Maybe I handed her the gun because I knew I didn’t have it in me to shoot. Maybe I was scared of the kind of person it would turn me into. Maybe I thought I would rewind back to that time when I found an undeniable thrill in taking a life, and that unsettled me. Whatever it was, as soon as I saw the guy’s body hit the ground with a flat, wet thud, a strange mix of feelings passed over me, a mix that I couldn’t describe, and I was glad that I hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger.
Saffron handed the gun back to me, and I tucked it back into my bag.
“I don’t know why they bothered to send you at all.” She shook her head. “Maybe they want you to be my apprentice.”
“I seriously hope not,” I muttered. She glanced over at me, giving me a hard stare, and then stopped moving.
“Anthony, is something wrong?”
It was the first time she’d said my time in so long that it took me by surprise, and I could tell that my feelings on what had just happened were etched over my face. Maybe she could take more than that - maybe she could see the guilt and fear I felt over protecting Sabrina. I shook my head quickly and got to my feet.
“Guess I’ll see you at the office Christmas party,” I shot over my shoulder flippantly as I made my way down the ladder and back to the car. I avoided looking at the body, focusing instead on everything I had to get for Sabrina on the way home. Yeah, that way, if someone saw me and reported me to the cops as a witness, I could say I was thinking about my girlfriend and was too absorbed to notice anything else. You know how women are, right, officer? Appealing to the sexist sensibilities of the cops usually paid off. As I got in the car, I paused for a moment, disturbed at how… easy all this had been. How quickly I had found myself back in the mindset I had all those years ago. How simply I could have covered everything up if people came asking questions. This was what I was good at - this was what I had trained to be good at, and that was getting harder and harder to stomach as the years went by.
I pulled the list Sabrina had given me from my pocket and drove off. I had some shopping to do.
Chapter Fifteen
I curled up on the couch and closed my eyes. I wasn’t tired, but the light was starting to hurt, and I needed to get some time just to think about everything that had happened over the last couple of days.
I had called Lily, given her the rundown on what she needed to know. I hadn’t told her anything about Anthony, just that I had decided to leave town for a couple of days after I got a threatening message and that a guy I knew was helping me out while I hid. She told me to take all the time I needed, and that I should for sure hook up with him because that was what the heroine in an action movie would do. I knew she was just kidding, trying to cheer me up as I faced off against the shit, but it made me smile to myself as she gave me her usual chatter down the phone. When I hung up, I felt a little more human again, a bit more normal, even though I was hidden out in an underground house in the middle of nowhere with no conceivable reason to get out in the near future. I was glad I had somewhere safe to stay, but damn - this was the last place I wanted to be.
Well, the last place I wanted to be alone. When Anthony was here, it was different, but he had been gone for a couple of hours now, and I had been left to pace the place by myself. Eventually, I dug out a laptop and a charger and managed to get it booted up. By some miracle, there was Wi-Fi in the house, and I logged on to the Internet. I wasn’t sure what I was actually going to look for as I hovered my fingers over the keys, but then I started to type, and I knew what I needed to find.
I typed “Anthony Carbonza” and searched - nothing, not even a birth announcement or someone else with the same name. I tried it again with “gangster” -nothing. “Assassin” and “Hitman” didn’t turn up any results either, even when I went far back through the pages, clicking through police records in the hopes of turning something up on him. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was looking. I guessed I just wanted to know exactly what kind of man I was dealing with. I trusted Anthony - he had saved me, after all, with no reason to do so - but a twisted little part of me needed to know everything he’d done, and why he’d done it.
“You’re not going to find anything, you know,” a voice came from behind me calmly. I felt dizzy with fear for a moment, until I turned around and found myself looking at Anthony.
“How did I not hear you come in?” I muttered to myself, and he shifted a strand of hair off my forehead.
“I have my ways.” He shrugged, and I glanced at the computer.
“Yeah, you’re obviously pretty good at keeping yourself hidden,” I replied. I looked up at him. Was he mad at me for looking this stuff up? He didn’t seem to be.
“I had to cover my tracks. With what I did…”
“So you were?” My breath hitched in my throat. “A… hitman?”
He stared me down for a moment, then dumped a couple of bags at my feet.
“Come on, I got you everything you asked for,” he replied. “You must be hungry.”
“I am, but that’s not going to make me forget about all this,” I warned him, leaning down off my seat and rummaging through the bags. “Ah, you got sushi! We should probably eat this first before it goes off.”
“Be my guest.” He smiled, and I went to town, munching my way through half the contents of the bag. He picked at a little here and there, but mostly left everything untouched. He looked nervous - probably because he knew I wasn’t going to let his past go.
I lay back on the couch as soon as I was done, patting my stomach.
“Jesus, I have a total food baby,” I muttered to myself, and he sat himself down on the couch next to me.
“A little.” He placed his hand on my tummy. “But it’s kind of cute. Suits you.”
