by S. Ann Cole
“Hey, boss—”
“What do you have for me?” he asked without looking up from the photos in front of him.
That familiar tone told her to get on with it. “There’s a new stripper. Been working here for over a week now. She goes by the stage name ‘Blood’ and—”
“Blood? Really?” his smooth voice asked, accompanied by a light chuckle. “Does she make money with that name?”
Momentarily taken aback, it took Nadia a minute to respond, because she’d never heard this man do anything even remotely close to chuckling before. “Lots. Without even working for it. She’s…flawless.”
“Hmm…” he hummed, clasping his hands above the scattered photos on his desk and raising his head to give her his undivided attention. “Well, if she’s so ‘flawless’, why’re you reporting her to me?”
“Because I think—no, I know she’s dangerous.”
Slowly, his lips tipped up in a breath-stealing smile, as if ‘dangerous’ was his all-time favorite word. And this time Nadia wasn’t just taken aback, but dumbstruck that this man actually smiled. He must be in an extremely good mood tonight.
With all these uncharacteristic gestures—chuckling, smiling—she wondered if he would let her suck his dick if she offered. Sweet Lord, she’d give anything to get on her knees in front of him, suck him deep in the back of her throat, and swallow his cum like it’s a goddamn elixir of life.
“Now I’m beyond intrigued,” he said. “I’ve never met a flawless-dangerous person before. That’s an almost impossible combination.”
Now he was jeering her.
“No, I meant flawless physically. People just stare at her like she’s a new species or something. But she, as a person, is not just a normal girl. She’s here for a reason. And stripping is not it.”
“And how have you come to this conclusion?”
“I’ve been watching her since she came. When she gets dressed, she puts something like a dagger in her boot, a Ruger .38 in her purse, along with a vial of something I’ve no doubt is poison.”
Boss’s eyes drew tight at the corners, but still he shrugged. “Maybe she’s just trying to be careful. Stripping is a risky job.”
Nadia knew he didn’t believe that. He was trying to screw with her head. He did it all the time. It was a game to him.
“Yeah, except she isn’t working. Once she dances onstage for the night, she sits and watches the door. Waiting for something.”
Expressionless, he tapped his finger against the desk, just staring at her.
“She only works three nights a week, boss,” Nadia informed, trying to get it across to him that this girl needed to be detained and questioned, or at least monitored closely until she slipped up. “Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The only three nights you might show up here.”
Taking a step further into the room, she said, “That girl is here on a mission, Mr. Niiveux. And I think her mission is you.”
How sweet the sound…
CHAD
Chad sat with his ears wide open, listening out for the deejay to call on a certain ‘Blood’ to the stage.
After Nadia’s report thirty minutes ago, he’d believed every word of it, but he’d wanted to make her think she was paranoid. Because, well, that’s just how he operated.
On a serious fucking note, though, ever since he’d gained custody of his little cousin Alina, who was worth a staggering $12 billion, a ton of hits had been coming after his head. Sure as shit, he’d landed himself in someone’s cross hairs. Needless to say, he wasn’t an easy ass to fuck. He was as straight as they came, tighter than a newborn, untouched, which meant they’d have to grease the hell up in order to be able to bend his inflexible ass over and fuck him. If they wanted him dead, they needed to send smarter men than the ones they’d been sending to assassinate him, because every sloppy idiot who came after him wound up dead.
Rubbing his forehead, Chad sighed. Tired of this shit.
He couldn’t believe his whole life in San Francisco was being uprooted. He’d fled there to escape the evil, bloody mess that used to be his life back in Russia. He’d started a new, normal life. Found some new, normal friends.
But now all the bad was following him there like a plague of locusts, thick and black, like a fucking funeral blanket.
It’s been a year since he’d been targeted, almost leading him to believe the son of a slut who wanted him dead had given up. But now Nadia was alerting him about this strange new chick who called herself Blood. And based upon everything Nadia had described, the subtlety, the nuances, this one was trained. She’d gotten as far as inside his club, disguised as a stripper, right under his nose, undetected. Unlike the others before her, she wasn’t sloppy.
She was patient.
The muffled sound of the deejay calling up a certain ‘Blood’ onstage had Chad shooting up from his chair and striding over to the one-way glass that overlooked the majority of the club, including the stage.
Hands crossed over his chest, he waited to see this Flawless-Dangerous Blood.
A silhouette of a girl he evaluated to be around five feet seven inches without her heels walked out onstage with long, confident strides, as though she were on a runway, not in a strip club. And as the club lights danced across her body, it was like she owned every soul in the fucking club. Everyone, customers and dancers alike, stopped whatever they were doing and looked toward the stage.
Unbelievable.
This girl had to be one helluva dancer to command the crowd like that.
Swinging up on the pole, she climbed all the way to the top, almost touching the ceiling, and then she began to perform to The Glitch Mob’s Our Demons.
Chad had traveled around the world and seen some amazing pole swingers before, but this performance had him stunned. Whoever she was, she was boss at working a pole. Mastered it.
As the song ended, melding into another, she abandoned the pole and sashayed to the front of the stage, tipped her head up, and looked straight at him.
