The Laughing Assassin [Assassin's Diary] (Siren Publishing Classic)
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Assassin's Diary
The Laughing Assassin
What can a simple man offer the most deadly of women? Money? Love? Or an adventure with the promise of more to come?
Jaden Bishop is closed off to the possibilities of love and romance. She is a premier assassin, trained by Ronin warriors as a child after she was left orphaned. By day, she bakes cupcakes, and at night? She keeps her body honed by training the weapon forged by her childhood. Interpersonal relationships have no place in her life.
But none of that matters when it comes to love.
Jonah Whitmore fell for the mercenary woman before they met, via the World Wide Web and all of the information he could plumb from his computer. He needs Jaden’s expertise, but he wants the woman for himself. He will stop at nothing to make his goals reality. And that includes making the wily assassin his woman.
Genre: Contemporary, Interracial, Romantic Suspense
Length: 82,234 words
THE LAUGHING ASSASSIN
Assassin’s Diary
Jennifer Willows
EROTIC ROMANCE
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Erotic Romance
THE LAUGHING ASSASSIN
Copyright © 2013 by Jennifer Willows
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62242-791-8
First E-book Publication: April 2013
Cover design by Harris Channing
All cover art and logo copyright © 2013 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
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Regarding E-book Piracy
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This is Jennifer Willows’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Ms. Willows’s right to earn a living from her work.
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DEDICATION
To Debbie, you have been an author’s best friend and confidant. Thank you for the use of your dining room table when I needed the bachelorette pad to get a moment to myself and the use of your ears when I needed someone to listen to me mutter about everything and nothing all at once. To Olivia, thanks for letting me use your name to chop n’ screw around with, and of course, thanks for being porch buddies.
To my mommy, thank you for corralling the terrible twosome of Thing One and Two when I needed to work and transition into a single girl in the small city. And I am so grateful for the advice you gave me along the way.
To my children, may they never know just how twisted their mommy’s mind really is, even as they enjoy the benefits. To my editor, thank you, thank you, thank you! These edits were the easiest by far and I really appreciated the commentary along the way. To Siren BookStrand acquisitions, thank you for having me re-do the ending, the story wouldn’t be half as strong without the changes.
THE LAUGHING ASSASSIN
Assassin’s Diary
JENNIFER WILLOWS
Copyright © 2013
Prologue:
Pay the Piper
July 2008
It was an auspicious hour. Not only was it nearly midnight, but the mansion along the ocean was smothered in fog. Juan was certain that the dark shadow was more than it seemed on the slightly grainy monitor feed from the video camera, but the night watchman was sure someone waited there.
It was Jones’s fault, Juan knew. There was only so much evil one human could perpetrate before karma took over. Jones was too much the skinflint to spend money on better surveillance. But the man would pay any price to indulge his fetish for snuff and torture. If the cameras had been of just a hair better quality, the reception for the wireless feed would be much better. Then he would know if the shadows were what he thought.
Juan had long since stopped mentioning what he saw. The other guards just laughed at him, claimed he was the boy who cried wolf, but somehow for the last three nights he was certain that someone was watching and waiting for something to happen. Before he left for duty this evening, he did extra Hail Marys and several Our Fathers. Whatever was out there didn’t have good intentions.
He didn’t plan on dying tonight. But without proof, no one believed him. No matter what he said he saw, he was summarily dismissed by the rest of his coworkers as if he didn’t operate on all cylinders. As was, he could see the other guards and security personnel ignore his warnings then circle fingers at their temples after he spoke. As if he was muy loco. He couldn’t make the others around him see the bits and pieces that didn’t add up.
The first night he saw an extra shadow beside one of the gargoyle statues bordering the property, and on the second night he saw another odd shadow clustered in the corner of the fenced-in back wall along the garden. Tonight, he saw an unusually dark area near the ocean just along the beach. To a less wary person it would look as if flotsam or driftwood had washed onto the beach, but he knew better.
“Hey, Johnson, check that driftwood out,” Juan asked the patrolling guard using his radio.
“What and where?” The reply was quick and snarky, as if the man was humoring his crazy colleague.
