RELEASE: A Bad Boy Hitman Romance

by Naomi West

  I nod at him. “Yes and no. If we just all got in our cars and left right now, then yeah. Within a week, the site would be stripped clean. No question. But we’re packing up everything we’ve found today. The crew will take most of it back to the Antiquities Museum in Athens. We’ve arranged for a residency there for the next year. Where we’ll study our finds.” My mind clouds over as I realize that, unlike yesterday, today I have absolutely no idea what the next year holds for me. I gulp down that feeling.

  “Or,” I start again. “I guess my crew will study what we’ve found.”

  “And the rest of it?” Kennedy asks, completely skipping over the moment where I remembered he’s a kidnapper about to pluck me out of my regularly scheduled programming.

  “The rest of it.” My heart plummets. “Well the rest of it will stay buried. No layman could excavate this site. And we’ll make it look good and plundered before we leave. So grave robbers won’t look at it and think ‘jackpot!’, you know?”

  “That makes you sad,” he says, tracing the back of his hand over my cheek.

  “Yeah,” I say, shrugging. “We didn’t find what we came here to find.” I turn and look back at the site, sighing. “But my father will kill me if I don’t protect the site. Someday, maybe we’ll be able to come back and keep excavating. But not if it’s been plundered. So the name of the game is to tag and bag everything we found and then take up the stakes and make the site look like nothing special.”

  I know I’m right. I know that this is the logical thing to do. But the idea of reburying Iairos. The one thing we came to find. Ugh. My father, my poor incapacitated father, is going to have a stroke when he hears about this. But I don’t have an option here. Kennedy said one day. And it’s either listen to him or essentially surrender myself to Esposito.

  One of those options turns me on like a light switch. The other makes me want barf into my shoes. I sigh and go to join my crew. Guess which one I choose.

  Chapter Ten

  Kennedy

  I watch her work for hours that day. The methodical, plodding work. The mystical fascination with each object she comes across. The reverence. Christ Lord, all of it turns me on.

  She’s got such concentrated attention. I adjust myself under my pants as I lean against my truck and watch over the site. I remember very clearly what it feels like to have that concentration focused on me.

  In the understatement of the century, let’s just say that I wasn’t ready for last night. I feel like I’m halfway down the waterslide and I’m not sure if there’s a pool of Jell-O at the end or a pool of poisonous snakes.

  I think of that one room in Esposito’s compound where each wall is lined with different kinds of carving knives.

  Yeah. If I had to guess, it would be a pool of poisonous snakes.

  God. I still can’t believe I’m doing this. I have yet to actually go rogue, but that’s just a matter of buying us as much time as possible while Dare gets my mom and sister safe and out of the states. He was fucking pissed when I called him last night. I had to explain why they were in danger in the first place. He thought I’d gotten out of the hustle, like the rest of them.

  Alessia’s family was a mob family for a long time. A few years back, her dad and her brothers quit the game. They left the states, picked up their roots, took the money and ran. Never looked back. They’re gonna skin me alive for keeping my mob connections live. For working for a mob boss.

  Dare cooled down pretty fast, although I don’t know if he’s told any of the rest of them. Alessia, or her brothers, Dante and Fabi. But he let me know an hour ago that he’d landed in New York City. He was headed to Brooklyn now to try and extract Mom and Mara with minimum fuss. I try to think about anything else.

  In a few hours, they’ll be free and clear and I can officially go off plan. Swoop Row somewhere that Esposito will never find her. And then I’ll breathe a little easier.

  Although, the waiting around isn’t entirely bad. It’s cool to watch her wrap up her dig site.

  She’s got a lot of authority on the site. You can tell all of the crew really respects her. And she just looks so fucking cute in that safari gear. I wish that I could give her more time to look for whatever she and her father were hunting for. But we just don’t have it. The literal second Dare has my mother and Mara secure, we’re getting the fuck out of dodge.

  I watch the last of her crew trickle out of the site for lunch. I notice that Row does not afford herself the same luxury. She’s working with the same intensity that she was four hours ago. The woman is a machine. Maybe I should wander over to some of the food stands and get something for her to eat.

  “Kennedy!” Row calls to me from across the site.

  I’m off the car like a shot, but I realize right away that she’s calling to me in excitement not distress. She stands up where she is and waves me over.

  I raise my eyebrows at the orange tape that circles the entire dig site and she throws up her hands. “Just hop it! It’s not electric!”

  I do just that and saunter over to where she’s standing, almost completely submerged, in a hole. It looks just like a grave.

  “God. Kinda gives me the willies to see you down there,” I tell her.

  “Why?” she asks, pushing her sunglasses up on her face.

  “Because it looks like you’re standing in a grave,” I reply. I don’t add the part about her standing in her own grave over my dead body.

  “That’s just it!” She claps her hands in complete excitement. She looks like a little girl. Like the ten year old version of herself. “This IS a grave! It’s Iairos, Kennedy. I found him!”