“Stop it.” I batted his hand away playfully, and he caught my fingers and brought them to his mouth. He planted a kiss on that sensitive spot in the center of my palm, and my toes curled against the cheap carpet on the floor. He stared at me, and I stared back - he might well have just been trying to avoid the questions he knew were coming, but I could feel my body beginning to respond to him, my pussy flooding with desire as I felt his hot breath on my palm.
He pulled me on top of him almost at once, and before I knew it, I was straddling him. Our mouths met, and our hands traveled quickly across the bodies that had become familiar over the last couple of days. Before I knew it, we were both naked, entangled on the couch together. I panted softly as he kissed down my neck, closing my eyes and letting the intensity of the moment wipe any other thoughts from my brain.
I was too full to do anything too strenuous, so instead I kissed down his chest until I ended up between his legs. He stroked my hair from my face and peered down at me with a small smile playing at the corner of his lips, and I wrapped my fingers around his erection and brought it teasingly to my lips. I let my breath linger on the tip for a second, and then guided my mouth down slowly around his cock.
I ran my tongue up the underside, enjoying the feel of it between my lips. I had always enjoyed giving head, and Anthony was no exception. It just made me feel… in-control. Powerful. And after everything that had happened in the past few days, I had a right to want to feel that way. I closed my eyes and took as much of him as I could manage, using my hands to cover the rest of the distance, and began to stroke rhythmically up and down his length. He let out a small groan, and shifted my hair back so he could look at me. I peered up at him, his eyes burning into mine, and the look of pure desire pulsing in his eyes was so utterly, consumptively gorgeous that I almost forgot what I was doing altogether. I paused for a second as I stared at him, and all I could hear was his breathing and the soft sound of my lips surrounding him.
Then I remembered the task at hand and returned to it with even more vigor than before. I paused at his tip for a moment, lapping lightly at the head of his dick, before I engulfed him again. I used my other hand to gently stimulate his balls, dragging my short nails lightly over the skin and massaging h
is tender flesh with care. He sucked in a breath sharply through his teeth, and his cock twitched in my hand. I knew he wouldn’t last much longer, and I took him as deep as I could, letting him fuck my mouth as he came closer and closer to cumming.
I swallowed without a second thought when I felt his cock pulse and spurt a length of cum down my throat. I paused for a few seconds, my lips still sealed around him, as I waited for him to finish, then lightly flicked my tongue over his head to collect the last few drops of his orgasm and pulled myself back up on top of him. He kissed me, deeply, taking me by surprise. Most guys would flinch away in horror from their own cum, but he didn’t seem to care an ounce, at least where I was involved.
“I think I have to repay you for that,” he murmured, wrapping his arms around my waist tightly. “It’s only fair.”
“Don’t let me stop you,” I breathed, and he pulled me forward, tugging on my hips until I was positioned just above his face. Fuck - I’d never done it like this before. Before I had a chance to overthink it any further, he grabbed my ass and shifted my pussy straight onto his mouth.
“Shit!” I hissed through my teeth as soon as his mouth found my cunt. His tongue was slow and gentle against my clit, moving as if he was determined to commit every inch of me to memory. His fingers groped and massaged my ass lightly, sending ripples of pleasure throughout my lower half, and I placed my hands on the arm of the couch to steady myself.
I began to rock back and forth on top of him, almost without realizing I was doing it. I was being careful to keep my hips far enough above him that he could catch his breath, but he pressed his face into me at every opportunity he got. Eventually, he found my clit, his lips sealing lightly around it, and he began to suck, sending spasms of sensation across my cunt. I closed my eyes and let my head fall back, my body convulsing, as he held my ass steady and went to town on me. He flicked his tongue a couple of times against my clit, as if testing me, and then…
I relaxed as soon as the orgasm hit me as if all the fight had been taken out of me. I let out nothing but a small moan, more to let him know I’d cum than anything else, and shivered as the waves of pleasure moved through me, over and over again. Shifting my hips, I moved down him so that I was straddling his lap once again, and he sat up swiftly to kiss me once more. I could taste myself on him, and I found it curiously erotic and cupped his head so I could make out with him even more deeply than before. When we pulled back, both of us were panting softly, and we laughed at each other’s expression.
“That was awesome.” I grinned to myself as I went to gather my clothes from the floor.
“Damn right it was,” he replied, trailing a hand down my back. “Hey, don’t get dressed just yet. I love it when you’re naked.”
“I’ll freeze!” I protested. Goosebumps were already starting to appear on my skin.
“Then let’s get into bed, keep each other warm,” he suggested.
I shrugged. “Lead on.”
We slipped beneath the covers, and Anthony drew me against his chest. I ran my fingers lightly over his chest hair, admiring the muscle that lay beneath my fingers. But, despite our beatific pose, questions were still playing on my mind, and he could tell.
“You want to ask me about it, don’t you?” he sighed, with a grim inevitability. I nodded.