“About two hundred feet to the left of you, check the beach.” He saw the patroller reach the mass in no time and shake his head before he kept on.
The radio crackled to life as Johnson spoke. “It was nothing, just a bunch of dead branches that washed up on the beach. You need a vacation.” Damn it, he knew that something was no
t right, but none of the other employees gave enough of a damn to do their jobs properly.
A man couldn’t live as their employer, Peter Jones, had and not make a few enemies. Somebody was gunning for Mr. Jones, but he didn’t have any concrete evidence. Even when he combed the places Juan was certain the stranger was at, not even footprints were left behind to mark the ground the person stood on.
He wasn’t able to make anyone see the truth, and he wasn’t sure if he should even keep trying to. Even now, after the debacle with an American girl a few months back, Mr. Jones still took yet another young woman just a few days ago and had his way with her in the basement dungeon right now.
For too many years, he had never known what was done to the children, but when his boss was done with them there was barely anything left to toss into the fire.
Normally the bodies were left in a burlap bag, which was tossed into a furnace, but on the last occasion the bag wasn’t secured completely. That single moment was three months ago, and even to this day, he dreamed about what he saw in that bag every night since.
There was nothing left to her.
The eyelids were missing, half of her limbs were broken, not to mention the raw brands burned into her skin or the permanent scream she’d died with was etched onto her face.
After that moment, he knew one thing for certain. Every last one of them, including himself, deserved to die. Even if he wasn’t the one responsible for the girls that had died a horrible death of mutilation and torture, he had known and abetted Mr. Jones in the heinous crimes after the fact.
One day, I will have to pay for what I’ve done, just like Jones will pay.
No sooner than he had the thought did the guard look back at the cameras and the beach flotsam was gone. And Juan knew that payback had begun.
* * * *
A shadow crept amid shadows in barely lit night. The clouds hindered the moon, and the fog covered each movement well. Jaden knew that she had to be quick. There was little time before the shifts changed and the guards would trade positions. That worked in her favor, as the guards who were to come outside would be blind in the night until their eyes adjusted to the change in ambient light.
Tonight she wore her favorite operational gear. Black fabric covered her from neck to heels. She had her sidearm holstered at the shoulder and about a dozen clips prefilled with ammunition if she needed the weapon for heavy lifting tonight. She had her face smeared in green and black grease paint to keep the shine of her skin from giving her away to the watchful. Her combat boots also got a facelift with a black marching sock over the entire sole of the shoe to keep her footprints from being matched. The outer sock also kept her boots from acquiring any evidence that she may have to explain away later. Not that she would get caught, as she was fully confident that she would escape this unscathed as always, but Jaden believed in being prepared for anything.
As soon as she found the underground entrance labeled in the schematic, she heard footsteps, and Jaden was forced to make a hasty retreat behind an azalea bush. At this time of year the flowers were everywhere and in magnificent bloom. Her heart had kicked up a notch, but she took even, slow breaths as she waited until the steps finally receded into the distance, and Jaden crept back to the sunken door.
If she was right, her information from the hack job she’d done a week ago told her that the door led to the basement dungeon that Peter Jones, aka Pietr Jourdain, used for his deadly hobbies.
Like clockwork, Jones would use his henchmen to steal a girl off the street once every three months and use the child until there were no vestiges of life left. The young women all fit a similar mold, between the ages of seventeen and twenty with dark hair, big eyes, and always small in build. Otherwise they were of different races and socioeconomic backgrounds. Rich girls, poor ones, black ones, even an Indian girl numbered among his victims.
Jaden had long since sworn that she would stop taking these types of jobs. The idea of heart-wrenching tortures being inflicted on innocent children was hard for her to personally deal with. She never felt guilt for her justifiable action of murder, as the bastards had earned death in every single case. But she took this job anyway because if anyone had earned the taste of her blade, Vigilante, it was Pietr.
