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Alessandro had taken the top floor in the three-story brick building that used to be a fire station years ago. Rogan purchased it but never did anything with it, and eventually we bought it from him.
I had walked through this building before when we purchased it. The first floor, with an unusually high ceiling, served as the garage for the fire trucks. The second, accessible by an iron staircase, housed the offices, and the third contained the rec room, sleeping quarters, and a big kitchen once capable of serving food to an entire fire team.
I climbed the iron stairs, with my hip screaming at me the entire way. I had left Shadow in the warehouse. She seemed susceptible to his bribes, and I had no idea what sort of bizarre thing he would try to feed her this time.
The original plan was to turn the fire station into barracks, but the building proved to be too old. Fixing it up would be more expensive than building a brand-new structure. Rogan let it go for next to nothing. At some point, Leon, obsessed with the fire pole, had tried to convince Bern to move there with him and turn it into a “hip bro cave.” That plan died when they realized rewiring the place was out of their budget.
The stairs brought me to a wide-open door. I stepped through and ended up in the rec room, flooded with daylight from huge windows. Someone had swept the concrete floor. On the right a large pack of bottled water waited on the counter of a kitchen right out of the seventies, complete with wooden paneling. Straight ahead, in the corner, an inflatable mattress rested on the floor. Between me and the mattress stood two plastic fold-out tables filled with weapons and equipment. A high-tech-looking laptop, parts of a drone, six, no, nine guns, including a BFR, four knives, two daggers, a machete, a garrote, and a compound bow. The assassin’s tool kit.
The assassin himself was nowhere to be seen. I walked to the tables. Whatever his faults were, Alessandro had excellent taste in blades. Everything was functional, sharp, and sturdy. And generic. No custom-made pieces, no family heirlooms. Nothing irreplaceable or that could be traced.
I reached for the Ka-Bar and tested the balance. Seven-inch straight blade angled at the tip. Heavy.
I turned to get better light. Alessandro sat on the kitchen counter, one leg bent, the other hanging free. I almost threw the Ka-Bar.
“Adorable,” Alessandro said. “Do that little jump again.”
I put the Ka-Bar down before the temptation got the better of me. “I brought you the recording.” I held up the thumb drive.
He jumped off the counter and stalked toward me.
I circled the tables, looking at his collection and keeping the furniture between us. “You seem to know a lot about Benedict.”
“Mhm.”
“What is he?”
“You were with him. What do you think he is? What did you feel?”
“Revulsion and fear. His magic manifested as dark phantom serpents. He opened himself, and a nest of ghost snakes slithered out wanting to bite me.”
“That’s why he calls himself the Adder,” he said.
“The Adder? Really?”
“It goes with the territory. Nobody wants to hire a Mr. De Lacy or Madame Laurent. They want to hire the Adder or Mort Noire.”
“Please tell me there isn’t an assassin calling herself the Black Death?”
“More than one.”
It seemed so childish except people were dying. “So, what’s your nickname? Instagram Famous? Playboy Killer?”
“Are you teasing me, you sexy beast?”
The careful train of my thoughts derailed, flipped over in the air, and burst on fire. Think of a witty comeback, come on . . . How did he keep short-circuiting my brain?
He laughed. “If looks could kill.”
I resumed our dance around the tables. “Benedict is a psionic, isn’t he? Probably a phobic subtype.”
Psionic mages affected survival emotions. Fear, disgust, rage, anxiety, shame. The primal, powerful urges that kept humans breathing thousands of years before tools and weapons came along. Psionics induced these emotions in their targets. Phobics specialized in fear. They had an innate ability to find your worst phobia and project it into your mind, dragging you into paralyzing madness. I’d dealt with a phobic before, although she wasn’t a Prime. Benedict’s magic elicited that same instinctual punch of revulsion and terror.
“Close,” Alessandro said. “His mother is a phobic. His father is a mind cutter.”
A menincissor mage. A particularly nasty branch of mental magic that attacked consciousness. Mind cutters punctured mental shields and induced pain and the inability to think. They weren’t lethal on their own, but they excelled at disabling their target.
