My days consisted of working out in the living room, listening to true crime podcasts and groaning with how idiotic some of the serial killers were, and talking shit with Jude via video chat. Our other best friend, our third musketeer, was working around the clock at the moment, and I refrained from the urge to distract her simply because I was bored.
Eventually, though, I was healed enough—and restless enough—to go back to work. Taking another job was the only way I was going to work out who was trying to kill me, but this time I’d be better prepared. I’d keep someone alive to torture for information.
Upon leaving the apartment, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. Most likely, that was just a byproduct of remaining sequestered for three weeks. But still, I kept my guard up and my eyes sharp as I headed down the street to catch a taxi. Nothing caught my attention, though, which made me think it was just paranoia.
It didn’t take long to find a waiting silver gray taxi cab, and once we were moving, I shot off a text to Carlos—the owner of the safe house—and let him know that I’d gone. Then I texted Jude to let her know I was heading home. She immediately replied and said she would come and stay with me over the weekend when she had a couple of days off work.
I should have refused, if only to keep my friend safe from the target on my back. But it’d been ages since I’d seen her, and I was craving some authentic human interaction. So I gratefully accepted and promised I would have food in my fridge before she arrived.
The trip from Kraków back to my home in Iceland was a long, tiring trip that included several car transfers, a train ride, and a helicopter trip. But it was always worth the effort when I stepped through the front door of my house.
The instant my keys hit the table and the door clicked shut behind me, I was home .
My house wasn’t even really a house. More like a cabin, it was located a half-hour drive from Reykjavík and perched on the edge of a cliff looking out over the North Atlantic Ocean. I was totally off the grid, my electricity from a hydro turbine, and my water collected from a nearby waterfall.
“Hello, Stanley,” I murmured with a sigh, dropping my bag to the ground and kicking my boots off. “You look like you’re still doing well, despite my extended absence.”
I headed straight over to my little galley kitchen and grabbed a large plastic jug, filling it with ice cold water from my tap. It was the first thing I did every time I came home.
“That mission went totally off the rails,” I confessed aloud, my chest loosening as I put voice to my looped thoughts. “I got shot . Can you believe it?”
Laughing slightly at my own incompetence, I carried the jug of water over to Stanley, my house plant, and poured it into his bone-dry dirt. He was a Pedilanthus tithymaloides or better known as Devil’s Backbone. Somehow, Stanley just refused to die. Jude had given him to me as a gift nearly ten years ago when I moved into my cabin in the middle of nowhere. Not long after that, I ended up on an extended mission for three months and fully expected to find a dead plant when I got home.
Stanley was a fighter, though.
“Good to see you, buddy,” I told my plant, then went to shower and change out of my grimy travel clothes.
When I was clean and my bag unpacked, I turned to my pantry for something edible. Jude hadn’t been wrong to remind me about food; I was so infrequently home that perishables weren’t worth buying. Luckily, I had some packet pasta that only needed water to cook. Winner.
My phone pinged with an alert while my pasta simmered on the stove, and I picked it up expecting to see a message from Jude.
Dinner was instantly forgotten, though, when I saw what the alert was for.
“Shit, that was quick.” I’d only reactivated my status in the Guild database when my helicopter had touched down in Iceland. I sure as hell hadn’t expected another mission quite so soon.
Not that I was complaining. For one thing, taking another job was my only lead in working out who was trying to kill me. For another, I liked my job. More than a couple of days at home, and I grew painfully bored.
Turning off my stove, I headed over to my computer and booted it up so I could read the assignment details. As mercenaries, it was our choice whether to accept the missions or not—usually depending on the price tag attached—but it was fairly well-known to be bad for your health to decline too many jobs.
This one seemed like an easy task. Intel gathering on an arms dealer, focusing attention on one of his medium-level management. If the Guild was offering it to me, it was probably safe to assume this man had loose lips in the bedroom.
The contract price on it was hefty, too, making the decision a no-brainer. I clicked the button to accept the job, and my emails immediately lit up with the rest of the dossier on my target, along with any other pertinent information.
Like whether I would be working solo or in a team.
“What do you think, Stanley? Is this gonna be another ambush?” I called out to my house plant. As per usual, I got no response. Heaving a sigh, I clicked to download the file. “You’re a man of few words, Stan. My kinda guy.”
My internet was as good as it got in my remote location, and the file didn’t take long to unpack onto my desktop. The first thing I checked was the target profile. Name, age, photo… nothing unusual there. He was a mid-thirties guy from Alabama. Sandy blond hair, sun-damaged skin, beady eyes. Definitely not my type, but that hardly made a difference to the mission. What mattered was whether I was his type.
For the next while, I read through all the intel gathered on my target—Mr. Edward Gates—and better acquainted myself with the assignment. It seemed simple enough, but these jobs were rarely easy . The dossier told me that a second mercenary would also be assigned to the project, but I didn’t recognize the ID number, so that was my next order of business.
I ran the number through the Guild database and came up with a basic mercenary profile, same as everyone working for the Guild had.
“Petr Wagner,” I read aloud. “You reckon this guy looks like a hacker, Stanley?”
My plant had no opinion. Shocker.
“Hacker for sure ,” I answered my own question, memorizing Petr Wagner’s face. The Guild gave us these details so that it wouldn’t be so easy for “the good guys” to take out one of our mercs and substitute in one of their agents. It’d happened in the past—before my time—and the Circle had decided we were safer this way.
Of course, no one knew who the Circle themselves were. So I had no clue how they maintained their own security without breaking secrecy. The whole thing hurt my head when I thought too hard on it, but that’s why I was assassinations and infiltrations. I’d leave the genius-level shit to the actual geniuses. Like Leon.
Fucking hell, why was I thinking about Leon again?
“Dammit, Stanley,” I muttered aloud, heading to my kitchen to grab some vodka from the freezer. “This is the result of too long without good sex, you know that? My tiny, insignificant crush on Leon from like three years ago has turned into a whole thing inside my head.”
I poured myself a shot and knocked it back. The ice-cold spirit burned down my throat, but it was a good kind of burn. Comforting.
Stanley was a great listener, but fuck me, sometimes I needed someone to actually give me advice. I guess that’s what I had Jude and Sab for.