Hitman - the Series: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance Collection (Alexis Abbott's Hitmen #0)

by Alexis Abbott

  Will and Boris both laugh. “That’s very noble of you,” Will begins, “but I wouldn’t dare turn down a two-for-one deal. Not when I’ve already got a prospective buyer for your friend here. Innocent little rich girl? She was a fast sell, bien sûr.”

  “A… a buyer?” I repeat, feeling my veins run cold. What kind of business is this?

  “Oh, yes. But don’t feel left out. I’m sure we’ll have a client interested in you before long. Especially once we, ah, tone you down a little bit. You’ve got just enough fire in you to make for a lousy product,” he explains matter-of-factly.

  “I am not a product, and neither is Maggie. We’re human beings. Let us go!” I protest.

  Will just rolls his beautiful blue eyes. “You can drop the martyr act anytime now, Olivia. If you haven’t caught on yet, I’ll assure you there’s no escape. You belong to me now, until we find a suitable match for you.”

  He looks at Boris and gives him a quick nod. “Take the bigger one.”

  “No!” I shout, flinging myself in front of Maggie. But Boris easily peels me off of her and tosses me aside again, my knees skidding painfully across the rough floor as I fall. “Maggie! Maggie! It’s okay, be strong! I won’t give up on you! I promise everything will be okay!” I call out after her as Boris throws her over his shoulder and carries her off. She’s weeping and reaching for me in vain, too frightened and in shock to even utter a word. The pair of them disappear through the doorway as Boris carries her up the stairs and away from me.

  Leaving me alone in this holding cell with Will.

  My terror twists and darkens into rage, and without even thinking about it I run full-force toward the gate of the enclosure, where he stands. I let out a frustrated scream as he calmly clicks the lock shut again, closing me off.

  “You’re a feisty one, aren’t you, petite fille?” he whispers, leaning close so that his ice-blue eyes and pointed nose are mere centimeters from my face on the other side of the chain-link fence. “I’ll break you of that.”

  I spit directly into his face. He blinks once, then wipes his face with a smirk.

  “Oui, I’ve got special plans for you, Olivia,” he growls. Then he turns on his heel and strides out of the room, turning off the light as he goes.

  I sink to the floor, clinging to the cold metal gate, utterly alone.

  10

  Max

  Navigating the congested streets of Paris in the middle of the day is hard enough on the best of days. The grating voice of the man to my right makes it even less bearable than usual.

  “Did they really not teach you any of this kind of tracking in Russia? Or whatever Russia-school you went to? This kind of stuff is, like, freshman-level kind of tracking,” my tech-savvy friend says with a laugh as he scrolls through the blinking map that’s pulled up on his laptop.

  Felix Meunier is a name I wish I would never have to call upon again when it came to matters related to work, but he’s one of the most talented computer specialists in the university, and more importantly, he’s never been afraid to get his hands dirty. Most importantly, he owes me a favor.

  If only it weren’t for his insufferable personality.

  I met Felix when he came to me shortly after getting my post at the university. Just like he is now, he was working then as one of the IT staff members who ensured the sprawling enclave of bureaucracy that was the University of Paris kept running smoothly. But apparently, Felix had been involved in some shady dealings with the criminal underworld of Paris. He was the kind of white-collar criminal who thought he could skim money from the university while playing the same game with some of the offshore accounts the local mob who had ties to the university.

  Inevitably, he got himself into hot water, both the French police and the mobsters he’d managed to offend breathing hard down his neck from all angles. He came to me looking for help.

  To this day, I don’t know why he reached out to me specifically, but I suspect he did some digging into my background and thought I’d be the kind of person he’d want to have his back in a situation like his. The assumption was correct, but I only agreed to help him reluctantly, covering his trail and burning old bridges that might have tied him to his crimes. He was beyond grateful.

  And despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able to shake the little man since, so I suppose we could be called ‘friends.’

  “They did not teach us…’your expertise’ in Spetsnaz training,” I answer, trying desperately not to say “they didn’t teach us how to be nerds.”

