Dangerous Lovers (110 page)

His glove. It was weighted.

He hit me again and warmth rushed from my nose. He must have put on a new glove, one with brass sewn inside. He was dirty.

I tried to get up, to hit him again.

“I told you I wasn’t going to lose,” the man rasped.

I heard the ref calling out for him to get off me, that he was supposed to back off. I heard the hush that fell over the crowd.

I looked up at him. He saw it in my eyes.

I wasn’t giving up. This title, the money that came with it, was mine.

He reared back one last time, the ref screaming for him to stop.

He drove his glove into my face, up under my nose, driving the bones straight into my brain.

I collapsed beneath him.

As life faded from my limbs, a single flicker of emotion was felt.

For her. She needed me and I failed. What would happen to her now?

Death swallowed me then, taking what was left of my thoughts, my life. Turns out the moment in which my life was defined forever was not what I expected.

In fact, it seemed that my life was now defined by death.

* * *

Red.
It’s all I could see. It was all around me, everywhere. At this rate I wouldn’t have one drop of blood left in my body. How long did it take someone to bleed out? How long until their organs, their heart had nothing left to fuel them? A minute? Five?

What I couldn’t understand is why I wasn’t in pain. Surely with this much blood pouring out of my skin I would feel some kind of raw pain. But there was nothing.

Nothing but red.

Why was it suddenly so quiet? I could hear nothing—not even the sound of my own breathing. Then I realized. The hush in the air was because everyone was watching me die. They were likely wondering the same thing I had been moments before:
How long?
I needed to get up, to prove to them that I wasn’t going down like this. I wasn’t going to die in a fight I should have won—a fight that was rightfully mine.

I stopped thinking completely when I practically flew up off the ground. An overwhelming dizziness overcame me, so disorienting and unsettling that my insides buzzed with discomfort.

I was upright, my body springing up so fast that I hadn’t even consciously tried to move it. Still, all I saw was red. How could someone bleed so much and move so fast?

I looked down at myself, taking stock, mentally preparing for the sight of my blood-drenched body…

Only I wasn’t bleeding.

And my body… it wasn’t there.

In the place of skin and bone was nothing but a fine red mist—a red cloud that was shaped like a man—
like me
.

Tentatively, I reached out my arm (was it really still my arm?) and watched the red mist dissipate like smoke from a cigar.

I must already be dead.

This cloud—this red—was all that was left of me, left of my life?

I looked up, beyond myself, and saw that I wasn’t in the ring anymore. I was in a room. An office. It was large, uncluttered and had a huge row of floor-to-ceiling closets lining the wall behind a massive desk.

It was clear this wasn’t heaven. But it didn’t seem like hell either.

I watched as the large leather chair behind the desk began to swivel around, slowly turning, and if I had a throat I would have swallowed thickly.

There was something ominous about the way that chair turned, something final. I knew it down to my core.

A boney man with a wide forehead and shrewd eyes appeared, steepling his fingers beneath his chin and regarding me in a way that did nothing to soothe my confusion.

“You’re dead,” the man said simply. “But you don’t have to be for very long.”

“I don’t?” I replied, surprised when my voice echoed through the room. How does one speak without a mouth?

He smiled. It was the kind of smile that I’d seen before. The kind the boxer gave me right before he killed me in that dirty fight.

“I have a proposition for you,” he began, pulling his hands down from under his chin and pushing out of the chair. “One that you won’t be able to refuse.”

And so just minutes after I lived the moment that defined my life forever… I also lived the moment that would forever define my death.

Chapter One

“
Death Escort - an assassin employed by the Grim Reaper. Will kill a target by any means necessary. Including charm.”

Charming

Present day

You would think being a Death Escort—a killer by trade—would make a man above getting a lecture from his boss. Apparently when you work for the Grim Reaper, the ultimate death dealer, it doesn’t matter who you are, how many times you’ve killed, or how ruthless you might be because he is better.

After over ninety years of working for him, it’s still annoying as hell.

And so are his lectures.

The fact is it gets old working for someone who is the be-all, end-all in life and death. So when I saw the chance to allow someone to get the best of him, I took it. I mean, it isn’t every day when someone manages to get around the iron-clad rules of the Grim Reaper himself.

So yeah, I talked and wasted time. I “forgot” to mention that one of his new Escorts had figured out a way to break the call of death that was placed on a Target. Turns out in the eyes of the Reaper (who strangely looked a lot like Mr. Burns from that cartoon
The Simpsons
), that made me an accessory.

And now, after weeks of delaying the inevitable, I was getting my punishment.

Goody gumdrops.

Instead of listening to what a disappointment I was, how he should just Recall me right now and let me twist away in an eternity far worse than hell, blah, blah, blah, I turned my attention instead toward the floor-to-ceiling row of closets that lined the wall behind his massive desk.

The closets where he kept his bodies.

Some people collect coins, artifacts, or tools. G.R. collects bodies.

The doors were open, making me think he was displaying his collection to me for a certain reason. Shock value maybe? Though he must know that seeing a bunch of bodies wasn’t something that would shock me. These bodies were all groomed and hanging in perfect rows. I was used to seeing bodies in… less than perfect condition.

