Dealing in Death

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dealing in Death

  Copyright © L.J. Hayward

  Cover Art: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com

  Editor: May Peterson, maypetersonbooks.com/editorial

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the author at www.ljhayward.com/contact.html

  ISBN: 978-0-6484460-4-0

  First Edition

  September 2019

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Dedicated to Riina and Yuuko,

  For your undying enthusiasm for Jack and Ethan and your support and friendship.

  Happy birthday!

  Dedication

  About Dealing in Death

  Twenty-One Months Ago

  Eight Months Later

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  Also by L.J. Hayward

  About the Author

  Ethan Blade—assassin extraordinaire, cold-blooded killer, heartless monster, and . . . retiree?

  I’ve spent my whole life dealing in death, efficiently eliminating targets while fighting to preserve a sense of self and morality, to avoid becoming as detached and ruthless as my siblings. I thought I had succeeded. Then I met Jack Reardon—contrary, handsome, forgiving, and far too good for the likes of me—and my life was tipped upside down. When he asked me to move in with him, he didn’t specify that I had to quit my job, but I wanted to—for myself, not for him. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

  My old instincts—“Ethan Blade”—are soon tempted out of retirement by a job offer I can’t afford to refuse and by an old hook-up of Jack’s he’d be a fool to refuse. While falling prey to my own temptation, Jack struggles with his. Which is precisely when the true danger exposes itself—one of my siblings with no such sense of self or morality. Only pain. And he is prepared to rain it down on me and Jack, unless I can square the Ethan Blade I want to be with the one I need to be, in time to save us both.

  I attached the scope with a soft click, then ran my hand over the Assassin X, swiftly checking the assembly. Everything was smooth and ready, so I set it to my shoulder and looked through the night-vision scope. The target came into view. A balcony on the third and top floor of an apartment building. There was a single chair on it, and tonight, for the first night in the week I’d been watching it, it was occupied.

  He was home. At last.

  Jack Reardon sat with his feet up on the balustrade. They were bare, his toes curling and flexing in the warm, early autumn night air. He wore only a pair of track suit pants, his hair still wet from a shower, hanging in thick black curls over his forehead and neck.

  Seeing him again was both a balm and a pain. Knowing he was hale eased a tension I’d been carrying since leaving him in the desert. I didn’t understand the effect Jack had on me, having never before experienced that flood of warmth and joy that just looking at him created in my body. Nor the surging physical need for him to be close to me. Jack had awakened something in me that hadn’t quietened since we’d parted ways. Just the thought of him was enough to rekindle those sensations. And that was why it was also a pain. I would never have the chance to feel those things firsthand again. This was as close as I would ever get to him now.

  So I drank him down as much as I could. His brown skin, long legs, narrow hips and broad shoulders. If only he would lean forward so I could see the tattoo of the St. Thomas Cross on his left shoulder blade. Instead, he slouched in the chair, mouth slack, staring at something distant. The Sydney skyline, the faint spread of stars, a horizon he’d never reach?

  I’d seen that despondent expression before, when Jack had thought I wasn’t paying attention. At the torture shack, as he’d named it, and after the fight, when he’d realised I—his enemy and a cold-hearted assassin—was his best hope of surviving. It had reappeared during the night and day that followed, but not since then. Not even when I’d betrayed him at the compound, or while he’d been tied to that chair as my primary target, Samuel Valadian, taunted him. When we had parted ways at the old homestead, he’d been determinedly stoic. Two months later and I was seeing that despair again.

  My hand itched to leave the trigger guard and reach out to him, to smooth away the lines around the corners of his mouth, to trace the shape of his eyes in the hopes they would light up again for me. In humour or anger or lust. Anything so they wouldn’t look empty anymore.

  He had been a target. A means to an end. He was supposed to be dead by my hand. I was not supposed to miss him so much my body hurt.

  But I wasn’t here to ease that ache, as much as I wanted to. I had come to do what I should have done in the desert—protect him.

  Dropping the angle of the rifle, I scanned across the front of Jack’s apartment building. There was faint light shining through one window on the second floor, and apart from it and the brightly lit common areas of the building, it was all dark. The leaves of the trees and hedges along the front of the building rustled gently every now and then but otherwise, it was all still. The building wouldn’t be difficult to breach, nor would Jack’s apartment, I was certain.

  I scoped the street and, sure enough, found my true target. A sniper rifle and perch on a neighbouring building might be the easiest way to kill Jack, but that option wasn’t available to Two. All Sugar Babies shared white irises, fixed pupils and a heightened night vision, but the condition also exaggerated other issues, such as Two’s short-sightedness. He’d never been any sort of marksman and had instead perfected hand to hand combat. Jack was a very good fighter, but he was no match for Two. I couldn’t let him get anywhere near Jack.

