Hate F*@k: The Complete Story

by Ainsley Booth

  “How long you took to get rid of her? Yes, it was.” Jason scowls at me, but since we need to stay on the same side today, I hold myself back from punching him. Just barely. “I thought you said you’d handle it. She says you were with her last night.”

  Last night. Ten minutes ago. “She’s none of your business.”

  “No,” he barks, taking me by surprise. I know he’s not pleased, but the look on his face is murderous. “She should be none of your business, for her sake. And the sooner you remember that, the better it will be for her.”

  I stare at him, pulse pounding. He’s not wrong. “Well, maybe I need to reconsider what business I’m in, then.”

  “Right now?” My best friend and business partner slides his usual calm mask into place and smirks at me. I want nothing more than to punch that smarmy look off his face. “Sure. We can discuss that right after we figure out who murdered Anabeth Fletcher.”

  I twist to glare at Wilson, who just hunkers down behind his computer and doesn’t say anything.

  Jason continues as if I haven’t just threatened to quit. “Tag is going to stop and talk to the medical examiner on his way back. Hopefully he can get an exact time of death.”

  I take a deep breath. Focus. “Fletcher didn’t do this.” I say it as a statement of fact, but none of us know for sure.

  Jason frowns. “Unless he’s the world’s greatest actor, no. I was heading home when he called me, already in my car, so I was there fast. Ten minutes after he woke up, maybe? And you guys all got there fifteen minutes after that. And I didn’t see anything that made me think he knew what the hell was going on.”

  Jesus. A man wakes up next to his dead wife, a gun in his hand…if you have our number, you call it. You don’t call 9-1-1. Not if you’ve got enough money or power to know better.

  I wish we’d had more time to clean up the scene. But no sooner had I arrived than the police were knocking on the door, and I only had one option. I wiped down the gun and picked it up, dropping it as soon as the uniformed officers came through the bedroom door.

  Our client didn’t need to be arrested for the murder of his wife. I spared him from that. I can’t spare him from the months of rumors and speculation, but I could keep him out of handcuffs this morning, so I did.

  “Then we need to dig into their backgrounds, figure out why someone would want Anabeth dead.” I lean forward, bracing my hands on the coffee table. “Brian had me escort her to a few things last year. He never gave me a reason, and at that point, I was just happy to make the contacts. We need to ask him why.”

  Jason nods. “We’ll go over there later today. Once we know more.”

  Wilson clears his throat and the screen flickers to life. He’s got a macro running on that laptop that auto-fills a fancy looking presentation with data from a number of databases he shouldn’t have access to.

  Shouldn’t have access to is like catnip for Wilson.

  So Anabeth’s deepest, darkest secrets scroll across the wall.

  “That’s it?” Jason shakes his head. An abortion when she was twenty-two. A few parking tickets. An audit five years earlier that carried a small tax penalty. “So this isn’t about her.”

  “Not unless she was leading a double life we don’t know about.” Wilson’s voice says it all—not likely.

  I frown. “What about Fletcher?”

  We already know his dossier from when we accepted him as a client. None of us need to look at the screen. Jason makes a beats me face. “We took him on as a client because of who he knows, not who he is. He’s on the Education and the Workforce committee. Not a threat to anyone. Might be a good future leader, but that’s two or three election cycles away.”

  “Huh.” Wilson squints at his screen and types a few quick keystrokes, then another round of lightning-quick taps. “Well, two months ago he started making noises about an anti-sex slavery bill. It was shot down by the party leadership staff. Twice.”

  “What? Why?” Jason asks the question that’s on both of our minds. That sounds like an easy bill to support.

  This is our area of weakness. None of us are Washington insiders. It’s an advantage because we’re truly non-partisan. On the other hand, parsing shit like this makes all of our heads hurt.

  “Searching…hang on.” A few more key strokes, then he stops and stares at the screen. “Holy shit.”

  “What?”

