by Sonia Hartl
Emma handled the Players for H4H. While my clients sought revenge against coworkers they couldn’t stand, Emma’s wanted to take down coworkers who had also been romantic partners, men who had played them to get ahead in their careers. Her list of services had a much higher base price since her assignments tended to be longer and more involved; she spent weeks in her clients’ companies to gather information on her targets’ duplicitous behavior, until she had enough ammo for the women to take to HR. Not only did she ruin any hope for these men to remain employed at those particular jobs, she also scorch-earthed any chance they had of working in their field ever again.
She’d lecture me—I braced myself for it—but she wouldn’t sell me out to the other Heartbreakers or hold it over my head. I trusted her with my life. She made all the right sympathy noises in all the right places while I talked, and when I mentioned Aiden’s name, she did a pretty solid impression of Winnie by hissing into the phone. That was why she was my best friend. She wouldn’t just help me hide the body. She’d take part in the actual stabbing.
“That decides it,” Emma said. “We finally have an excuse to murder Aiden.”
I laughed, but it sounded as tired as I felt. “I don’t think that’s necessary. The girl wrapped around him like a python probably thought I was homeless though, so that’s one more humiliation I can take to my grave.”
Emma gave a noncommittal grunt. I wasn’t kidding about the stabbing thing. “Here’s what you’re going to do about Mark. Tell your client you couldn’t get his attention, give her the refund, and let it go.”
“I know.” I’d already decided to give Selena a refund, even though it burned me. “You won’t say anything to Margo, right? I finally got her to let me handle assignments without her input, and I don’t want her using this as an excuse to take over again.”
“Please,” Emma said. “I can’t believe you just asked me that.”
“Sorry.” I really should’ve known better.
“How could you, though?” Emma’s tone went sharp. Here came the lecture. “He was a target. A target. For fuck’s sake, B. You know better than this. He screwed over someone he worked with bad enough for her to want to drop a thousand dollars on revenge.”
“He didn’t really strike me as a typical Ego though.”
“Why? Because he was hot? Because he was smooth? Those guys make the best liars. They undermine women until they don’t even know themselves anymore. Do I need to remind you that Aiden was hot and Jacob was a smooth talker? That’s how both of us ended up fucked sideways and working at H4H in the first place.”
“Em. Calm down. I made a mistake. It won’t happen again.”
Her heavy breathing came through the line. “I don’t want you to get involved with someone we already know is an asshole. You deserve better.”
The worst of her temper had passed. She’d gone easier on me than I’d expected.
“Maybe this means I’m ready to… date again.” I hesitated on those last two words, afraid Emma might laugh at the suggestion, even though I knew she’d do no such thing.
“You should try going out. See how it feels. Anything is better than going home with a target.” Emma took a deep breath. “I don’t mean to lecture.”
“Yes, you do. But I needed to hear it.” Needed to remember that men, especially the men we were hired to take down, would always screw us over in the end. “You keep me sane.”
“One of us has to be.” She sighed. “Sorry you didn’t get your orgasm though.”
“I am too. It was nice while it lasted.” He hadn’t acted like the other Egos I’d dealt with. Admittedly, I didn’t know him at all, but I couldn’t wrap my head around him stomping on a coworker. He seemed passionate enough about teaching and driven enough to excel without resorting to putting down his colleagues. Especially since women had a hard enough time in the boys’ club of academia. But making excuses for him in my head wouldn’t do me any favors. “Guess I’ll have to fall back on plan B, moving to Hollywood and marrying Chris Evans.”
“Haven’t you been keeping up with TMZ? He just got engaged to a Korean woman. Not me, sadly. Her name is Susan something-or-other.”
“Welp. Plan C, then. Die alone and become cat food for Winnie.”
“On the bright side, the price of your paintings would go through the roof.” Emma gave me kissing noises before she hung up.
I gathered Winnie in my arms, where she started hissing and flung out her claws to get away. We had a deeply intense love/hate relationship. At least she let me dress her without much fuss. She stuck her butt in the air and flounced out of the room.
