Death of an Assassin (Saint Roch City Book 1) (13 page)

pad across the floor of my bedroom, casting a glance over my shoulder at Thomas as he spreads out his borrowed blanket across my couch. I don’t have the heart to tell him that the couch used to belong to a man I helped die. No one knew about his second house where he saw prostitutes on the weekend, so I figured the furniture would be up for grabs.

At least he didn’t die on the couch. Or even in the house.

The bathroom door creaks when I push it open, cutting the silence of my apartment. Trying to ignore the tension, I close the door behind me and don’t even consider hitting the light. I flick the tub’s faucet on. The pouring water, already warming up, sounds soothing in the darkness. A white noise.

The drain gurgles just low enough, just feral enough, to remind me of the giant croc from the night before. While my stomach completes a flip, I clear my throat to erase the rotting scent of Bruce. I know that’s not really what’s got my heart racing. I drop the stopper into the drain, and the water begins to splash from the faucet.

After stripping out of my filthy clothes still caked in blood, and leaving the light off, I step into the tub, my feet getting wet as the water begins to pool around me. I slide down the slick back of the shower, the wet surface gripping as best it can to try to stop me. As I lower into the tub, I slide my legs toward the drain, my feet resting just beneath the faucet. Hot water pours around my legs, and the smell of fresh steam billows around my face. With one of my feet, I reach up and turn the water from hot to cold.

It’s supposed to be cold.

Why is it supposed to be cold?

I’ve never used the tub before. It never crossed my mind to take a bath. In my line of work, rarely does it feel good to wash up after a hard day’s work by steeping in your own washed-away grime. Usually a bit of blood or someone else’s sweat on my body. I’m much more inclined to rinse it away and watch it quickly flow down the drain. Now that I’m lying in the white basin, icy water pouring over me, I can’t connect the dots that my imagination and memories seem inclined to do on their own.

I curl my body as much as I need to so as to feel the rising cold water caress my neck, my cheeks. As the water rises higher, I gasp, a soft wave lapping over my lips. Touching my nose like a kiss.

Don’t fight it.

Let go.

Not my words in my memory. They sound like… my mother?

When the water starts licking at my stray hairs, I take a short breath. I know, somewhere, that I should take a deep breath. Prepare for a plunge. But I don’t. Because I didn’t the last time.

Mommy loves you. You know that, right?

Hands on my shoulders. A loving stroke up my nape, the same as when I was younger and was trying to fall asleep. Affection that any mother would do for her child in distress. A child she loved.

But her palm opened. Her fingers splayed. And the hand became a clawed being, entwining itself in locks of dark brown hair―my long-lost natural color―and pushing down. Guiding my head beneath the water of the tub, the sound of the faucet pouring more warm water into the basin.

I was six. Maybe seven. I thought she was playing a game. A game we had never tried. Maybe some form of training. The first time my chest heaved and I tried to push off from the bottom of the tub to reach the surface, I panicked. But I tried desperately not to show it. I wanted to prove to Mommy I could be strong.

But when I started to feel my lungs burning―organs you never really notice until they’ve gone haywire―I started to feel afraid. I began to wonder if she wasn’t playing. If she really wanted me to―

Hands on my shoulders again. Gripping my arms, yanking me into the cold air of the bathroom set about the stark contrast of the billowing steam from the tub. My skin crawls as it hits the air, tangles of hair sprawling over my face like a beached jellyfish. The hands fumble a bit, slipping beneath my armpits and pulling me over the side of the tub. My eyes are open. I know they are. But I still can’t see. Or it doesn’t matter what I’m seeing. I can’t tell which.

“Layla? Layla! Fuck…” Thomas shouts at me. They’re his hands on me. Pulling me out onto the soaked linoleum of the bathroom. The tub has started to overflow and coat the bathroom floor. His hand positions itself, only hesitating a moment over my naked chest. He’s mumbling, cursing, frantic. The same as a six-year-old me was.