  “Right, right,” he muses, his fingers flicking the screen back to his voluminous spreadsheets through which he’s been inputting data that’s been assembling the GPS signal we’re tracking now, “have to keep all the training on killing enemy spies, climbing up sheer cliffs, wrestling bears with your bare hands, that kind of thing, right?”

  “We were taught to track,” I say, no smile on my face, “but we needed no such technology to hound our targets down like animals.” He stares at me a moment before giving his head a light shake and turning back to his computer. I smile quietly to myself; it was helpful to recount the details of my past to keep the fear of god in men like Felix.

  “Anyway, like I was saying: the email address you have was sent from a computer that was hooked up to the internet, just like any email, so that means it’s got a server associated with it.”

  I’ve already stopped paying attention, but I nod.

  “So I can trace that server and bounce a signal off it and figure out where it’s coming from, kind of like echolocation, but with internet signals. Does that make sense?”

  “Of course,” I lie absently.

  “It doesn’t look like this person was using any sophisticated technique,” he adds with a scoff, “even the most basically tech-savvy users who do so much as illegally download a movie will use something that masks your IP address at least, or maybe a program that can bounce signals around to confuse people like me who might want to track ‘em, but it looks like your guy was just sending an email from a building, plain as day. I could pull up the email here if I wanted.”

  “Mmhmm,” I say with a nod, pretending to be following along.

  “Basically, I mean he’s not trying to pull any tricks in keeping me from being able to figure out where your Liv’s cell phone is, from what I can tell,” he goes on. “Between triangulating the location of her phone, provided it’s still on, and figuring out where this Will guy is sending his emails from, this is child’s play. You sure this guy is doing something shady? Take a left at this light.”

  “Not everyone is as skilled as you, Felix,” I say candidly, and Felix rolls his eyes as we take yet another turn down the winding streets. What I meant was that plenty of criminals did just fine without the help of technology, and even so, sometimes a light touch did the trick just fine. That, and his question made me uncomfortable — because no, I was not sure.

  “Anyway, I triangulated the signal, and I’ve just about —voila! Got an address for you.”

  “No dramatic pauses,” I say with an arched brow.

  “56 Rue Alfred de Vigny in the Parc Monceau area,” he says, and I feel my mouth grow cold at the name of the address. It’s a respectable area of Paris, to be sure, but that makes the significance of that address no less familiar and dangerous.

  “Uh...Max?” he asks, tilting his head and pushing his thick-rimmed glasses up his nose. “You alright? You look a little tense,” he says as he eyes my tightening knuckles on the steering wheel.

  “No, Felix,” I say slowly, taking a breath and resisting the urge to carve a path of destruction through traffic to reach our destination faster. “I’m afraid this little excursion of ours is about to get complicated.”

  We speed towards the Parc Monceau, tires screeching as I take sharp turns, and Felix grips the safety handle of the car, trying to keep his computer steady. “What’s the big deal? You’ve got your missing students, they’re probably doing drugs with some locals in a fancy
apartment or something.”

  “I recognize that address,” I say, my voice tense with the anger I’m holding back. “Felix, you did some digging on my past, didn’t you?”

  The question throws him off, and he stammers a few syllables before I cut him off.

  “You know some of my background, I have no doubt. You’ll also know a thing or two about the Russian mob’s activity in Paris, I’m certain. What you may not know is that this address is where the Bratva established a base of operations to run their human trafficking ring here in France.”

  Felix paled as we turned onto Rue Alfred de Vigny, and he licked his lips nervously. “B-but that’s impossible,” he stammers, “the Russian mob hasn’t had a sex slave ring in Paris for years — I mean, I keep an ear out for this kind of thing, just for safety’s sake and all.” He looks uneasy, but I don’t bother casting him a glare. I know I’m not the only person Felix has been helping from among the Parisian underworld’s denizens. He’s a pencil-neck and a coward, but he’s not a particularly predictable man, and he knows his skills are valuable to those willing to pay the right price. Despite his close calls with death in the past.