God. I couldn’t believe I’d run into Aiden. For the first six months after he ended things, I’d had nonstop fantasies about running into him on the street. I’d be wearing something low-cut and clingy, my hair would finally have the perfect beach waves I never could get right in real life, and I’d be on the arm of some faceless stud. But he was hot. And huge. He’d make Aiden look hung like a circus mouse. I’d toss my head and laugh at something witty my faceless beefcake said, and Aiden would shrivel into a little lint ball and roll into the sewage drain. Sometimes, in these fantasies, he would beg me to come back. Apologize for all the ways he’d hurt me.
“I tried, Brinkley. But you’re too much of a mess.”
I shut the words out of my memory. The things he’d said to me after I found him in our bed with one of his fellow psych majors. It wasn’t just that he was naked with another woman, or that it was in our bed, or that they’d ruined the sheets I’d just bought with my money, but he was holding her. He never wanted to hold me after sex. He just wanted to get it in and roll over. According to him, it was because I was cold, rigid, completely dull in the sack. Trying to please me wore him out. He had no energy left for cuddling. Every ugly word he’d ever said had cut away pieces of me until there was nothing left.
It was at that final meeting, at a restaurant of his choosing, that he’d said those last words to me as I handed him the key to our apartment after I’d moved out my stuff. That was where Margo had found me, crying into a chicken Caesar salad. She’d taken Aiden’s vacant seat and offered me the opportunity to make bastards like him pay for a living.
I didn’t want to take her up on the offer at first, but pulling my life together after Aiden had proved to be more difficult than I’d imagined. I took a semester off school, thinking I’d use the time to figure myself out again. Have that whole Eat, Pray, Love experience, minus the praying and love. Every time I tried to pick up the pieces though, I’d hear Aiden telling me I was a mess. I’d hear him cutting down my early paintings and calling them prosaic. I’d hear him making jokes with his friends about his poor, dumb girlfriend who couldn’t hack it in psych and took the easy way out by majoring in art theory and practice, and how it was a good thing I was hot so I could end up working in pharmaceutical sales.
The rest of our friend group had naturally gravitated toward Aiden. As psych majors, they had all their classes together, they held study groups, and they’d been hearing his insults for years without speaking up to defend me. Even Eliza, who had been my roommate since sophomore year after my first roommate dropped out to follow One Direction on tour. Eliza had introduced me to Aiden at the end of junior year. I didn’t get to keep her in the breakup.
Once one semester turned into two, and it became obvious I wasn’t going back to school, my friends had stopped making excuses for why we couldn’t hang out and just ghosted me completely. We still followed one another on social media though, so I got to see their lives move on without me. That was when I called Margo.
During the first year of H4H assignments, I saw Aiden in every setup. I’d taken pleasure in tearing apart the big egos of small men who thought of me as an object designed for their amusement. They soon learned differently.
But as those old wounds started to heal, I wanted something more for myself. I wanted to create and bring joy back into my life. I didn’t want my tombstone to read Here
lies Brinkley Saunders. She pissed off a lot of shitty men. The gallery began to take shape in my mind, and it had become my singular goal and focus for the last year.
I wandered into the master bedroom, the space I’d turned into an art studio because it had the most windows and best light. A few hours with a blank canvas would clear my head. I picked up my brush and dabbed it into the turquoise, the same color as Aiden’s eyes. More than two years of avoiding him in this city of three million people, and I had to run into him on the one night I came off looking worse than the last time he’d seen me.
“I tried, Brinkley. But you’re too much of a mess.”
I set the brush down, turned off the lights, and walked out of the room.
* * *
There was something truly depressing about going out alone. It should’ve been empowering to strut into a club like I didn’t need anyone to have a good time, but being surrounded by groups of friends and couples in the party atmosphere made me feel more isolated than the Sunday nights I spent with ice cream, Winnie, and Netflix. But I wanted to give this a try. The only way I met men anymore was when I was hired to take them down, and the last thing I needed was to go home with another target.
