Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 113996 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113996 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
“Where do I even start?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
I exhaled deeply and opened my eyes. “I’m the person who’s meant to kill you.”
“I figured that part out myself. The photos and the gun were a dead giveaway,” he said sharply. “But why you?”
“Because Alex said so.”
“Why? I don’t even know him.”
“No, you don’t. But you know his business partner…”
We said the name at the same time.
Gimmel Martel.
He looked away as he absorbed what I was saying, clenching his teeth so his jaw ticked.
I longed to tell him the full story. That my parents didn’t die when I was younger like I’d told him. That they were junkie scum who tried selling my virginity to their drug dealer, so I had run away to live on the streets. That Alex had plucked me out of the nightmare of homelessness, and sat me in an ivory tower in the part of town I could only dream about. How at eighteen, after he saved my brother from my mother, I had agreed to do anything for him, and as a result, became his kill girl. How I’d stealthily crawled through the shadows of the seedy underworld taking out whoever he told me to. How the targets were bad men. Every single one of them. Drug dealers. Rival kingpins. Human traffickers. Rapists. Men who had somehow made their way onto his hit list for one reason or another. And how I’d found satisfaction in it. Not because I enjoyed killing, because I didn’t, but because it made the man I idolized proud of me.
I wanted to tell him how he started to hire me out. A hired killer available for the right price. How, if you needed someone gone, I was an option to make it happen.
A psychopathic night club owner you couldn’t forgive for raping your sister and putting her in the hospital for three weeks.
A corrupt senator with a taste for the younger kind who took advantage of your daughter, and who you knew was responsible for her body being found in Chesapeake Bay.
A cruel, corporate playboy who raped and killed your brother in a drug-fueled, sexual rage because he thought he could take whatever he wanted, from whomever he wanted.
How I would lure the target with the promise of sex. But end their life before they could lay a finger on me.
I wanted to tell Bull how I’d had my moment of clarity at the ripe old age of twenty-three years old, when Alex murdered my one and only friend in front of me because he was having an affair with his wife. How the veil had lifted, and I’d seen him for the monster he truly was. But how it was too late for me by then. Because I was already a lethal killing machine.
Bad to the bone.
A monster. Just like him.
And I had to live with it every single day.
I wanted to come clean to Bull. Wanted him to know me, all of me, and how remorseful I was for a past I’d never had any control over.
But even now as I lay my cards on the table, I couldn’t admit to him just how deep my own venom ran. Because I could already feel him slipping away from me.
I wasn’t insane enough to think that our love could survive this. I had accepted that last night when I decided I would kill Alex today. I had accepted it with every tear that fell down my cheeks when we’d made love. With our final touch. Our last kiss.
But standing here now, seeing him and feeling the gulf between us widening, I couldn’t find the words.
I hadn’t expected to see him today.
I thought I would be gone by now.
But he had figured out that last night was goodbye. And now here he was.
He moved cautiously, taking a step closer. But he said nothing, the cutting silence forcing me to explain at least something.
“I was a runaway when Alex found me on the streets. I’d run away from my parents when I was twelve because they were junkie scum. By the time Alex found me, I was jaded and sick. I’d been beaten. Abused. Raped.” Bull’s eyebrows drew in and his jaw tightened. “He took a broken fifteen-year-old and spent the next eight years taking advantage of her. Because he could. Because she was so grateful to him, so she never questioned his motives. Never told him no.”
I swallowed thickly, feeling the echoes of how I once felt about him. They were so foreign now, so alien, so wrong. My face stiffened with emotion and remorse.
“It was years before I realized the truth.”
“Which was?”
“That he was a psychopath who saw me as nothing more than an opportunity. That he had used me. But by then it was too late. He had already taken my anger and pain, and used it to mold me into what he wanted me to be. And I’d been so desperate to please him, I’d let him.” The bleak memories surged forward as if they’d happened only yesterday. “When I realized who he was, I took Noah and we ran. Because he wouldn’t let us leave. And if we’d stayed, he would’ve done the same to Noah as he did to me.”