Ah, okay…the glass was one-way, so she wasn’t exactly looking at him, but…she was staring right in his direction. Like she knew he was there watching her.
With her face tipped up in the light, unhidden in shades of darkness, eyes staring at what he knew she couldn’t see, recognition hit him.
Holy. Fuck.
Two things happened. His cock swelled solid hard in an instant, damn well aching. And his heart bulldozed through his ribcage, crashing through his chest with a traumatizing force.
He was both balls-achingly aroused, and shocked clean out of his skin.
And Chad had seen it all, so it took a fuck lot to shock him.
If he’d had any doubts about her being a threat, those doubts shattered right then.
Because that girl was there, in his club, for one reason only: to kill him.
And he didn’t believe this was Alina-related either, nor that she was sent. He believed she was there of her own accord.
For revenge.
Maybe she wasn’t expecting him to recognize her, now that she was all grown and curvaceous and fucking beautiful. Or else she would’ve better disguised herself.
Wrong move.
Chad might have forgotten the faces of the people he’d killed in his short life. But he never, ever, forgot the faces of the people he let live.
Uh-huh, he agreed, this girl was “physically flawless”. And judging by the way she was staring up at his one-way glass, she was daringly dangerous.
But she wasn’t ‘Blood’.
He was Blood.
Her? Her name was Jhay.
Jhay Byrd.
TWO
That saved a wretch like me…
JHAY
“Babe, you’ll be late for work if you don’t get up now.”
The delicate touch of Sydney’s palm sliding under my Cami tank and up my stomach to cup my breast had me smiling in my sleep.
Moaning my approval of her caress, I stretched and rolled onto my back.
>
Sydney flipped off the sheets and crawled on top of me, pulling my Cami tank up and off in the process, her curly blonde hair spilling down around her cherub-like face, her naked body warm and supple against mine.
“I really don’t feel like working tonight,” I grumbled, pinching her nipples. “Would much rather stay home and let you suck me dry.”
Though what I should have said was, “I really don’t feel like chasing Chad’s life tonight. I just wanna live a normal fucking life.”
Fatefully, this job had to be done.
Most importantly, it had to be done not just because it was an assignment that would grant me a payment I’d dreamed of for ten agonizing years, but because it was also a gift to myself. Tied with a neat little red bow, and a little black card signed with a blood-inked pen, “Sincerely, Revenge”.
For the past six months, I’d been in the States, studying Chadrick Niiveux. Yep, I literally had to study him because he wasn’t the easiest person to get close to.
He was a very important man. A very dangerous man. A very wanted man. A very hated man. A very loved man. A very protected man.
He was Chadrick Niiveux.
The man who murdered my family. The man who once, when I was a stupid, stupid, stupid little girl, I thought of as…the rich, handsome prince I would grow up to marry one day.
He used to take care of me, buy me gifts. He used to read me stories, fall asleep in my bed. And I used to stare at him and dream of us together, because I used to love him.
Even though I was too young to know what love was, I’d known without a doubt that I loved him. Even though we were eight years apart and I was too young for anything like what happened in my fantasies to happen in real life, I still fantasized, because I loved him.
But then he turned into a monster. Into an invincible black spirit.
Death.
Pulling the rug from under my feet, he took everything from me. My mother. My father. My brother. My freedom. My sanity.
Never again would I be the same, because of him. Never again would I trust, because of him. Never again would I believe in anything or anyone, because of him.
Chad needed to die. By my hands. Not because he murdered my parents. Not because he murdered my brother. But because he made me live.
He. Made. Me. Live.
And I wished like hell he would’ve done to me as he’d done to the rest of my family. Because death, I believed, would’ve been better than the heavy cloak I now wore; this hideous, insidious thing called life.
So I watched him from as close as I could get, which wasn’t very close. The guy didn’t have a pattern. His movements were never the same, always throwing me off, making it near impossible for me to snipe him.
Except for this one club of his, Empty Cage, which I deduced to be his haven. That was the only loop in his seamless life. Empty Cage was his only pattern.
But it was still difficult, because, even though I knew he would turn up on either Monday, Wednesday or Friday, I could never be sure which of the three days it would be each week; and sometimes he didn’t show up at all.
So I sought a job there. Which was perfect, as pole-dancing was compulsory as part of my training. And over the years it became my preferred method of exercise.
Metaphorical brush on my shoulders, I mastered the thing. An easy cover-up.
But my plan went only so far; stagnant at this point. For me to get any closer than that to him would take a whole new miracle.
Using sex to get to him was the next-best option. I knew I looked good. Taking special care of my body and staying fit was another compulsory, and I’d been taught how to seduce with my walk, my eyes, my words.
But seducing men was my least favorite thing on the list. Men, I hated them with a churning, bitter passion.
And even if I did chose the seduction route, I’d probably have to work three times as hard to win him, because I’d heard through the loquacious strippers that he wasn’t a fuck-around. He was the “relationship” kind.
If he had a girlfriend, it would’ve been easier to befriend her and use her as a channel to get to him. Become BFFs, turn her gay-for-me or some shit. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen him with anyone for the months I’ve been watching him.