  “The poor bastard.” Wilson narrows his eyes as he punches a finger at the keyboard. The large screen flips to a projection of an email account. The recipient is Fletcher’s chief of staff, an experienced Hill veteran.

  Is there any way to get Fletcher out of the way? Something that might remove his wife as an option, too?

  I stalk around the table and stab my finger at the sender’s email address on the screen: syst34@xmail.com. “Who in the hell is this?”

  “Hang on…” The email zooms to the corner of the screen as Wilson brings up a black search box and starts typing. IP addresses whiz by on the screen until one flashes and stops.

  “Jesus Christ. The email was sent from a server inside the Russian embassy.”

  We all curse at the same time.

  “Wait. Look at his history. Fucking hell, this motherfucker gets around. The Turkish embassy. Iranian. Practically everyone except the Chinese.”

  Well, no shit. Nobody asks the Chinese embassy if they can just hop on their wifi and send murder plot emails from their Hotmail account.

  I look at Jason. He looks at Wilson. “You sure? This isn’t some teenager pranking?”

  Our ex-CIA hacker doesn’t even blink. “Nope. These emails were legitimately sent from those locations. I don’t see anything else that interesting, so maybe he slipped up. Hopefully there’s more—maybe in code…it’ll take me an hour or two to read through all of these.”

  I cross my arms and narrow my eyes at Jason. “Time for you to call the puppet master.”

  He looks back at me blandly. He’s always so sure he’s on the side of good, no matter how fucked up things get. I haven’t had that confidence in years—the primary factor in my decision to leave the SEAL teams.

  I still don’t really understand why Jason left with me. He’d been tapped for the secret squirrel, black ops team. Although we play at that, most of the time we’re exactly what we seem to be—fixers, up-and-coming bachelors of Washington society. Professional assholes.

  Not superheroes. Not even anti-heroes.

  Nothing heroic about what we do, even if there’s a shadowy organization that keeps telling Jason we should keep doing it.

  And I’m the number one asshole who does it, without an ounce of belief.

  No wonder Hailey wants nothing to do with me—she can see my true character.

  But right now…this might be one of those moments when the other side of what we do might actually make a difference. Too late for Anabeth Fletcher. Hopefully not too late for her husband.

  “First, call Tag. Tell him to pick up Fletcher and bring him here,” Jason says. “He can stay with me while you two figure out what someone might want Fletcher to lose his seat in the House.” He rubs his thumb between his eyebrows. “And yeah, I’ll go make a call.”

  He disappears to his office. This is the deal. He’s the only one who talks to his PRISM contact.

  Project Responsible for International Security Measures.

  It sounds so…reasonable. And compared to the forces of evil in this world, it is. But the powers-that-be who formed the alliance are ruthless. They wouldn’t care about an individual murder. Not of Anabeth Fletcher. Not of a hooker who made the mistake of saying no to Morgan Reid six months ago.

  My stomach turns at all the blind-eyes that have been turned in the name of international geo-political stability.

  But if the take down of Representative Fletcher is a lead domino, intended to start a chain reaction that culminates in World War III…that, they care about. That, we can demand support on.

  And if this turns out to be noth
ing? Then they’ll turn a blind eye to the justice we administer.

  — —

  We wait four excruciating days before making our move.

  Word came back from PRISM that they were concerned, but had no immediately relevant information to share. Whatever the fuck that means. So we did our thing.

  Wilson read every single email he could find. We talked to people. Found out that Fletcher’s bill was shot down after lobbyist intervention. What lobbyist? No one would say.

  Tag gave Kendra what we had. She said it wasn’t enough, and she was right.

  So now I’m waiting in an alley a few blocks from his house in the early evening. There aren’t any cameras nearby. Tag dropped me in a visual dead zone, and he’ll pick me up again in the same spot in a different vehicle.