Maybe it was to make me think that the very body I inhabited at this moment might end up back with the others and I would be nothing but the red mist that makes up my soul.

I scanned the bodies, my eyes looking for one that probably should have been familiar, but after so many years I wondered if it would be. I had done this occasionally through the years, but just like today, I didn’t see it. I wondered what had become of my original body, the one I was born in. The one I died in. I couldn’t imagine G.R. got rid of it; I mean, he was practically a body hoarder, yet in all my years of working as an escort, of rotating bodies, I hadn’t seen it.

And I wasn’t about to ask. Because asking would let him know I wondered; it would give him even more power over me… something he didn’t need more of.

“I have a new Target for you,” G.R. announced, effectively ending my thinking.

“A Target?” I asked, surprised, wondering if I somehow missed the punishment I was supposed to get.

“That is your job, is it not?” he mused, staring at me through narrowed eyes. His cheekbones jutted out and his wide forehead was further widened by the way he combed his dark hair back and away from his face. He wasn’t a big man, but I guess when the merest touch could kill, muscles didn’t really matter.

“I thought we were here to discuss the status of my job,” I replied, looking right at him. I was careful to keep my posture bordering on lazy to give off the impression I could care less about whatever he dished out.

“Active,” he said, irritation flashing through his eyes. “That’s the status of your job. Like it or not, you’re one of the best escorts I have.”

I flashed a smile. I wasn’t
one
of the best. I was
the
best. We both knew it. I guess that was the reason my punishment was lacking.

“Here,” he said, holding out a file. I got up and took the folder, opening it up and staring down at the picture clipped to the front of the page. It was a young woman, in her twenties—long dark hair, brown eyes, and full lips. She was gorgeous, which could be considered a bonus. She had the bone structure of fine breeding and about four names, which spoke of old money.

She’d be dead by the end of the week.

I scanned the information, looking for her address, looking for the place I’d be flying off to next. Hopefully it was somewhere warm, with miles of beaches. Or perhaps the dessert where it seemed the sun always shined. I didn’t really care as long as it wasn’t here. Alaska sucked. I hoped I never came here again.

My eyes found the zip code and I stiffened. “Is this right?” I asked, turning to look at G.R.

“Have I ever given you faulty information?”

Here. The woman was here, in this godforsaken, cold, and dark town.

Something niggled at the back of my brain. I looked at her name again.
Rosalyn Elizabeth Kennedy Sinclair
. Her last name… I’d heard it before. I glanced down at the short paragraph on known information about the Target.

Daughter of Senator Jack Sinclair.

The file slapped my thigh when I jerked and spun around to look at G.R. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I don’t joke about business.”

“She’s the daughter of Jack Sinclair, the
Alaskan
senator. He’s practically a celebrity around here,” I said, thinking of all the times I watched the news or some show on TV. The press here loved him. They practically camped out on his lawn, just hoping for a glimpse of him.

“Yes. He is. His daughter is worth thirty million dollars.”

“Money. So this Target is all about money,” I said. I don’t know why this irritated me, but it did. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d killed for money. It wouldn’t be the last. In fact, I killed for money more than I killed for abilities because finding people with some sort of ability wasn’t as easy as finding one with money.

“You have something against money, Charming?”

“No. But you have to know this girl has got to have security practically feeding her breakfast. Not to mention she probably has fifteen financial advisors and lawyers that will make actually getting to her money impossible.”

“So are you saying you can’t do this job? That you refuse?”

Ahhhh. And here it was.

Understanding dawned like the sun of a new day.

He was dolling out my punishment in the form of a job. He assigned me a Target that would practically guarantee failure. Failure would get me Recalled, would get my soul pulled out of my body and sent into an empty vast space of nothingness for all eternity. A place where I could hear the tortured wails of those lost around me, a place where I could think but feel nothing but pain, and a place where I would know no peace
ever
.

And if I refused this job?

Same thing. So here was an interesting dilemma. I could refuse and get Recalled. I could fail and get Recalled. Or I could pull off the most impossible kill in the history of escorting and I could make Mr. Death himself finally realize who he was attempting to mess with.

Really, there was no dilemma at all.

“You know this job is going to take longer. To infiltrate the camp of this woman, of this family… it isn’t something I can do overnight.”

G.R.’s eyes gleamed. “Yes, I’m aware. I’ll give you six months.”

I kept my face smooth, my posture relaxed as his timeline sucker punched me in the gut.
Six months?
That was insane. A job of this magnitude would take a year. I underestimated just how angry I had made him.

My eyes slid to the bowl of light-colored stones that sat on the corner of his desk. The stones that he always left in exchange for a life that he took. Once a stone was placed, the death—the end of a life—was sealed. There was no getting out of it.

Except for once.

Turns out if you can manage to break the stone, then you break the claim of the Grim Reaper. One of the new Escorts figured it out. It got him Recalled. It got me into this predicament.

“I want more than my usual cut,” I said. Punishment or not, if I pulled this off I wanted what I earned. “Ten million.”

“That’s a lot of money,” G.R. replied, leaning back in his chair as he appraised me. “You’re in no position to be making demands.”

I shrugged. “You’re convinced I’ll fail anyway. Who cares how much I ask for?”