AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I bent my wrist, not feeling even a tinge of pain from it anymore. The car accident that had bruised my ribs and sprained my wrist could have been so much worse, but even a wrecked car couldn’t get the drop on me for long. I no longer needed the brace, and aside from an occasional twinge of pain in my ribs, I was good as new. No weaknesses to hold me back.
“What is the job?” I asked.
“It’s a fairly straightforward one. Go in, kill the assholes we’ve been hired to kill, get out. We’re taking care of it tonight.” He cocked his head. “Having watched you fight while injured, I expect it’ll be quite a show seeing you fully in action.”
Was that a flicker of another kind of interest in his eyes? I’d swear I caught a hint of the same heat that was trickling through me at his nearness, but it was there and gone so quickly I couldn’t quite tell. Julius didn’t hold up walls of defensiveness the same way Garrison did, and he wasn’t as impassive as Talon seemed to be naturally, but he kept his emotions close.
“I usually work pretty differently from you and the crew,” I had to point out.
Julius shrugged. “It’d be a trial run. Maybe it’ll turn out to be a bad idea… or maybe it’ll be a brilliant one.” He shot me a rare smile that showed his teeth—and nearly melted the panties right off me.
I still wasn’t sure about the whole chaos thing, but the prospect of getting to do any kind of work sent a thrill through me. And this was an awfully immense show of trust. Julius had enough faith in me to invite me along and let me take part in the kind of job he staked the crew’s reputation on.
That alone felt like more than enough reason to jump at the chance.
I only had one more hesitation. I’d been forced to kill people for years—people I now knew might not have done anything all that wrong. Going forward, I could make those decisions for myself.
I studied Julius’s expression. “Are we sure that the people you’re taking down deserve it?”
Julius analyzed me right back, scanning my face as if evaluating my motives for asking the question. It really was very simple. The killing itself didn’t bother me, but I wanted to know who I killed and why I killed them. The idea of murdering someone innocent—someone who didn’t deserve the brutal wrath reaped by the Chaos Crew—made my skin crawl.
Maybe Julius could read some of that with his gaze. “It’s important to you that we don’t kill innocents.”
“Yes,” I said firmly. “It is.”
He smiled again, slower and softer, but somehow this one sent an even deeper surge of attraction racing through me. “Good. We feel the same way. I believe in dealing out justice alongside the chaos. We require that our clients provide information on the targets’ background, and Blaze confirms it independently. We only accept jobs that involve marks who’ve been doing plenty of destruction of their own.”
A sense of certainty clicked into place inside me, as if this was exactly what I’d been waiting for. “All right,” I said. “I’m in.”
