Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 109878 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 440(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109878 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 440(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
He keeps going until I’m shaking and trying to push him away because it’s too much. He finally lifts his head, his beard wet, smiling like he just won something.
“Tonight is just about you,” he growls. “I like to spread out my fun over multiple nights. Tonight . . . I just want a taste.”
Chapter Two
Blue
I never visit the same establishment more than once if I can help it, and most definitely not two nights in a row. My profession—scratch that—my old profession of hired killer makes me wary of patterns and predictability.
But I’m retired now. I’m a new man. Or so I keep telling myself.
The truth is, I wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for the phone call. Tommy Vance, low-level information broker with a talent for finding people who don’t want to be found. Five years of searching, five years of dead ends and false leads, and suddenly he claims he’s got a lead on Sara Mitchell.
“White Note cabaret,” he’d said. “Meet me there tomorrow night. I think I found your girl.”
Your girl. As if she belongs to me. As if I have any right to her after what happened to Peter.
The smoke in this place is thicker tonight, clinging to everything like guilt. Every shadow in the corner could be hiding threats, every patron could be a Crow who followed me here. Old habits. They die harder than the people I used to kill.
I scan the dimly lit bar, my old instincts kicking in despite my best efforts to quell them. The bartender is the same as last night. He catches my eye and gives a slight nod of recognition. Damn. So much for anonymity, but it was important for me to come to the bar last night to scope it out before this meeting. I like knowing what I’m walking into. In my line of work, surprises equal death.
I sidle up to the bar, trying to appear nonchalant. “Whiskey, neat,” I mutter, avoiding eye contact with the bartender. He slides the drink over without a word, but I can feel his gaze lingering. Taking a sip, enjoying the fire liquid as it sizzles down my throat, I check my watch for the tenth time in as many minutes. Where the hell is Tommy?
Peter’s dying message plays in my head on repeat: “Blue, they found me. If something happens, promise me you’ll find Sara. Keep her safe. She’s all I have left, and she’s perfect. She deserves better than this world I pulled her into.”
I’d been three whiskeys deep in some dive bar, drowning in my own demons after a job gone sideways, when his call came through. Let it ring. Figured Peter could wait an hour while I finished feeling sorry for myself.
By the time I called back, Peter Mitchell was dead.
The man who was trying to save my soul, and I couldn’t even answer his fucking call.
We were opposites in every way that mattered. He believed in second chances, I believed in permanent solutions. He saw the good in people, I saw the targets they painted on themselves. But somehow we’d ended up walking the same dark circles, two men from different worlds trying to survive in a business that didn’t have room for conscience.
Peter was the light trying to pull me out of the darkness. I was the shadow that followed him, cleaning up the messes his decency couldn’t handle.
Peter and I met fifteen years before on a job in Prague. I was supposed to eliminate a witness. Some college kid who’d seen too much. Peter took one look at the boy, barely eighteen and shaking like a leaf, and stepped between us.
“There’s another way,” he’d said, calm as death. “There’s always another way if you want it badly enough.”
He was right. We made the kid disappear instead. New identity, new life, clean slate. Peter paid for it out of his own pocket. Never asked for anything in return except a promise that I’d think twice before my next kill.
That one conversation changed everything. Peter saw something in me that I’d never seen in myself—the possibility of redemption. He was the one who convinced me to walk away, to try building something instead of just destroying.
“You’ve got enough blood on your hands for ten lifetimes, Blue,” he’d said the last time we spoke in person, about a week before he died. “Maybe it’s time to find out what those hands can create instead.”
Peter believed in second chances the way other people believe in gravity. With absolute, unshakeable faith. He was probably the only decent man I’ve ever known.
And I failed him when it mattered most.
The singer finishes her set, and the sparse applause dies down. As she slinks off stage, I catch her eye. She winks, a coy smile playing on her crimson lips. I raise my glass in a silent toast. Oh yeah, there’s going to be a repeat of last night. No doubt about it.