouse to save Liv.
While they waited for Ghost’s signal to breach, the familiar scent slammed into him, stealing his breath. The stiffening of his spine alerted Jade, who stood next to him in formation.
What? Jade’s surprised outburst rang in his head.
He looked down and something on his face had alerted Jade to scan their surroundings. The scent of fear lingered in the air, and although the fox shifter understood what it meant, her brows drew down in confusion at the intensity that must’ve shown on his face.
Ghost, the woman is here. Reaper needs to protect her, Jade communicated through their mind link.
Go. We’ll call if we have problems. Ghost’s gruff voice gave him permission.
Reaper didn’t wait; he took off at a run, desperate to reach her before she could be spotted or killed.
As he rounded the corner, what he saw gave him pause.
She stared into the warehouse, her brows angled down in concentration, as she moved her hands through the air. It wasn’t until he looked inside that he fully understood. Dr. Ames had been throwing punches at Liv, striking her face and chest, but something—or someone—slowed his movements enough that the blows were ineffective. When he glanced back at the woman, he knew that she had been the one preventing the fierceness of the hits.
When the understanding struck him, his body stiffened as he processed what it meant for the woman. They kidnapped her because her powers were beyond that of a normal human, and they would kill her before they let that kind of power escape them. A fierce growl broke through before he could hold it back.
The woman whipped around to face him, her eyes wide, as she kept her hands outstretched. A howl of pain sounded from inside, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her. At the same moment, the team breached the warehouse; Kai would take care of Liv, so he took a step closer to to the scared woman in front of him. She tensed but didn’t run, and he took that as a sign of progress. Another step, and then another, but when he stood several feet away, he knew not to push it any further, and stopped.
“I’m not going to hurt you, beautiful,” he said.
Her eyes were wary, but she hadn’t moved from the spot since he alerted her to his presence. He could see the exhaustion etched on her face as she leaned against the outside wall of corrugated metal. Although he had a strong desire to sweep her in his arms and keep her safe, he managed to keep his distance.
She looked as though she hadn’t slept in days, maybe even longer. The way the scrubs hung on her malnourished body indicated that she’d lost weight. Although her curvy body tempted him like no other’s had, rage rushed through him at the abuse she must have suffered, and it stole his breath. With his mind ricocheting around desire, protectiveness, and rage, he took a deep, calming breath before trying to convince her to accept his protection.
Instead of shying away from his eyes that roamed over her body and face, she stood her ground and stared up at him. He met her gaze, and for long minutes, they stared at each other. Something settled inside him when she relaxed her stance.
He had found her, and his wolf let out a low growl of pleasure at that.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
Her eyebrow rose in question, but she didn’t speak.
“You disappeared from me and my team before we could rescue you from Standard. I could sense you near, but you stayed hidden from me.”
“Why were you there in the first place?” she asked.
He enjoyed her low, smoky voice as she spoke, and it took him a few moments before he answered her question.
“We were assigned to free the shifters and the vampire, but we didn’t know about you. We were expecting the possibility of more than four, so we were prepared to extract you as well.”
“Who is we?”
“Me and my team.” He didn’t want her to know the entire truth until she had trusted him, after she had gotten to know him.
Something in his answer made her tense. So did the next words out of his mouth.
“Why don’t I take you to my house? We can grab a bite to eat and you can get some sleep.”
Her head shook and she stepped back from him.
Her rejection tugged something in his chest that left an ache. Fuck, he had pressed too hard.
He held his hands up in surrender, showing her that he wouldn’t force her, but he thought about how he might appear to her. Ready for battle, he was decked out in all black, two guns in holsters at his hips, a knife sheathed around his right thigh, and a semi-automatic strapped to his back.
He searched for words that would put her at ease with him. When he spotted movement to his right, he glanced inside and spotted Liv in Kai’s arms. Kai had Liv back, and he knew that the vampire would do everything in his power to save his mate.
“Thank you, for what you did for Liv.”
Curses whipped around in his brain as he watched her eyes widen at his words and felt her pulse speed up to near panic. He realized, too late, that he said the wrong thing, again.
His words must’ve reminded her of her captivity, and she confirmed his suspicions when she darted her gaze into the warehouse. When she nodded, satisfied that Liv was in safe hands, she jerked away from the window and started down the alley. In the opposite direction of where he stood.
At a loss for words, he followed after her. After a few blocks, she whipped around, outrage marring her features.
“What do you want?” she asked.
Hands held up in surrender, he waited until her breathing settled before he spoke.
“I want to keep you safe, to protect you from whoever is after you.”
The look on her face brought further insight into her world. Trust didn’t come easily to her, and both times he’d run across her, he had been armed and decked out for combat. Along with his height and build, she must have thought that he forced people to bend to his will. But to him, her trust and willingness was more important. He wondered who had hurt her, but his answers would have to wait.
“I don’t need your help.” Her voice broke on the last word.
