“Hey, what’s going on out there?” Dinah barked from her holster on my thigh. I reached down and slid her out a little, running my thumb over the worn and smoothed stock.
“Nothing. Go back to sleep. We’ve got hours of driving ahead of us,” I said.
The two guns were styled after a Berretta, matte black, and threaded for silencers. Other than that, they bore no resemblance to anything normal. Both spoke and had distinct personalities. Both had a love for killing. Both were, as far as I knew, cursed in their own way, but I didn’t have details on what had happened to them to have their souls shoved into an inanimate object made for one thing—death dealing.
“Eleanor, wake up. I want to talk to you,” Dinah barked.
I rolled my eyes.
Eleanor was silent. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who got irritated with Dinah’s incessant need for chatter when there wasn’t a fight or lives on the line.
From the front seat, Simon tapped the dash with his knuckles, drawing my eyes to him. “Medford coming up. You want to stop and eat then?”
I gave him a nod and nothing else. I put my hands over both guns, quieting Dinah immediately. She knew as did Eleanor that there were times to shut your mouth, and this was one of them. Something in the air had shifted, and I could feel it on my skin.
Eleanor shivered under my hand and I knew she wanted to tell me something, but she didn’t speak. Interesting. Something she didn’t want Simon to hear, then.
I looked at him and the way his hands tightened and relaxed over and over on the steering wheel.
Simon was up to something, then, though I couldn’t put my fingers on it.
“How long were you an assassin?” he asked, breaking the silence with probably the worst question he could have chosen.
I leaned back in the seat, letting my eyes drift so they were almost closed. “You mean you don’t know? You were sent to bring me in.”
I watched him through my eyelashes. He shrugged as he steered us onto the off ramp. “I’m not a details kind of guy.”
“No shit,” I said. His lack of detail orientation had almost gotten us both killed back in Hollywood. After a little thought, I decided to answer him. “I started training when I was twelve. Made my first kill at fifteen. Got out when I was twenty-two.”
He snorted. “Twelve. That’s messed up. But seven years, damn, that’s a good record. Most normals don’t make it to three before some abnormal chomps them in half and shits out the rest of them.” Simon smiled as if he were giving me a compliment. Which in the past, I would have taken it as such, but now, not so much. I wasn’t hunting abnormals anymore. I was hunting the man who’d started me down this path. My father, Luca Romano.
“Simon,” I lifted a foot and put it against the door frame to take some pressure off my injuries, “I don’t want to talk about my past.”
His eyes flicked to mine in the rearview mirror. “You sure? Because I’m thinking it’s your past you’re hunting down as much as vengeance for your kid.”
The muscles in my jaw tensed, and I kept my hands still on my thighs. Though I could use him in Seattle, and I knew he could potentially speed up my hunt, this was why Simon would not be coming with me farther than Medford.
He talked too much, he wanted to be my friend, he wanted to analyze me and figure me out. And occasionally, I think he wanted to fuck me. And the last thing I wanted when I was hunting Romano’s business, money, and power, and doing all I could to take them from him, was a nosy abnormal with tracing abilities, questionable loyalties, and a hard-on for my body.
Time to cut him loose. There were other ways to find people.
“This place looks good.” I pointed at a big truck stop coming up fast. A greasy spoon that would have food, bathrooms, and give me a break from Simon and his questioning. Shit, I’d been awake less than thirty minutes and I needed a break from him. Something had changed, because this was not our first road trip together.
What had happened while I’d been asleep? Again, Eleanor shivered under my hand. She really wanted to talk. I pressed against her and spoke low. “In a minute.”
“What?” Simon looked in the mirror.
I shook my head. “Talking to Abe. Just get us parked. I need to stretch.”
He did as I asked and pulled into the truck stop parking lot. I leaned forward and held my hand out. “Keys. I’ll drive next and you can sleep.”
Without a single protest, he handed the keys to me. I kept my eyes away from his so he wouldn’t see any hint of the duplicity I was planning.
Whatever had changed with Simon while I was asleep was the final strike that got him an early ejection from my life. Simon’s time with me was done. He just didn’t know it yet.
I slipped Abe’s collar and leash on and adjusted Dinah and Eleanor so they sat in the shoulder holsters hidden by my loose jacket. The strap of the holster dug into the bite in my shoulder, reminding me I was far from done healing. Fuck, it would be nice to have Zee with me. My mentor was good at reminding me to take things at a doable pace.
Abe limped along next to me, both of us battered and bruised. But alive, which was more than I could say for those I’d faced down. We’d survived something where the odds had been stacked against us.
I didn’t want to think too hard about what I’d done to make that happen. Killing people was one thing, and I didn’t mind that. But drinking down a vial of magic that had amped up my speed and strength and made me something close to an abnormal, even for a short time . . . that was something else entirely. Three of the vials full of Diva, to be exact.
To be fair, the effects had disappeared, leaving me a mess of slow healing, slow moving, all normal assassin. The thought made me smile. Or grimace, if the look on the trucker’s face I walked by was any indication. The dude was massive, built as if someone had been stacking bricks and brought their creation to life. With his tiny eyes, he looked a bit like a rhino.
“Talk to me, Eleanor,” I said as soon as we were clear.
“He took a call while you were asleep,” she said. “I don’t know who it was but he was whispering and nervous.”
“Fuck, did you get any names, any words?”
“No, I couldn’t hear. Dinah?” Eleanor said.
“No, I got nothing other than he took a call,” Dinah said. “You think he’s going to turn on you?”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re not with him from here on out.” I adjusted my hold on Abe and kept moving.
I headed to the side of the diner where a pay phone sat empty. I stepped up to it and slid a few coins in, then dialed Zee’s cell phone number. Zee was the last of my family, even though he was not blood related. Not only had he been the man who’d trained me to fight and kill, he escaped my father and hid me for years at the cost of his own health. Zee had been there and seen the evidence of Justin’s and Bear’s murders. He’d helped me prep, and now he was holding down the fort back in Jackson Hole. He believed that one day I would go back.
The phone clicked through and he picked up on the second ring. “Nix?”
I smiled, even though it hurt my face. “Yeah, I’m here. We cleaned out the studio, burned it to the ground, took all the money and Gabe is done.” Had to be careful with the words. Didn’t want to have someone overhear me talking about killing my brother.