I took a seat at the bar, resenting the skimpy black dress I’d squeezed into. This was supposed to be a painting and yoga pants night, damn it. The upper floors of Belly Shots—three levels of red walls and pulsing lights designed to ooze sex—were known for being a meat market, and I shuddered to think of the horrors a black light would reveal in the private VIP rooms that took up most of the top two floors. That was why I’d be sticking to the bar on the first floor.
A guy with trim blond hair and a well-cut suit approached me. He had nice teeth. This could be promising. “Hey, pretty lady. Can I get you a drink?”
Pretty lady. I tried not to cringe. “Sure. I’ll take something fruity. Bonus points if it has a tiny umbrella.” I loved those umbrellas.
Instead of ordering from the bar, he walked away and returned with something frothy and pink in a mason jar. Any bonus points he’d earned for the umbrella would have to be deducted and then some for the roofie he’d likely slipped into the pink concoction. I set it aside on the bar.
“Aren’t you going to drink that?” He leered at my cleavage, because God forbid he make the effort to look at my face. “I went to a lot of trouble to get your umbrella.”
While working for Margo had made me a lot more jaded, it had also honed my survival skills. I handed the drink back to him. “Nice try, but if you want to drug me, you should try to be a little less obvious. Your moves are straight out of the pamphlets sent to every college girl her freshman year.”
“Bitch.” He took his drink and left. Was it something I said?
I went back to leaning against the bar with my bored-and-ready-to-mingle expression. Wednesday nights weren’t exactly hopping, but the thought of hitting the bar scene on Friday night exhausted me. Most of the people in the club had come with a significant other—a little break after work to pretend they were still part of the hip singles scene without actually having to be a part of the hip singles scene on the weekends.
This wasn’t going to work for me. I wasn’t ready to date, and Mark had been an anomaly. If I got the urge to go home with a target again, I’d just book an extra appointment with my therapist. I grabbed my purse off the bar and prepared to give up for the night.
I looked across the room and saw that my roofie creeper had found a new target. He actually tried to press my pink cocktail on her. He must’ve only brought one pill tonight. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-two, and the guy was all up in her personal space. She had that deer-in-the-headlights look, frozen with fear and not sure how to make an exit.
I marched over to her table and threw my arms around her. “Go with it,” I whispered in her ear. Then louder: “I’m so glad I finally found you. It took me forever to find this place.”
“Excuse me.” The guy tapped me on the shoulder. “We were having a conversation.”
I cut him down with a withering glare. “Not anymore, you’re not.” I took the girl by the arm. “Come on, sweetie. Your UFC boyfriend is waiting at the bar up the street.”
As soon as we stepped out on the sidewalk, the girl turned to me. “Thank you. I didn’t think I’d be able to get out of there without him following me.”
“No problem. Girls in this city have to look out for each other, right?”
“Right.” She gave me a relieved smile. “Though I wish that UFC boyfriend was real.”
“Don’t we all.” I waited with the girl until her Uber driver pulled up, then headed back to my apartment. I hadn’t found a guy worth talking to, but at least my brief experiment had confirmed that Emma had been right. Hooking up with future targets wouldn’t be an issue.
CHAPTER 6
The next morning, I grabbed an Uber to work and took the elevator up to the twenty-fourth floor, where the Heartbreak for Hire office was located.
Aside from myself, there were three other Heartbreakers. Emma was head of Players, Charlotte Diaz took care of the Grifters, and Allie VanHousen ran Cheaters. Margo had hand-selected us to form H4H, finding us at restaurants, bars, or coffee shops all over the city, alone and in tears after a horrific breakup. Right when we were primed to enter this business. Because there were only four of us, we’d grown close. Not only did we get to live out our revenge fantasies, but the commission we made on assignments would fund all the dreams we hoped to accomplish one day.