She had shown him in every way possible that she could take care of herself, but with exhaustion pulling at her and the trauma of being imprisoned, it would lead her to make sloppy choices that could lead to her death.
Words weren’t his forte, and trying to convince her that he, a fucking shifter assassin, wasn’t going to hurt her seemed impossible, but he had to try. If she didn’t listen to him, he would have to take her by force and save the explanations for when she was ready to hear them.
Turning away from him, she started down the street, and he followed. For several blocks, they walked in silence as he closed the distance between them.
Before he could reach her, he found himself hovering several feet in the air.
He glanced down and noticed the strain on her face as she held him away from her. He tried to move his arms, but he found his body frozen. A loud, ferocious growl ripped from his throat at the confinement. The rage that coursed through him should have had his form shifting into his wolf, an automatic reaction to an unknown situation, but his wolf stayed dormant inside him.
“I’m preventing it. I know you’re stronger in animal form, and I’m too tired to hold you for long. The scientists wanted to test them in both forms, but the shifters refused, and I learned how to bind them from doing so. It took me a couple days, but I eventually learned.”
Her brows drew down, and he knew that she contemplated why she had told him all of this information. When she glanced up at him, she gave him a small smile.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Before he could ask her about her apology, he found himself flying through the air, back toward the warehouse. He braced himself for the impact and for the pain that would certainly come with the velocity with which he traveled, but his feet lightly touched the ground before he was released from her hold.
He ran at a full sprint to where he had last spotted her and couldn’t help the panic that rose in his throat when he’d lost her scent. Desperation had led him to search for her until dawn, but she had vanished.
Their short conversation had been branded in his mind, and he replayed it every night as he waited for her to appear. Her smoky voice, filled with doubt yet tinged with hope, had run through his mind every day since he’d lost her. Instead of driving him to give up, it led to the opposite, and made him work harder at finding her. His only mission was to track the woman who had driven his thoughts from mere curiosity to obsession. He had gone as far as taking a leave from Dark Company, letting Ghost believe that he’d found her.
Absently, he lifted his left wrist to glance at his watch. His enhanced vision let him read the numbers without light, and he groaned aloud at the late hour. It seemed as though he had missed her again.
Pushing away from the tree, he was about to turn away when he spotted a flash of movement to his right.
Her scent hit him first, but he didn’t know whether he could trust his senses. Blending into the darkness, he watched as she stalked closer to his position. When his gaze landed on her face, it confirmed what he had known minutes before.
He had found her.
***
All of his muscles locked down as he scanned her, making sure that she hadn’t been hurt. When he found her injury-free, he blew a sigh of relief.
Comparing the last memory he had of her, he took note that she had lost even more weight from her time on the run. Her body, clothed in scrubs that were similar to the pair she wore close to a month before, hung loosely on her curvy frame.
Before he could rein it in, a low growl of disapproval slipped past his lips. Either too tired or determined to get into the house, she missed the noise.
He kept his gaze on her as she ran up the porch and hesitated a moment, before she waved a hand in front of the door. When the door unlocked, she pushed her way in and closed it behind her. He heard the distinct click of the lock sliding back into place.
Although he wanted to rush after her, scoop her up, and ta
ke her home while she would be too tired to launch him down the block, instinct told him to wait. If he found her, then someone else could’ve as well.
Less than five minutes after she entered the house, a figure emerged from the woods several yards from where he stood. Without disguising his movements, the man ran up to the porch and jiggled the doorknob. His amateur actions covered the noise of Reaper’s advance.
As Reaper stood feet away from eliminating the new threat, a male voice erupted through the man’s earpiece, making the asshole jump. Reaper paused and listened to the angry voice.
“Have you got her yet?”
Instead of answering, the stupid git removed the offending object from his ear and stomped on it. “I’m going to kill that bitch when I get a hold of her.”
Reaper waited until the man went back to his futile attempt at picking the lock before he unsheathed a knife from his thigh. Not giving his target time to make any more progress on the lock, he stepped forward and wrapped a hand around the man’s mouth and nose, silencing his shout of surprise. Rage filled Reaper at how close this man had gotten to her. So with precise movements, he drove the knife into the man’s chest to the hilt and twisted. The man was dead within a matter of seconds.
He hid the body on the side of the porch. The bushes would prevent anyone from the street happening upon him. After the woman was secured in his home, he would call for a cleanup crew to make the body disappear.
Reaper hadn’t been surprised that they caught up to her, and he knew that this one man’s incompetence didn’t mean that whoever chased her would make the same mistake twice. He had to rush before the man in the earpiece realized that his colleague lay dead.
Stepping up to the door, he placed his hands, several inches apart, and pressed until the locks gave way. He slid inside without a sound before shutting the door. Taking a deep breath to get a trace on where she might have gone, he was surprised because it seemed as the entire house smelled of her. Light and sweet.
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