  She motions next to her at a vague outline of something she’s traced in the dirt. It’s a stone box, about three feet long and a foot tall. One corner sticks out from the hard-packed sediment. A weird feeling creeps up my spine.

  “Is that a casket?” I ask her. “A tiny casket?”

  She reaches her hand up to me and I clasp it, help to haul her out of the hole. She slaps her dusty hands on her pants.

  “We won’t be sure until we investigate further, but I can feel it. In my bones. That’s the resting place of Iairos.”

  I pull off my baseball cap and scratch my forehead. “Well, I feel like an idiot, here. But who the hell is Iairos?”

  Row takes a swig of water from the canteen at her hip, splashes a little on her hands to get the dust off. She motions to the shade of a tree at the edge of the site.

  I follow her there and the two of us sit on a piece of canvas laid out under the dusky silver leaves of an olive tree. She pulls an orange out of a little cooler that sits to our side and starts to peel it.

  “Iairos was just a boy. An ordinary boy.” She hands me an orange slice. “The stories put him at about eight years old when he died.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Well,” she says matter-of-factly. “We can’t possibly know for sure, not unless we exhumed him and studied his remains. But the story says he died of an illness. Something that caused him to wither away to almost nothing. So he was the size of almost a four or five year old when he died.”

  She pops a slice of orange into her mouth and watches a plane track across the sky. She’s both here, with me under the olive tree, and she’s away, in the story she’s telling.

  “The story is that his sister was ill with the sickness first. She was dying. Withering. Probably some kind of cancer from the sound of it. But anyways, Iairos loved his sister very much. She was younger than he was by a few years and he spent much of his life protecting her.”

  I think of Mara. Of Dare, perhaps there right this very second, extracting her out from under the nose of a torturous mob boss. I gulp. Jesus. Not right now. I can’t think of her right now.

  “But once she was sick, dying, there was nothing he could do. He was helpless. So he went to the temple of the gods. And he offered himself in her place. He was bigger and stronger, he argued, so it was almost as if the gods could feast twice in excha
nge for one soul. They’d already feasted on his sister and now they could feast on him.”

  “Is that temple the one about thirty miles down the road?”

  “The very same,” Row nodded. “It still stands. A gorgeous testament to Greek architecture. And one of the clues that ultimately led us to this dig site.”

  “What happens next in the story?”

  “Well,” she said as she adjusted the cap on her head, once again looking into the distance, toward Mount Olympus. “His sister Kyna, she got better. And sure enough, Iairos started to die. She was horrified and furious as her brother became weaker and weaker while she thrived. She went to the temple and attempted to strike the same deal that Iairos had, but the gods were done making deals. They were done with the petty issues of mortals. And they sent her away.”

  “By the time she returned-30 miles is no joke for a 6 year old-Iairos was gasping his last breaths. She laid with him while he died.”

  “Wow,” I murmur. I can’t help but imagine me and Mara in that position. How she would feel if I were dying beside her, because of my devotion to her.

  “Now, Iairos and Kyna were orphans, with no money or reputation,” Row continued. “But the community, having heard of Iairos’s sacrifice for his sister, pooled their goods and treasures and had a high priest prepare him for burial.”

  “They turned him into a mummy?”

  Row nods. My stomach turns as I think again of the little casket in the ground not far from us. There’s a tiny little mummy in there. God. That sounds lonely as hell.

  “But it’s probably not how you think. The Greeks didn’t create mummies the way the Egyptians did. It was much more similar to how we bury people in modern day society. Clothes, airtight casket, you know. But there was one difference. A big one. Kyna had the priest cut out her brother’s heart.”

  “Jesus,” I say. Repulsed by the idea.

  “It was not a common practice, but they say that she was a very compelling little girl. Beautiful and persuasive even as a child. The man did as she wished and she took the heart in a small stone box, buried it on a cliff overlooking the sea.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “It seems she thought that if she kept his heart separate from his body, then someday, when she could bend the gods to her will, she could reunite his heart with his body and he would come alive again.”

  “Bend the gods to her will?” I ask, raising my eyebrows.

  “Exactly. The crux of the story. The loss of her brother changed Kyna. She became heartbroken, bitter, furious with the gods for what she felt they’d done to her. She grew to be a beautiful woman and a powerful warrior. Legions of men fell under her command with not much more than a word. She had plans to wage war against the gods.”

  “Wow,” is all I can say.

  “Yeah. She was a real fireplug. Her army was strong, and filled with others who’d felt wronged by the gods. They marched across Greece, to Mount Olympus. There the army planned to fight the gods. To battle them. Not for control over Olympus, but in order to have their wrongs righted. In Kyna’s mind, Iairos had done everything he could to protect her life. And Kyna wanted, needed, to return the favor. But the night before they were to climb the mountain, the army camped at the bottom. Kyna accepted a glass of wine from a soldier. There was poison, from the gods, in the glass. She knew immediately. She felt the familiar withering feeling of her childhood sickness. The one that had taken Iairos.”