I try to focus on him. I want to, if only to bring myself back to reality. But the stinging thoughts of the past billow around me with the ferocity of so many insects. Every millisecond I regain myself, they burrow into me to bring me back all those years ago, when my lungs burned.

Thomas’s ineptitude shows as he tries to help me without actually looking at me. Laughter fills the small bathroom, and when I don’t see it coming from him, I realize it’s me. I lean my head back on the tub, my hair, soaked through like a ratty mop, drapes over my shoulders and onto my chest. I focus on my own laughter, because it really is funny. Billionaire Boy can’t bring himself to look at a naked girl.

“Layla, what were you doing?” He turns off the tub and reaches into the depths to unplug the drain, the starving gurgle of the water pouring from my pool of memories. With each gulp, I feel myself coming back.

“I have no idea.”

Thomas falls back against the sink and now he’s staring at me. His eyes are wild, fearful even. “Only one of us can be losing it at a time, and while I appreciate you not killing me, I think that person needs to be me right now.”

I drag my legs up and put a hand on either knee to look at the boy I was supposed to be killing just a little over twenty-four hours ago. A grim chuckle escapes me. “We are so incredibly screwed. It doesn’t matter if we both lose our minds, Tommy Boy. We’ll be lucky to live out the week.”

For a brief moment, he looks like he might burst into tears, but it shifts quickly to anger. “Well, why not just end it now then?” He stands up. “Want me to fill the tub back up for you?” He reaches over my head, shoving me out of the way a bit as he flicks the faucet back on.

Stepping out into my bedroom, he turns back. “I’m just going to grab the toaster for you. It’ll be quicker than drowning. You think three stories will be enough to kill me?”

The return of water pouring into the tub is the only thing keeping my bathroom from boiling over.

“Or maybe.” He grimaces in fake consideration. “Maybe we can get our shit together?”

I stand up. “Get our shit together? If you were dead, I wouldn’t even be involved in
your
shit.” I shove a hard hand into his sternum.

“What?”

“You. Should. Be. Dead.” I step out into my bedroom and grab a bathrobe from the coat rack beside my dresser and wrap it around myself tightly, knotting it at my waist. I kneel down and fish the manila envelope out from under my bed and throw it on top. “Half a million to make sure you didn’t see the sunrise this morning.” I open it and pour the bills onto my bed.

Thomas stands in the doorway of the bathroom and stares at the money sitting there as though he’d never seen so much in his life, even though his family probably spent this much on breakfast cereal every week just because they could.

But the look is not familiar to me. Not many people get to see a monetary representation of what their life is worth to the outside world. Thomas Donahue was worth a cool half million.

“But I screwed up.” I sweep the stacks off the bed and the bundled bills explode, flitting about the room like the world’s most lavish confetti. I sit down on my rug, Benjamins clinging to my wet skin as I throw my head back against the mattress.

“You… you…” Thomas paces across the room. “Did
you
kill them?”

“Who?”

“My family?” Now his eyes really are tearing up. “My mom? My sister? Did you kill them?”

I bite my lip. “No. And I don’t know who did.”

He nods, not really acknowledging that he’s heard what I said, but just that a puzzle piece has been given to him. It’s a part of my job I never see. The realization of a mark. Why they’re about to die. Why their life is coming to an end.

Watching the poor kid crumble while standing beside my dresser, I can’t help but wish that I never had to see this. Though, a decent-sized part of me―maybe even most of me―doesn’t regret leaving Thomas alive.

I’ve never felt much remorse for killing the people I do. At least the ones I’ve been paid for. They always deserve it. In my limited opinion, anyway. I’ve never killed someone who volunteered in a soup kitchen or rescued lost kittens. It was always thieves. Murderers. Cheating bastards.

Thomas drops down on my floor and leans against the wall, staring off into space.

“But you did kill him, didn’t you? Andrew?”