  Wesley Perry, Fletcher’s snake of a chief of staff, is walking toward me. Face down in his smart phone, because he’s an asshole and unaware of his surroundings.

  It gives me a decent amount of pleasure to yank him into the dark alley and send his phone flying toward the brick wall. “Oops.”

  “Hey!” His fists come up too late. I’ve got my forearm pressed against his neck, up into his chin. He scrabbles his hands against me, his eyes wide with fear.

  Good.

  “Two options here, motherfucker. Talk or die, got it?” My breath puffs in his face.

  He kicks at me and I step back, letting him trip himself. Down he goes and up I drag him, slamming him against the bricks again, my fists holding him so tightly his coat tears at the seams. The rip makes me grin.

  “Next thing to break is your face.”

  With a whimper, he presses his legs together and my nose tells me why he’s crying. He’s pissed himself.

  Of course he has.

  “I haven’t even hit you yet.”

  “Don’t hit me,” he says, his eyes pleading for mercy.

  “No, I’m definitely going to hit you. I’m going to leave you battered and bruised, so you never forget that I’m more terrifying than the asshole you’ve been working with. Who is he? Because I’m not scared of him.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Wrong answer, Wesley.” I drive my fist into his guts. “Try again.”

  “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he gasps.

  “So you didn’t exchange emails with syst34@xmail.com? Because I know that you did. And I don’t like being lied to.”

  He groans as I thump him against the wall again, but he still doesn’t talk.

  “Is there any way to get Fletcher out of the way?” I recite the email from memory. “And you responded. He needs to be disgraced. Ruined forever. Maybe he could off his wife.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” he whispers, which is pathetic if it’s true. I don’t fucking care.

  “But she’s dead, isn’t she? An innocent woman. You did that. Who were you talking to?” I release him, and he staggers towards me, putting his hands up. I jab twice, quickly, before delivering a roundhouse to his jaw. It’s barely fair.

  Good thing I don’t believe in fair.

  “I don’t know his name.”

  “Wrong answer.” Another jab to the gut. I’m done hurting him now, because I’m not a murderer, but I don’t have a problem bruising them up when I come across them in an alley.

  “I think he goes by the name Andre. I heard him answer his phone that way once.”

  “Where did you usually meet him?”

  “The Mall. A coffee shop near the Hill sometimes. I haven’t seen or heard from him since Anabeth—”

  Blood sprays the wall as I thud my fist into his jaw. “Don’t fucking say her name.”

  He sags against the brick, and I step back, my chest heaving.

  Ten seconds pass. Thirty. The chill of the cold February night is getting to him. He’s been pummelled in an alley. Any second now…

  His shoulders slump, and I lean in, gripping his jaw in a painful hold. “Physical description. Anything you remember. I want it all. Give me everything, and you leave here alive.”

  He spits out more than I expected. Enough that when he’s done, and I’ve whispered a promise to make the injuries permanent if he doesn’t quit and find another job in another city doing anything but power-play politics, I saunter out of the alley, leaving him standing.

  More than he deserves.

  I’m getting soft.

  I shove that thought away. I know why. I don’t want any thoughts of Hailey in my head while I do what I’ve gotta do.

  Tag pulls up ten seconds late and I get in. My hands are freezing and my knuckles hurt, but I’ve got what I need. As soon as we pull away, he gives me even better, unexpected news, as he hands over a tablet.

  I hit play as he explains. “Brian Fletcher’s neighbour to the east has video surveillance, after all. Kendra doesn’t have this yet, I assume, because she’s still sniffing around us covering this up for the good representative.”

  “Why are we just getting it now?”

  “Their system went offline before Wilson started looking that morning. It just blipped back on and he snuck in through their digital backdoor tonight. Two masked men scaled the wall into their backyard twenty minutes before Fletcher called Jason. No great shot of their faces, but we’ve got build, height. And one of them has a slight limp.”

  “You gonna suggest she get a warrant for this?”

  “Already done.”