So basically I was stuck. For now.
I just had to wait it out.
Therefore, as much as I didn’t care to go to Empty Cage tonight, I had to. Because every Monday, Wednesday and Friday was an opportunity. One never knew when an opening would come. I wasn’t sent to San Francisco to fuck, relax, and live a normal lesbian life. I didn’t have that privilege. I was there to kill a man who some anonymous moneybag wanted dead real bad—badly enough to have sent one dozen different men who’d failed to succeed, losing their own lives instead.
“But you have to,” Sydney mumbled, kissing along my collarbone. “How else are you gonna take down that big, bad drug lord you’ve been investigating for months?”
Sydney was my temporary girlfriend for five of the six months I’d been in SF. She believed I was an FBI agent, undercover as a stripper, sent here to investigate a notorious drug lord—thanks to my fake badge and ID.
Just as I liked them, she was blonde, pretty, and had a wicked tongue. Convenient for the time being.
She thought she loved me. She thought I gave a shit.
I had her move in with me because I liked having her around. Being alone was possibly my only fear; so wherever I went, I always tried to have at least one innocuous person around me.
After my family was murdered, I was captured, imprisoned, and enslaved. Abused and raped.
Trained to fight. Trained to kill.
So now that I was loaned freedom on a short string, I made use of it by inviting a harmless person every now and again into my space. Preferably someone who could bring me both normalcy and pleasure. They crossed me, I killed them. Though no one ever actually did.
Sydney was six years older than me. I was freshly twenty-two. She didn’t know that, though. She believed me older. I mean, where would you find a twenty-two-year-old FBI agent sent to ‘investigate’ a massive drug lord on their own? But because I was more mature than the average twenty-two-year-old, I pulled the lies off well.
That and my supposed wealth. How could a twenty-two-year-old afford to own an apartment in one of the most expensive apartment complexes in SF? Or drive the latest Niiveux sports car?
They were all temporary gifts from my owner, my captor. But Sydney believed I was rich.
I believed that’s why she thought she loved me. Or why she ignored the signs that I was using her for my own convenience. Because, although she claimed she loved me, she was screwing the pompous doctor who lived two floors below my apartment. She had no idea I knew this. No idea I knew that, as soon as I left for work at night, he was there in my apartment.
I made her none the wiser. Like I said, I liked her company. And instead of going to find someone new, I was sticking to the devil I knew. Keeping her around until my mission was complete.
As soon as Chad was taken down. It would be her turn.
Not tonight, though.
Tonight, I needed that skillful tongue of hers.
Grabbing a fistful of her hair, I dragged her face up to mine and took her mouth in a mean, hard kiss. She moaned and squirmed against me, pressing her mound against mine.
“I love you so much,” she whispered when I freed her from the mouth assault.
You don’t even know me.
Drifting my eyes to the ceiling, I tightened my grip on her hair and urged her down, down, down, until her mouth was right where I wanted it to be.
With her teeth, she pulled off my boy-shorts and I flung my legs wide apart then forced her head back between them.
And, as usual, the girl did well serving her purpose.
I once was lost …
SYDNEY
Half an hour after Jhay left for work, Sydney heard the taptaptap…tap…taptap of knuckles against wood.
Jeff’s secret knock.
Grinning, she rushed to the front door and swung it open. “What took you so long? I almost thought you weren’t coming.”
“Sorry, I had to—”
“Don’t care,” she muttered, grabbing him by the lapels of his jacket and tugging him across the threshold so she could crush her mouth to his. “I just want you inside me.”
Jeff doffed his jacket. “If you’re always so hungry for my cock, why are you with that bitch?”
Sydney paused, then slapped his face. “Watch your mouth, hey. I love her.”
Jeff’s eyebrow lifted in a sardonic arch. “If this is what you do to the people you love, then I don’t even wanna know what you do to the ones you hate.”
“Just shut up and fuck me.”
With a shrug and a chuckle, Jeff swooped her up and headed over to the couch. Depositing her squirming body, he tugged his dress shirt from out of his pants before crowding down over her.
Reaching down, he grabbed the end of her short little sundress and whipped it over her head, then bit his lip when he found she was wearing nothing underneath. “My God, Syd, you’re so damn hot.”
“And wet,” she whispered back, “and ready.”
As Jeff leaned down to kiss her again, she stopped him with a palm to his chest. “Shit, Jeff. The door. We left it open. Go close it.”
“Too late.”
Both Jeff and Sydney jumped apart at the sound of the unfamiliar voice in the room. Jeff lurched up to his feet and spun around to face the interloper, while Sydney frantically reached for her dress.
Scrambling off the couch, she looked to where the voice had traveled from and saw a tall, devastatingly good-looking man striding over to them in the living room. Despite the situation, Sydney couldn’t help salivating at the sight of that delectable body in worn denims, a black dress shirt, sharp blazer, black boots, and a silver chain with a cross pendant around his neck.
Dirty-blond surfer hair flirted just above his shoulders, tucked messily behind his ears. But it was his eyes that terrified Sydney. They were scarily black, vacant, no sign of life within them, even though he stood before her as a living, breathing male.