  Placing the crosshairs in the middle of Two’s face, I snapped a photo of him through the scope with my neural implant—basically a smart phone grafted to my temporal lobe—then sent it to Two. He blinked when my message came through, then a slow, cool smile curled up the corners of his mouth. His connection pinged into my head a moment later.

  “I’m impressed, little brother. How long have you been waiting?”

  “Long enough I began to doubt your insistence that you are the best amongst us.”

  Two laughed. “As your inability to finish your jobs lately caused me to doubt your second best status.” He motioned in Jack’s direction. “This one is
supposed to be dead. I overheard your debrief with Zero and thought I would finish the job before you get into too much more trouble with the bosses.”

  My heart gave a single, hard thump at the thought of Jack having to face Two. I would do anything I could to make sure that never happened.

  “Let’s go somewhere else to talk,” I sent.

  In the crosshairs, Two looked up at the balcony above him. His face was blank, but I knew him well enough to guess at the thoughts running through his mind. Calculations on how to deal with me and Jack. I could do the math just as well as he could. He would have to deal with me first.

  “Fine.” Two turned away from Jack’s building and walked towards a steel-blue Audi RS5 parked further down the block.

  I kept him in sight as I dismantled my Assassin X and then slid down the rope I’d hung over the side of the building. Hitting the ground, I went to the car and found him in the passenger seat.

  “I know better than to take the wheel when you’re in the car.” Two smiled as I settled into the driver’s seat. He dangled the keys from a finger. “You also know this city better than I do, since you come here at least once a year to race.”

  Careful to not react to the statement, I took the keys and started the car. It rumbled into life and dropped into a satisfying purr. Not quite as sublime as Victoria, my Aston Martin Vanquish S Coupe, but decent all the same.

  I tried not to make a show of my racing habits. It was impossible to think that the Cabal and therefore Zero, our handler, and my siblings weren’t aware of it, yet it was purely my thing, nothing to do with any of them. It was an escape from the world the Cabal had tried to drown me in. That they hadn’t entirely succeeded was a small victory I needed in order to survive. Letting Two know how much it meant to me would destroy the peace it gave me, because there was no doubt in my mind that he would use it against me.

  Not wishing to alert Jack to anything unusual, I pulled out sedately and cruised down the street. Two was quiet as I wound us through Leichhardt in the early hours of the morning.

  Why had Jack been up at this time? Restless sleep or still trying to reverse our mostly nocturnal patterns while in the desert? Or had he brought someone home with him? Someone who kept him up until two a.m. with activities that required showering after?

  I shook those thoughts away. Jack had no reason not see anyone else. What we had shared had felt special to me, but that didn’t mean it had been to him. He’d called it mutual attraction and that had certainly been true, but unlike me, Jack probably felt that for any number of people.

  “He was supposed to die,” Two said as I turned onto the highway and headed west. “That was the job.”

  “No, the job was to determine if he knew anything about the person protecting the primary target. He didn’t.”

  “And when you proved that, he was supposed to die. All targets have to be eliminated, One-three. You know that as well as I do.” Fingers drumming on the passenger door window, Two frowned at the passing scenery. “Zero should have ordered you to return and finish the job. I shouldn’t have to do it for you.”

  My fingers tightened around the steering wheel at the thought of Zero giving that command. “Zero doesn’t define our job parameters.”

  “He does enforce them, though.”

  “But he didn’t send you here to kill Ja—him.”

  “No, he didn’t. I still have to do it though, because you didn’t. Or was it because you couldn’t?”

  I kept my gaze directly ahead. The highway was mostly empty but to let my attention drift away would only confirm Two’s suspicions.

  “You let this target distract you. Why, One-three?” When I didn’t answer, he continued. “You’re better than that. I made you better than that. You always finish the job. Why didn’t you finish this one?”

  He sounded genuinely curious. I had no doubt he truly was, just as I knew I would never be able to explain it to him. I didn’t understand it myself. Even if I did, Two never would. He simply had no capacity to understand.

  “The target may be useful in the future. Zero agrees,” I said.

  The look Two gave me was cold and knowing. “Only because you killed the primary target too soon.”

  “He threw himself on my knife.”