I barely had time to turn on my laptop before Margo summoned me to her office. I had a meeting with Selena in fifteen minutes to give her the refund, and I hoped to have her out in less time than that. Closing my laptop again, I got to my feet and headed down the hall.
When Margo told me to come in, I pushed open the door, then stopped short. Margo sat at her desk, cozy as could be, across from Selena. I narrowed my eyes. This was my client, and Margo had promised she wouldn’t interfere. She’d been doing so well the past few weeks too. I should’ve known she’d crack soon.
“What’s going on here?” I took a seat. “You’re early, Selena.”
“I couldn’t wait to see you and gush about what a great job you did. Mark looked like absolute shit yesterday.” Selena wore a wide grin, which didn’t give me any sort of satisfaction.
“He did?” I asked. Margo cleared her throat, and when I glanced at her, she gave me a quick jerk of her chin. “Okay. He did.”
None of this made sense. I’d assumed Mark wouldn’t have loved my exit, but as far as Margo knew, he hadn’t gone for me. Why was she acting like all had gone as planned?
“I’m so pleased you found our services helpful.” Margo poured a cup of tea for Selena from her frilly pink pot and passed her a gold-filigreed cup. “I do hope you’ll pass the word along to some of your friends, since we can’t exactly advertise this sort of thing.”
“Certainly.” Selena flipped her sleek blond hair over her shoulder. I could spend all day under a hot iron and still never get my hair that straight. Her salon bills must’ve been astronomical. “If only I could’ve been a fly on the wall when you destroyed him.”
She would’ve been one unhappy fly if she’d witnessed what I’d actually done with him. I didn’t care for Selena as a person, but when she salivated with delight over Mark’s misery, she reminded me of those kids in school who pulled legs off crickets and tied strings around cats’ tails just to see what they would do. The way she took pleasure in it all went well beyond that of a contemptuous coworker. I looked her over as I considered what real score she had to settle.
“Brinkley is our best.” Margo handed me a cup and gave me the kind of motherly smile I never got from my own mom. “She’s been with me for two years and rarely strikes out.”
I glowed under the unwarranted praise. Margo was all business, but she always talked us up to the clients. Maybe it was just because it was good sales practice, but it was more than I ever got growing up, or fr
om my disastrous three years with Aiden, so I lapped it up like a kitten with a bowl of milk.
“I’m going to recommend your services to the other adjuncts in my department.” Selena’s eyes sparked with malice, and for a moment it was like looking in a mirror. A really harsh mirror with bad lighting that showed all your pores. “Half the assistant professors are like Mark.”
If she meant assistant professors who gave great ladyhead, I’d have to seriously consider a career change. “Can I ask you a question?” Margo shot me a warning look, but I ignored her. “Mark seemed okay during our meet-cute. Not like the typical narcissists I deal with on a weekly basis. Is there something we should know about your relationship with him?”
Selena’s smile turned feral for an instant, before melting back into her earlier pleasantry. “I assure you. He is a complete jerk-off.”
Touchy.
Margo cleared her throat. “Which is why we were happy to assist you in bringing him down a peg. Men like that need to learn they don’t always get what they want.”
“Yes. Of course.” I buried my grimace behind my teacup. I had no idea why I’d even asked Selena about her relationship with Mark. It wasn’t my job to defend him or poke at her personal business. It wasn’t my job to do anything other than make him feel terrible, and apparently I’d succeeded at that without even trying.
“You were very effective.” Selena crossed her legs as she turned toward me. “Care to share how you broke him so fast after just one meeting?”
“Trade secret, I’m afraid.” I smiled, but I’m sure my eyes were like ice chips. Everything about Selena rubbed me the wrong way. She carried herself like a tiger. While I generally respected women who gnashed their teeth and flashed their claws to get ahead in a world that constantly tried to hold them back and keep them sweet, she had an unnecessary cruelty about her. As if she didn’t just use those claws and teeth on the men who stood in her way.