“Are you running away from me?” Alessandro asked.
“No.” We had come full circle around the tables.
“Yes, you are. Are you afraid of what I’ll do if I catch you?” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Or are you scared of what you might do?”
I stopped. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
He vaulted over a table and landed next to me. I tilted my head and looked at him. Magic roiled just under his skin. His amber eyes all but glowed.
Kiss me.
“When a phobic and a mind cutter have a child . . .” He spoke softly, his voice warm and low, meant just for me. When he told someone he loved them, he might sound just like that. “. . . they have a one in a quarter chance of producing a crime against nature called a mind ripper. Benedict can penetrate mental defenses like his father and then scramble the mind, inducing panic like his mother. Benedict didn’t just happen; he was a planned project by a mind cutter House. They wanted a dark horse to handle their dirty deeds.”
He was standing way too close. Looking at him made it difficult to concentrate. “What happened?”
“They had a difference of opinion. Now House Weber is no more.”
I held out the USB drive. He took it from my hand. His long fingers brushed mine.
Alessandro opened the laptop and plugged the drive in. Sigourney appeared on the screen.
I crossed my arms on my chest and leaned against the wall by the window. If Alessandro ever kissed me, I wouldn’t want him to stop. When he came to see me that time after the trials, asking me to go for a ride, I wanted him so much, it took all of my will to not open my wings and make him love me. In that moment, it didn’t matter that it wouldn’t be real. Being loved by him was all I had cared about.
I got so scared that I would lose control, I called the police and asked them to make him leave. I did it because my magic would take away his free will and chain him to me. I didn’t want that for him. I wanted him to have a long, happy life with whoever he chose. I had to let him go.
The more I looked at his Instagram over the years, the less happy he seemed. Now I knew—the Instagram Alessandro was bullshit. He had created a fantasy and held it up to the world like a shield. This Alessandro, the one in front of me staring at the laptop with the single-minded focus of a predator; this was the real man. Knowing this should have freed me, but I only wanted him more.
My phone chimed. An Instagram alert for Alessandro’s account. On my phone Alessandro surfed, a crystal blue wave curling around him. His wet hair flared around his face. Muscle corded his body under bronze skin. I looked at the tag and held the phone out to him. “Maui, really?”
“Mhm. I’m currently in Hawaii. Did you see his hand when he reached over her?” He paused the recording just before Sigourney’s killer turned off the PC.
“I did. I digitally enhanced it.” I hadn’t mentioned it, because I wanted to know if he would notice it too.
He glanced at me. All the flirting had evaporated. His eyes were clear and cold. He had seen his target.
Alessandro the killer. And if I let my mind wander, it would drift off into imagining the glide of his fingertips against my skin, the warm heat of his lips on mine, the power of his arms around me . . . It would construct impossible scenarios where somehow he fell in love with me and stopped being an assassin and we lived happily ever after.
I was morally bankrupt.
He must’ve seen it in my face because humor sparked in his eyes.
“Can I see the enhanced image? Or will you make me beg?”
“It’s the second file on the drive. You know, you don’t have to pretend to flirt with me. I said I would work with you and I meant it.”
He smiled at me. It wasn’t his dazzling bachelor-of-the-year grin, it was a simple quick smile. “I never pretend with you. Tease you, maybe. Flirt, yes. But never that.”
I wished he hadn’t said that to me. Not helping, Alessandro. Not even a little bit.
“These fingers have claws,” he told me.
“And the knuckles of the hand are abnormally large and oddly shaped. If this was a normal person, he or she would have advanced arthritis. Doesn’t seem like a desirable trait in an assassin.”
He frowned. “If this is arthritis, he wouldn’t be able to open a door. No, I think this is reinforcement to account for the additional finger weight and length of the claws.”
“Yes. The distal phalanges are wider and longer as well. The whole hand appears stronger.”
He leaned back from the laptop. “The warped can’t do magic by definition.”
“Yet here we are. It looks like she had a massive stroke with catastrophic bleeding. Is this a carnifex mage?”