I don’t want to split hairs by mentioning the thirty-foot crocodile doing that―semantics aren’t important. I just nod.

At this, Thomas grimly smiles. “Bastard probably had it coming. You know, he once raped a girl? Dad swept it under the rug. Friends on the force and in the district attorney’s office.” He chuckles at it. “Dad paid his friends very well.”

The soft drips of the tub’s faucet break up the tension between us as neither of us speaks.

“You should probably get dressed,” Thomas says standing up, shoes squishing on my bedroom floor as he leaves.

“I was… seeing something,” I said, looking up at Thomas. He stops on the threshold and turns around.

I’ve spent most of my life being taught not to feel, and the past twenty-four hours has done some foul things to undo that. Feeling like a drowned rat, I look up at Thomas, only vaguely attempting to cover myself.

“The thing―the person that killed your family. I think I know what it is.”

His eyes perk at this information, and he squats down to meet my eyes, quiet. He nods, urging me on.

“I don’t know
who
it is, but I think she wasn’t normal.”

Thomas leans on the bedroom’s doorframe. “When I was a kid, Andrew used to try to scare me with ghost stories.” He explains slowly, in a wistful way as though he were picturing himself with his older brother, whom he despised. “Andrew only had a few years on me, but he liked to pretend he’d been around, y’know?

“There was one story he told me about. These monsters that lived in the sewers and would come up in the middle of the night, crawl into bedrooms, and steal kids away. He’d tell me a bunch of stories about them that I knew he’d made up. Kids he knew who got eaten by them.”

I shake my head at him for a moment. Reliving his childhood wouldn’t help us.

Thomas ignores me. “And one night, Dad heard him telling me these stories. He got this really serious look on his face. He took Andrew away, and I heard him getting the beating of his life that night. And when Andrew came back, I mean, he was crying and sniffling, but I pretended to be asleep. And I remember what my father said to him.”

I look to Thomas, only a little embarrassed that I’m vaguely interested in such a monotonous story.

“He said, ‘Don’t you go telling your brother about those things anymore. He doesn’t need to know.’“

We sit looking at each other for a brief moment, and a flash of stray lightning envelopes the room before he continues.

“That’s when I knew they weren’t stories he was coming up with. I mean, they may not have been strictly true. He may not have known a kid named Dougie Wilson who got dragged into the sewers and eaten. But there were monsters out there.” He stops and watches me.

I gather myself up, so utterly crushed by the defeat the Donahue family has brought me. I watch him, with what I have to assume looks like the hunger and lethality of a jungle predator.

“You’re not human, are you?”

Averting my eyes, I shake my head.

To his credit, Thomas doesn’t move. He doesn’t jump up. Doesn’t run. Doesn’t try to attack me. When men and women had discovered what I am in the past, they moved as though they really believe they could overcome me.

“If I wanted you dead―
really
wanted you dead―I could have you kill yourself right now.” I mutter it, if not to him than to me. Of course, he asks the question I’ve been asking myself all night.

“So why am I still alive?”

I shrug. I’m a kid who stole a cookie even when she wasn’t hungry.

“I can make men die. Bad men, usually. Not many people are willing to pay to kill the guy who keeps his head down, pays his taxes, and stays faithful to his wife.”

Thunder rumbles in the distance, the storm moving away from Saint Roch, satisfied with its futile attempts to cleanse the city. Clean shit is still shit.

“So how could you get me to kill myself? What kind of boogie monster can do that?”

“I got your brother to fall in the river, didn’t I?”

He chuckles, grim. “And eaten by a crocodile. Not the typical wildlife I’d expect around here.”

“Bruce isn’t wild; he’s tame,” I say nonchalantly. Common crocodile knowledge everyone should have. Obviously.

Thomas rolls his eyes. Right. Not crocodile-learning time.

“I’m a siren,” I admit. “I can lure people.”

“And the reason you’re not a freckly redhead who smells vaguely of fish?”