  I nod and pull out my phone. I replay the voice recording for Tag. We listen to it twice on the way to the office, and by the time we get there, we already have a plan.

  —five—

  Hailey

  A week without Cole has meant a week of thinking.

  I want to scrub him from my brain, and my heart, but he’s in there. Stubborn bastard.

  I keep coming back to memories I didn’t even realize I had, and each time they replay in my mind, I’m reminded that he’s wanted me just as long as I’ve wanted him. It’s bittersweet and totally unhelpful.

  Five months ago, I was summoned to my parents’ estate.

  At the time, I convinced myself I was going to be a good daughter.

  Now I know I went to see him again.

  — —

  Five months ago

  It’s embarrassing, how my face flushes as I walk into the library where they’ve gathered to talk about who-knows-what. Something to do with Georgetown, I guess, which is why I’ve been called, since I just graduated. But my face is hot because he’s here. Cole of the thousand-yard-glare, who turns me on and repulses me at the same time.

  Who are you? I want to ask him. How can you be so soulless and so freaking captivating at the same time? Why the hell won’t you get out of my fantasies and let me dream about a nice quiet life that doesn’t have any drama in it?

  I bee-line for the bar, because I could use some liquid courage for whatever this is, and for ignoring the uncomfortable tension seething my way from Cole’s corner of the room.

  Right away, my mother is in my face, and against my will, my eyes dart around her to find his face.

  I don’t know why I do. He’s obviously pissed at me.

  I get it. I’m so useless when it comes to this society stuff.

  “Did you give a quote to the campus paper detailing that you’re not close to your family because you’re trying to be an upstanding citizen?” My mother’s voice is shrill. Migraine-inducing. Completely un-maternal.

  “That sounds like something I’d say inside my head, but no. I know better than to talk to anyone.” I barely even have any friends who would know that about me. I just started an internship at this employment agency and got all excited when this girl Taryn asked me to have lunch with her. I’m an island of silence, because of my family. I shake my head and repeat the denial. “Definitely didn’t say that.”

  My father rises, a smirk on his face. “It doesn’t matter, Amy.” My mother stiffens. She hates that he calls her that. Amelia Dashford Reid doesn’t do nic
knames. “It’s just some socialist kid trying to make trouble before the unveiling of the Reid Steyner Center next week.”

  That’s something Cole and his group of evil minions managed to do. A month after my father narrowly missed being charged with murder, they’ve orchestrated a major donation to the business school that will see a think tank named after my father’s company.

  It makes me sick.

  But that doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t have anything to do with the article my sister must be tapping against her knee. Taylor doesn’t willingly read anything—unless it’s about herself.

  After another short yelling match that one of the other Horus Group guys—Jason—deflects into a more productive conversation about something else I don’t care about, I head outside for some fresh air. I need to clear my head.

  I want to convince myself to run screaming and never look back, but that leaves Alison all alone with them. And I love my baby sister. I’m willing to do anything to protect her.

  It’s dusk, a lovely summer evening that I’d enjoy if I didn’t have to go back in with the vultures soon.

  And if I were alone. Because when I look up again, Cole is a few yards away.

  Watching me.

  For a second, his gaze is hot and dangerous. Like he sees me as a woman, and the cold anger from earlier is gone.

  “Ms. Reid?” And just like that, bam, he’s back to being a suit.

  My sisters all have first names. Me? To Cole Parker I’ll always be Ms. Reid. Held at arm’s length like I’m the problem.

  I’m a twenty-three year old intern at a disability employment agency. Between me and Cole “No Comment Motherfucker” Parker, I’m not the problematic one.

  I live in a small two-bedroom apartment and refuse to touch my trust fund. I volunteer at a food bank, and in my spare time, I spend too much time on Ravelry. I’m pretty sure Cole spends his spare time cage match fighting and seducing the wives of Washington’s most powerful men. We are nothing alike.