  “She knew the gods had won. They would not fight her. So, she used her remaining strength to go back to the site where she had buried Iairos’s heart. Her army, now headless without her, dissipated and scattered, asked for mercy from the gods. She asked for no such pity. She dug her own grave. Right next to the box that held Iairos’s heart. She laid a stone tablet over her own chest and closed her eyes to rest forever.”

  “What did the tablet say?”

  “It explained her story. Who she was. Who her brother was. And where his bones lay. She asked anyone who found it to return the two components of him to one another. To make him whole again.”

  I let out a long, smooth breath. For a moment, while she’d been telling the story, it almost seemed like the bright sun had dimmed. But now, the clouds part and the two of us are back, side by side under the olive tree, looking out over the site where Iairos’s body might very well lie.

  “So, I take it you and your father found the tablet. The heart.” I assume this is what has inspired such passion in the two of them to find the remains of Iairos.

  But Row shakes her head. “No. My mother did. She was an archaeologist too. That’s how she and my father met.” Row adjusts her cap again, just a little bit lower over her eyes. “It was a standard dig, they were expecting to find some old clay pots. Maybe some animal remains. The site was an ancient place of sacrifice. They didn’t expect to find the tablet, the few bones of Kyna’s that had survived. The small stone box containing traces of organic matter, with human DNA attached to it.” Row’s eyes are so distant. So clinical. As if she isn’t talking about her mother.

  “She became obsessed with reuniting the heart and body of Iairos. She could barely rest or eat or talk about anything else. She got sick about a year into the search. About 15 years ago. Leukemia. It withered her body just as Iairos and Kyna’s body did. A coincidence, to be sure, but a haunting one.”

  I’m holding her hand and I’m not sure when I started, but all I know is that even under the hot Greek sun, her skin is cold.

  “My father never believed in magic or hocus pocus like that. But he never got over my mother’s death. I think he feels in some way, that the unholy separation of Iairos’s heart from his body was a curse. One that transferred to my mother. Killed her. I think he feels that if he reunites the heart and the body, then all three of them, Iairos, Kyna, and my mother will all be able to rest in peace.”

  “And what do you think?” I ask. I truly have no idea what she thinks. She’s as shuttered and closed off as I’ve ever seen her.

  Row slips her hand from mine. “I think that the dead are dead. Not resting. They’re gone. Poof. But my father is alive. And peace on this matter would certainly make his life better.”

  She stands, reaches a hand down to help me stand too. “And I think that it’s a very interesting archaeological find. It has a nice symmetry to it. A narrative end. Which is a rarity in my world. Usually there’s a lot more beginnings to stories then there are ends.”

  I stand beside her and watch as her companions on the dig start loading carefully marked and wrapped archaeological finds onto a large truck. Part of me can’t believe how well she’s taking all this. Her entire life has been completely turned upside down in the last 24 hours. Not to mention the fact that she’s standing here, calm as can be, while we dismantle the dig site on something she and her father have been searching for 15 years. In order to make peace with her mother’s death, no less.

  I don’t know if I’ve ever felt like a bigger dick than I do right now. Watching her head back over to the truck to oversee the loading process. Watching as she glances back, wistfully, at Iairos’s grave.

  I glance at the time on my phone. Dare should be extracting Mara and my mother from Brooklyn right this very second. If everything goes according to plan then he’ll be calling me in about an hour, telling me that we can get the fuck out of dodge. Hopefully, her father will be revivable at that point, and we won’t need to figure out a way to get an unconscious man out of Greece.

  Unfortunately, I think this means that she’s gonna have to hide the grave. Bury it and hope it doesn’t get plundered. I saw how long it took for her to excavate a shard of pottery this morning. It was the size of a nickel. There’s no way she’s exhuming an entire casket in less than two hours.

  It’s for her own good, but I have a pit in my stomach as I head over to her to break the news.

  She sees in my eyes what I’m going to say before I even cross the site to her.

  “I know, I know,” s
he says. “I’ll bury him.”

  “Can I help?” I ask, although I’m already fairly certain what her answer will be.

  “No,” a small smile flickers at the edge of her sadness. “Civilians can’t help, even with the re-burying of priceless, ancient artifacts.”

  So I watch from a distance, under our olive tree. She slowly and painstakingly fills in the hole with dirt, planting certain markers here and there in the earth. I’m sure she’s making a map for herself when she comes back to dig it up. She works methodically at the gravesite while her crew loads the rest of the treasures. After an hour they, one by one, file over to say goodbye to her as she works. She must have already told them that she and her father won’t be joining them at the Antiquities Museum in Athens. She hugs a few of them, shakes the others’ hands.

  And then she’s just standing there, over Iairos’s re-buried grave, watching her crew drive away with months of work. At least she knows it’ll be safe in Athens. I’m not sure how big of a consolation that is to a woman who is still under the impression that she and her father could be taken to Esposito at any moment.