  “Police databases have some kind of files on every ring that’s active in Paris, and they’ve got agents deep undercover, but there’s nothing on a Bratva slave ring based out of Paris. I’m sure they’ve been inactive here for ages.” He pulls up a few more spreadsheets, scrolling through them while chewing his lip. “Right, see here, it says there was some kind of internal coup that ended the trafficking activity from within a few years ago. The slave ring’s ended, Max.”

  “You’re right,” I say as we pull up at that old, familiar building, and I gaze up at the faded stone. “Because I’m the one who ended it.”

  I turn off the car and step out, Felix fumbling to put his laptop away as he unbuckles his seatbelt and staggers out of the car, now casting nervous glances up at the building before us. The sky is overcast, gray clouds rolling overhead very quickly as wind blows above us. Felix follows me to the back of the car, where I pop the trunk.

  “Well,” Felix says, wringing his hands, “okay, so if we know she’s here, and you think...well, what you think, then shouldn’t we call the police and have them investi-”

  “No,” I snap, whirling around to look the man in the eye, my expression stony. “Felix, these girls are my responsibility — mine. It was me who took them from the comfort of their hometowns to come train in Paris. It was me who offered them everything when they never thought they’d get the chance to glimpse this thorny flower of a city. It was me in whom they put all their trust to guide them as they tried to make their homes here for the next few years. And it was me who saw the unbridled potential in them to be something more than they or their parents or their old teachers ever could have begun to imagine,” I say, and I mean every word of it.

  Felix looks hesitant, but nods slowly as he watches the determination burn bright in my eyes. “You must have a lot of respect for these girls.”

  “Far more than they know,” I say, looking at the ominous doors of the apartment building. “I was harsh on them. I had to be. But there’s something special about them that I want to see realized.” About Liv, I want to add especially, but every one of them has untapped passion. “But that’s not the only reason this is my battle to fight,” I say as I reach into the trunk and move a panel aside, revealing a false bottom.

  “I thought I’d put a permanent end to the Bratva’s human trafficking days.”

  Felix’s eyes widen as I pull a couple of silenced pistols out of the trunk’s false bottom, followed by a set of knives I start strapping to my legs. “I thought that part of my life was gone entirely. If I was mistaken…”

  I take out some ammunition and load up the pistols, strapping a pair of spares to my waist under my jacket as Felix looks around the empty street nervously.

  “Then things are going to get ugly,” I finish, loading my pistols. “These Russians are Bratva. They’re ruthless, they’re dedicated, and they have no qualms delving into the deepest depravities imaginable to man. If the girls are in their possession, they won’t give them up without a fight, and they’re every bit as vicious as the next mobster. These are men from my past, Felix,” I say in a low tone, looking him dead in the eye.

  “You can’t be serious, Max,” he breathes. I give him a silent look that tells him that I am every bit as serious as the weapons on my person are deadly. He swallows.

  “Take the car back to my place, Felix,” I say, “then get a cab. I’ll pay you back. You’ve done me a service today. I won’t forget this.”

  “No way,” he says, stepping forward, “Max, this is too much. Okay, so yeah, I looked up the whole story on you. The orphanage in Yakutsk, the stint in the Russian Special Forces, the covert operations you did, the retirement to the Bratva here in France, I know it all. I know you’ve been involved with these guys before.”

  “Then you know that I know my enemy,” I say calmly.

  “I know that for all you know, the guys in there are a whole different breed of killers. They’re slavers, Max, and if they’re starting up again after you shut them down last time, they’ll be expecting a visit from you. I don’t need my spreadsheets and statistics to tell me that, but you sure sound like you need to hear the statistics on your chances of survival if you’re thinking of going in there guns blazing with no plan!”

  “The men in there are the reason I divorced myself from the Bratva,” I say. “For them to start up again is a mockery of everything I did to earn my retirement... Do you think I made my career on helping white-collar criminals dodge the law?”