  Which I could have pulled away but hadn’t. In the moment the target had lunged towards me, I’d flashed on him bending me over the desk and unbuckling his belt while muttering about making sure I knew who owned me. The screen in front of me had shown footage of Jack in that white room, tied to a chair, tossing his head in anger and confusion. It’d made me believe he felt something more than simple attraction for me. It had let me understand that I didn’t need to let Valadian think he could own me anymore. So instead of keeping him alive and prying information out of him, I’d let Valadian run himself onto my knife.

  It had been a failure, but a satisfying one.

  And Jack had come incredibly close to paying for it. I had to make sure Two wouldn’t come after Jack again.

  “I made a mistake,” I whispered.

  “Yes, you did.” There was a hint of resigned weariness in his tone that sent a shiver down my spine. I was familiar with that sound, and what it meant.

  The rest of the drive was silent. It was nearly mid-morning when we reached the exfil location. I’d sent the request for pick up hours earlier and the chopper would be here soon, touching down in this hidden valley west of Sydney. We would get onboard and it would take us to a private airfield with a jet, or to a ship offshore, and we’d slip out through the gaps so no one would even know we’d been here.

  I got out of the car, reconciled to what was going to happen.

  “I didn’t think I’d have to do this again,” Two said as he came around to stand in front of me. “I’d thought you would have learned by now.”

  “It was a mistake.”

  His hand cracked across my cheek. I went with the blow, lessening the impact. A second and third slap, delivered fast and hard, didn’t give me that option. Two lowered his arm and stepped back. I didn’t move, head knocked to the right, blood trickling into my mouth from my teeth cutting into my inner cheek.

  I could have fought back. I burned to fight back. To catch his wrist, twist his arm and kick his feet out from under him. I couldn’t, however. Quite apart from him being the superior hand to hand combatant was the fact that if I did manage to best him now he would only retarget Jack as a means to punish me. Two was frustrated and confused and he blamed me for these upsetting emotions. This was how he dealt with them.

  By the time the chopper landed, my left eye had swollen closed, I’d had to wrap my shirt around the knife wound in my arm and Two had to help me limp to the aircraft. All the while, he told me he was sorry for hurting me and that he wouldn’t have to if I would just stop making mistakes.

  All that mattered was that it was me Two said these things to, and not Jack.

  The car pulled up outside the front of the shed next to my cottage in the Wachau valley in Austria. I wiped my greasy hands on the already dirty rag tucked into the waistband of my jeans and stepped back from Honey’s engine. She was a Lamborghini Huracán I’d rescued from a human trafficker in Hungary. Apart from a few performance issues I’d sorted out, the most work I’d done had been on her paint job. The piece of filth who’d owned her had had half naked warrior women painted on her bonnet and flames along her sides. Now she was pristine white. A new beginning.

  Leaning against her side, I waited while the driver got out of the van, opened the side door and pulled out a ramp. A moment later, Zero wheeled himself out and down, his powerful arms easily propelling his chair across the gravel drive and into the dim interior of the shed. His greying blond hair was buzzed almost down to the scalp and a scar cut from his left temple, under his sunglasses and across his nose to the right side of his mouth.

  “One-three,” he said in greeting.

  I nodded in acknowledgement.

  It hadn’t been that long since I’d
last seen him. After Two and I had been picked up west of Sydney, I’d been confined to a Cabal black site while I healed. Two and Four had been sent out to trace Samuel Valadian’s partners in the hopes one of them would know who had been protecting him. As of a month ago, when Zero had told me I could finally leave, they hadn’t had any luck.

  “Your brothers still haven’t managed to complete their task,” Zero said in German.

  “I didn’t think they would.”

  “The bosses want the job finished, no more waiting.”

  I concentrated on getting a smudge of grease off my hand, not wanting Zero to see any hint of the hope that flared at the thought of getting to complete the job. “I have a plan.” I’d had little else to do while recovering from Two’s punishment.

  The corner of Zero’s mouth turned up slightly. “I thought you would.” He reached up and took off his sunglasses to clean them. White eyes locked on to me. “What do you need?”

  “I quit.”

  Nine carefully set her SIG Sauer P226 down on the workbench and turned to face me. “You what?”

  I smiled at her horrified tone and loosened the bolt on the front wheel strut of her white Ducati SuperSport S.

  Her reaction was much as I’d expected. As had been Seven’s, our sister. Three months ago, as we’d cleaned up the mess left at her Vietnam home by myself, Jack and a Burmese drug lord, I’d told her my plans to leave the Cabal—properly this time—and start a “real” life with Jack. Seven had swallowed the news with her usual calm, told me to be careful, and then blown up her house to eliminate the evidence of what had happened there. Six weeks after that, when my request to meet face-to-face with Zero had been granted, I’d been pleasantly surprised by his response.

  “I’ll inform the bosses.”