As soon as I arrived at the top, I dumped the bag and looked down at the ground below me. A few people were strolling by. I wondered if one of them was Saffron, waiting at the meeting point for me. I rustled around in my bag and pulled out a sniper rifle - a big, heavy thing with telescopic sights that would allow me to make out anyone who wandered past on the street below. I heaved it up on to my shoulder, and pressed my eyes to the sights, scanning the ground underneath my vantage point with care. I couldn’t see anything untoward, but then, why would I? If there was one thing I knew about Saffron, it was that she would be discreet. She’d been doing this for longer than I had, at least now. After all, I had taken a few years out while she had continued to work and gain experience. Even despite my time away from the job, I was disturbed by how easily the gun fit in my hands, how natural it felt to be back here pointing a weapon at innocent people on the street below me.
I heard a footstep behind me, and I launched myself around, my heart thumping hard in my chest. The gun was still held up to my eye, but I let it drop when I caught sight of a flash of red hair through the sights. Of course. It was her.
“You always were easy to sneak up on,” Saffron commented flippantly as she strode towards me across the balcony. Her hair was cropped short, as far away from the long, flowing locks she’d had when I’d known her as it could be, and he clothes were dark and loose to make for easy movement. Her eyes flashed as she made her way towards me, her footsteps almost silent, and I wondered how many people had this image imprinted on their brain as their last.
“How did you know I was-”
“Saw a fancy car, assumed it was yours, then tried to figure out where I would have gone had I parked down there.” She shrugged. “It’s not rocket science.”
I stared down at her for a moment - even in the gloomy light that made its way onto the rooftop, she was still undeniably striking.
How long had it been since I saw her last? Seven years, maybe more? The last time had been when we split up for the last time, when she slammed the door in my face and threatened to kill me if I ever came back around to see her again. I remember walking away from her dingy apartment, feeling numb, and downing a few shots of whiskey at a local dive bar not long after.
We met in training, both of us learning out craft alongside each other. We’d worked together on countless missions, and eventually, the mixture of the adrenalin and her good looks led to us ending missions at home together, clothes on the floor as we fucked like animals. I fell for her, hard. She was the first woman I’d ever really fallen for at that point in my life, and I was pathetically in love with her. And then the troubles started.
“I’m surprised they still let you work after all the shit you put Leo through,” I commented, scanning her arms for track marks and her face for the sallow complexion I had grown used to over our last few months together, but I couldn’t find any.
“I’m clean now,” she snapped. “I have been for years. No thanks to you.”
“You know I tried to help you,” I replied curtly. “You wouldn’t have any of it.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I didn’t want my fuck-buddy trying to tell me how I was supposed to live my life, did that cross your mind?” She tilted her head at me, her eyebrows raised. Her hazel eyes were outlined with a little liner, and now that she was facing me head-on, I was surprised by how healthy she looked.
The heroin had taken her slowly at first, and then all at once, just like I fell in love with her. She started off small, enjoying the money we earned going out on hits and taking a few too many highs on a night out, the way it got started for a lot of people. And then, before I knew it, she was smoking heroin. Then snorting it. Then injecting it. And then she was too far-gone for any of us to pull out. She dropped out of work, unable to keep her hands steady enough to hold a gun, and ended up avoiding the cops for a completely different reason. I tried to help her, but in the end, she was the one who kicked me to the curb and decided to lose herself to her worst impulses.
Before I had a chance to say anything more, she pulled the sniper rifle out of my hands and peered through the lens. Her brow furrowed slightly, and I noticed a few more lines on her than I had the last time I saw her. Well, this work would age you - I knew that better than anyone else did.
“There he is,” she murmured and handed the rifle to me.
“I only have a name, not a face.” I shrugged at her, and she sighed and pulled a photo from her pocket. On it was an older guy, with maybe a couple of decades on me, in a nice suit, hair thinning and combed over. I glanced through the sights at the guy Saffron had been looking at - yeah, it was him. Undeniably him. He was walking alone, and his face was smug. He was stumbling slightly, as though he’d been drinking, and was moving slowly down the darkened alley.
At times like this, I had to remind myself that the people we picked off weren’t innocent. This guy, for example, Leo had mentioned him to me, describing him as the head of another crime syndicate that worked in trafficking women. I wondered if that’s why he’d put Saffron on the case with me - if she did it, then at least he knew he had someone who would have a personal vendetta against this guy for what he did to her gender.
“How’s your aim after all this time?” she murmured urgently, and I immediately handed the rifle over to her. I knew there was no time for pride at a time like this - we had one shot to get it right, and she was probably the one to nail this. She lined up the shot and fired.
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 his 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.
BABY FOR A PRICE Page 9