“You don’t have to talk about it, but if I’m trusting you with my life, I feel like I should at least know what kind of guy you are,” I pointed out. He shifted onto his side so he could face me, and placed a comforting hand on my waist.
“You can ask me anything, and I promise I’ll answer as honestly as I can,” he replied. I looked at him for a moment before I spoke, phrasing everything that came out of my mouth with a special kind of care.
“How did you start?” I began. My voice was softer than I had intended, more fearful, and I tried to make it into something more confident so I didn’t sound as if I was scared of him. I wasn’t. But I was worried that what he was about to tell me would change all of that.
“My parents were both big in their own gang families,” he answered calmly. “My mother was a Liago, my father a Rendlesham. There was no way I wasn’t getting involved with gang culture on some level with the two of them involved in my upbringing.”
“Why did you become a… hitman?” I finally managed to get the word out. I couldn’t believe that the man I was lying next to, the man I had to admit I was falling for, used to kill people for money. A shiver ran up and down my spine, and I tried to keep focused.
“It’s tradition for the oldest son in a gang family to become a hitman,” he replied matter-of-factly. “And after my brother died-”
“Your brother died?” I gasped. This was the first I’d heard of any brother. Anthony paused for a moment, taking in a sharp breath before he continued.
“Yeah, he was killed in a turf war,” he explained. “When he was sixteen and I was thirteen.”
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” I clasped his hand tightly, but he didn’t even look over at me. He stared up at the ceiling, his face suddenly set, tense and cold.
“After Jacob- that’s my brother- after he died, they put me into training to take his place,” Anthony went on. “And that’s how I ended up as a hitman.”
“I lost my sister, too,” I filled him in mournfully. It felt like such a tragic thing for us to bond over - that the two of us would so easily be able to find tragedy in common.
“How?” he asked gently, stroking my her, and I felt tears prick at my eyes.
“I…” I held my breath. “She was raped. By a man with a snake tattoo across his knuckles. And she couldn’t handle it, couldn’t handle what came after that, so she…”
I let the words hang unspoken in the air between us, and I knew he understood. He pulled me closer, and I quickly refocused my mind on what he had just said.
“So, it wasn’t your choice, then?” I grasped to one little detail, a little detail that could allow me to forgive him. “To become… you know, to become a hitman?”
“It wasn’t my choice,” he agreed. “I wouldn’t have done it had Jacob not died.”
“Oh…”
“But I don’t necessarily regret the fact that I did,” he finished off, and I felt a cold prickle down my scalp.
“Why?” I whispered. How could someone enjoy killing? The two men Anthony had killed to save me, they haunted my nightmares, and I hadn’t even laid a finger on them.
“It’s not about the… it’s not actually about killing people, that’s not the part I like,” he explained. “I don’t hate that- but it’s just a job- I don’t get any actual enjoyment out of it or anything.”
“Okay,” I replied carefully, giving him the space to go on.
“It was everything else. You have to remember, I was a kid when I came to all this stuff, and to me, it was all action and adventure and big money for doing something I found I was naturally pretty good at,” he went on. “I enjoyed that aspect of it, enjoyed the fact that I got to look after myself and live a life that was so different from almost every other guy I knew around my age.”
“So… it wasn’t about the killing?” I repeated.
“No, I don’t enjoy that,” he replied firmly. “I never have.”
He clasped me to his chest, as though he knew how freaked out I was, and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I had been holding. Okay, well, there it was - the truth, in all its ugly glory. I knew him now, knew him truly, knew things I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know. But I was still here, and I had no intention of going anywhere. Everything about Anthony, it was in equal parts thrilling and horrifying, and I wasn’t sure which one came first. I laid my head against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, wondering idly how many heartbeats he’d brought to an end over his years as an assassin. But before my brain could linger for too long, I found myself falling asleep in his arms - the arms of a man who cared for me, the arms of a man who killed people for money. And I had never felt more conflicted in my life.
Chapter Sixteen
I woke early, glancing across at Sabrina to make sure she wasn’t up. She was lying face down on the pillow, her hair spread all over her face so I could barely even see her. She was out for the count, and I slipped out from underneath her arm and headed towards the living room, so I could get washed up and dressed without disturbing her. I probably just had time to do everything I needed to do before she woke up. After all, a direct route back to the city would likely only take me an hour or so at this time in the morning.
I slipped into the car, started the engine, and pulled out onto the highway once more. I found my mind drifting back to the conversation we’d had the night before as I moved on autopilot - she seemed so scared, but so set, so uncertain but so definite. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, and I wasn’t certain she was either.
It didn’t take long for me to get back to the city. Before I knew it, I was pulling up outside Leo’s place, hurrying up the steps and glancing at my watch. I knew that Leo wanted all his hitmen to pick up payment and get their next assignments as soon as possible after they completed their last ones, and I hoped he wouldn’t question why I wasn’t at my usual ungodly hour to do the same.
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