Leon gave me a long look, his brows dipped slightly in concern. “Okay. Well… call me if you need anything.”
I smiled. “Sure. See you around, Leon.”
His lips kicked up in the ghost of a smile. “I’m sure you will.” He stared at me a moment longer, like he was trying to work something out. Then he gave a nod and climbed back into his car.
He didn’t lurk there, waiting for me to enter the train station, and I appreciated that he was treating me as an equal rather than as a defenseless woman. It also saved me the charade of pretending I was taking a train anywhere.
Once Leon’s car disappeared from sight, I bypassed the train station and quietly broke into a car sitting dormant in a parking space nearby. I had it hot-wired a minute later and let out a long breath as I drove back into the city. Given that someone had just detonated a bomb in the hotel I’d stayed in for all of eight hours, it was safe to assume I was being tailed somehow. So I spent the next two hours winding my way through the streets of Prague and doing everything possible—including changing cars several times—to ensure I was totally alone before heading out of the city once more.
I needed to get over the border and into Poland. More specifically, I was heading to a safe house in Kraków, which was an easy five-and-a-half-hour drive from Prague. Once I was there, I could breathe again.
Even with several more vehicle changes along the way, it was only six hours later that I keyed the code into the safe house combination lock. Everything was dark inside, but I still drew my gun and swept the apartment carefully. I’d be an idiot not to in my line of work.
Only when I was satisfied that I was entirely alone did I drop my bag and head to the bathroom for a shower. I was bloody, sweaty, and dirty. Dust and ash from the hotel explosion coated my silver white hair, and the bags under my eyes were big enough to carry a small circus. Good thing I wasn’t trying to sleep with Leon, because this was far from my best look.
“Fucking hell,” I whispered at my reflection. It’d been a long time since someone had come so close to killing me. Maybe I was getting rusty in my old age? I may only be twenty-eight, but I’d been an active mercenary for the Guild since I was eight. Twenty years of killing was bound to age a woman, wasn’t it?
As carefully as I could, I peeled my clothes—and weapons—off and stepped into the hot spray of the shower. My dressing was already so messed up that I just peeled it off and tossed it out. I’d need to re-stitch the wound myself, so it couldn’t hurt to rinse the crusted blood away first.
When I was clean, dressed, and re-stitched, I grabbed my phone and checked what time it was in the UK. Relieved to see it was only early evening, I dialed my best friend and put the phone on speaker while I browsed the kitchen for supplies.
“Danny, hey!” Jude answered after the line rang a couple of times. “Shit, sorry, give me a sec.” That second part was said in a hushed whisper, and I smiled as I pulled a sealed bottle of vodka from the freezer. Thank fuck for that.
“You good?” I asked after a couple of moments of muffled noises.
“Yep,” she replied, and a door closed on her end. “Sorry, I’m still at work, and you know how Franklin is.”
I gave a low chuckle. Jude was a librarian, and her boss, Franklin Godwin, was a level eighty twat. That man needed to get laid worse than anyone I’d ever met, he was so tightly strung. And he hated Jude talking on her phone at work, even if there was no one in the library.
“Fucking Franklin,” I muttered. “How come you’re there so late?”
Jude huffed a sigh. “Because I was worried sick about you , so figured all my nervous energy was better spent here on the archive project. I just didn’t expect Franklin to fucking stick around to ‘help’ me.”
“Well, this is your official call to say that I’m still alive. And safe .” That was really all I could tell her, and she knew it.
Still, she gave a frustrated huff. “Alive, sure. But are you hurt?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her about being shot and about the hotel exploding, but any details at all would give her clues about my mission, and that directly violated the Guild secrecy laws. I never should have told Leon I was shot or that I was in Prague. But I couldn’t undo the past, so I had to chalk that up to careless mistakes made in shock. I also had to pray Leon wasn’t a stickler for the rules to report me.
“I’m fine, Jude,” I replied with a small sigh. “Just wanted to call you and chat about… anything. How was work today, other than Franklin being a prick?”
Jude gave a short pause, like she wanted to push me harder for answers, but she knew better, so after a small sigh, she launched into the latest gossip from her day in Edinburgh’s oldest privately owned library. Jude and I had been friends since we were twelve, meeting at boarding school in Vermont. She’d been living and working in Scotland for over ten years now, but somehow still couldn’t shake her American accent, which always seemed to lead to cute stories of the people she interacted with during the day.
I envied her for her normal life.
But I was a Guild mercenary, through and through. For me, there was no option for normal. It was work… or die. And call me crazy, but I had no desire to meet the executioner any time soon.
I needed to work out the Prague mess. Soon. Then get the fuck back to work.
4
D anny drove non-stop between Prague and Kraków, barely stopping even when she was swapping cars. It was impressive but gave me no opportunity to research her mission that had resulted in her being shot.
I couldn’t risk letting her out of my range for even a moment, though. She was too good at her job, and she’d be in the wind. So I forced myself to remain patient and wait until she’d been inside the apartment building for a solid fifteen minutes before I relaxed and pulled out my computer.
The first thing I checked after hacking into the Guild main server, was outstanding kill orders. I wasn’t the only executioner for the Guild, I was just the best. So it was possible someone else had been assigned her job, and I gave a short exhale of relief when I didn’t find her name on the list.
That was something, at least.
The next area I accessed was harder to get into. Danny DeLuna was originally from France. She’d grown up in a Guild-owned orphanage in Lyon, so she fell under Emmanuel Blanchet’s authority. Which meant only Emmanuel Blanchet and his outer circle members had access to the exact mission Danny was on.
“Motherfucker,” I cursed as I ran into a new firewall. The paranoid bastard had overhauled his systems since I’d last taken a browse through his files. Groaning, I tossed my non-prescription glasses into the passenger seat and scrubbed a hand over my face. Why couldn’t Danny be under a stupid Circle member like Carol Atwood? Her systems were so badly protected a six-year-old could hack in undetected.
A light flicked on up on the seventh floor of the apartment building, and I stared up at it, wondering if that was where Danny was staying.
Why was I so fucking fascinated by her? She was a habit I thought I’d kicked a year earlier when I’d flagged a do not assign between our files in the Guild database, but here I was. One fucking phone call from her, and my curiosity—my obsession —was back worse than ever.