Vigilante was a custom-made knife. The handle was lighter than the blade, and the grip custom made for her and her alone. The edges were slightly serrated, just enough to mimic shark teeth and cause the maximum damage with the least amount of work for her. She had used her blade at every job she’d ever taken like this one. It was her signature weapon du jour and her personal favorite for stealthy work. It was fitting that Jourdain would be the latest to fall victim to the bite of hand-forged steel.
A few months ago she had gotten a hit from her programming about a missing island girl, and when she cross-referenced the snatch and grab with other cases, she found there were similarities. Too many to be merely coincidence and she knew that if left unchecked, dozens more young girls would be abducted before federal officials would connect a pattern to begin intervention.
The only reason government agencies hadn’t made any moves was the fact that the cases varied in all the ways that mattered for profiling software. Not only that, but local police tended not to talk to each other or the Feds until the situation was out of control. The abductions all varied in location and spanned the globe. It took time to figure out who perpetrated the crime, but property taxes were the bane of a criminal’s existence. She noticed that her quarry-owned houses in each area that the girls were taken and the trail of taxes actually led right to his door.
Better yet, she saw where an excavation company had charges for several digs invoiced to a black AmEx owned by a shell corporation. Then following the invoice, she found another contractor and more unusual charges. The plans were informal with no permits, and Jaden knew immediately that she’d hit pay dirt. Especially when she hacked Ingram Construction and found it was a subsidiary of Jones’s corporate tree of front companies, used to wash his former illegitimate funds clean.
The architect was dumb enough to have a copy of the plans used on his home PC. She crashed the creator’s computer network and fried every drive to cover her tracks. The information she gleaned was more than she needed, and it helped the plans for tonight immensely.
Once she hacked the palm print lock hidden in the metal door with her PDA and a nifty program she created just for security measures of this type, she was in. The device was quickly secreted back into one of the numerous pockets smattered over her gear. The door opened quietly despite its size and heft, a sign that the entry was well used, as the hinges had been regularly oiled and maintained. It was a great way to sneak inside, but that also meant that the entry was utilized frequently enough that she could run into more action than she wanted on this operation.
She had a gun and enough ammo to kill a herd of elephants, of course, but these jobs were more about stealth and smarts than sheer bravado and brawn. If she had to use her sidearm, then her preparations failed, and she didn’t like the idea of failure at all. Not when a mistake could not only cost her life, but more innocent lives as well.
When quarry knew they were being hunted, the natural impulse to flee would make another attempt at assassination difficult and time-consuming to say the least. With that in mind, she had to make this one count. She entered the dim corridor of the cliché basement dungeon, Vigilante ready in her right hand and a silenced Glock in her left. Each step she took was with care and time to ensure she was soundless during her exploration in the labyrinth of underground tunnels.
Attention is the most important aspect to all living creatures. The prey knows when to run if consideration is paid to the whispering of the wind. Just as the hunter knows when to strike the instant quarry is unmindful.
She wanted so badly to rush, to run through the corridors and burn the extra energy away, but her sensei’s voice was a constant reminder of what her impatience would cost her.
Only fools rus
h in, Jaden. The wise wait for the perfect moment. And the universe will provide whatever aid is needed to the patient and the watchful.
Remembering those words were all she needed to calm her restlessness. Her information showed the heart of the maze would be her prey’s most likely location. The rooms below all had a purpose, but the center was most likely where all of the nastiest activities were held. There was a furnace, kitchen, along with a standard bedroom and bathroom. To make sure that no one was around to ambush or waylay her, she paused a few moments at each door before she continued forward.
She listened for movement, struggles, or speech as she made her way right then left at the next intersection. All the tunnels were angled into a giant circle that spiraled inward, but the route to the center could only be accessed with the correct series of turns. If she lost her way now, she would have to make her way back to start over, and there was no time for that.
Jaden only had a small window to make this work, within a handful of hours she needed to be off of the island and in her home with her mission completed. But when the cobbled stones gave way to a mosaic tile, Jaden knew she had finally gotten close to the heart of the basement and slowed her steps. She was well informed, but on the other hand, any lack in her intelligence or stupidly underestimating her opponents may get her dead, or worse, captured.
But even with all of her preparations and expectations for the worst-case scenario, the next moment shocked and stunned her.