  I smile a cold smile that sends a visible chill down Felix’s spine. I was more than just a killer. I was a hitman. One of the most feared hitmen in all of Paris. And to let the monstrous wretches in that building live would be an insult to everything I stood for.

  Felix keeps an eye on me for some time before asking, “So there’s no convincing you. What if I don’t hear back from you?”

  “If you think that’s a possibility,” I say over my shoulder as I make my way up the steps toward the apartment front doors, “then you don’t know me very well, my friend.”

  I hear Felix starting the car behind me as I ready the pistol in my hand, put the other hand on the door handle, and push.

  11

  Liv

  I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here in the dark. It could have been minutes… or hours. It feels like months. I have no idea what time it is or where my grisly prison is located. In my head, without any physical distractions to stimulate my thoughts, I start to go a little crazy. My theories range from the relatively benign to the outlandishly catastrophic.

  Maybe this is all an elaborate prank! I’m just in the basement of some building on campus, not far from home. It’s just part of a hazing ritual performed by the members of the gymnastics program or something. Any minute now, one of my coaches will pop out and tell me it’s all over — I passed.

  Or then again… I don’t know how much time passed while I was knocked out. I could be halfway across the continent, in some Bulgarian holding cell. Will talked about somebody buying Maggie. What if this really is a sex trafficking ring or something? I watched a documentary once, curled up in my blankets at home in Toast. It had seemed like something that couldn’t possibly happen in my world. It was a far-away thing that happened to far-away people, not me.

  But maybe, just maybe, that nightmarish world is colliding with mine.

  And I’m caught in the intersection of two very different dimensions: the safe, cocoon-like shelter of my past, and the shadowy film noir of my imminent future. And where am I now? In limbo? The static place in between?

  At this point, the loneliness of my predicament is digging in at me, tugging at the strings of my already-strained sense of sanity. There’s not a single sound, hinting to me that I’m either so far underground that sound can’t travel down here or that my little prison is soun
d-proof. Either way, I’m dying for any hint of humanity out there, even if it’s sinister in nature. Although I hate him with every fiber of my being, I wish Will would return, if only to remind me that other human beings still exist out there somewhere. Because down here in the dark, it really feels like I could be all alone in the world and I would never know the difference.

  A shiver runs down my spine and I pull my legs up to my chest, wrapping my arms around my calves and resting my chin on my knees. There are goosebumps prickling up and down my limbs. It’s so cold down here, especially now that I’m alone. I didn’t realize how comforting it was to have Maggie curled up with me until she was gone. Now I long for any kind of human contact to make me feel alive again. I’m so lonely and lost and afraid.

  Almost like a cruel answer to my wish, the door creaks open again and Flameface — Boris — hobbles into the room, a shaft of dull light following to cast his shadow long and tall on the concrete floor. I can’t decide whether it would be better to run back and press myself against the opposing wall, as far away from him as possible, or to go to the gate in the dim hope of obtaining some human contact.

  Instead, I simply stay put, curled up in my little ball.

  “Feeling lonely, malyshka?” Boris sneers, his voice dripping with faux sympathy.

  I don’t respond, not even moving. He strolls to the gate and pokes his fat fingers through the links again, staring down at me with a hungry gaze. At this point, I hardly care what he says or does to me. I feel so empty and exhausted. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  “Oh, come. Don’t be impolite. I know you’ve got to be dying for a friend by now. Isn’t that right, suka?” he goes on, tapping his fingertips on the metal gate. I begrudgingly tilt my head ever so slightly upward to look at him and he grins.

  “You know… I could be your friend,” he growls lecherously. “We still have time before the team arrives to stand guard here. I could make you feel things you’ve never even imagined. The man who buys you won’t know the difference if I punch the card first. And besides, if Will won’t use up his finder’s fee… I won’t let it go to waste. They don’t pay me enough. What’s a man to do? Got to get my fair stoimost somehow — whether in money or flesh.”