Death of an Assassin (Saint Roch City Book 1) (19 page)

My legs ache beneath me, my palms and arms scraped. I have rarely felt exhausted in my life, but I can’t remember the last time I closed my eyes without the belief I would die before I was able to open them again. My current plan, my only plan really, is to find a place semi-safe and collapse. The questions of my continuation of life can go to Hell.

I run my hands over mold-spotted mirrors and panels, leaning against them, hoping to find the one that might be willing to open to me. I make a full circuit and reach the creepy lion grinning at me like it wanted me to fail.

Pop.

A panel several feet from me loosens and swings free, revealing a dark cavern beyond. I look around and find Thomas standing near a control panel beside the ride. He smirks and comes back up to join me. I reach out and open the door farther, revealing a room that seems otherwise untouched by time and abandonment. In the faint light of the waking morning, I see what looks to be a very simple control panel with a small display and an old desk chair toppled sideways. The room is no bigger than a bathroom, but I’m grateful anyway. With a final glance around, I step inside and look back to Thomas.

“We’ll get a few hours’ sleep.”

“Here?”

I shrug. “As good a place as any, Tommy.” My eyes look past him, still searching the fair ground for any sign of pursuers.

He sighs and steps through, pulling the door behind him. It clicks and we’re plunged into darkness. I grumble at the inconvenience until I hear Thomas shifting and a light clicks on. He’s holding a set of keys in his pocket with a small metallic flashlight attached. He grins.

“I was a Boy Scout once.”

He shines it around the room, the metal floor looking as though it might be the cleanest thing in the park. I’ve never seen a more inviting floor, and I promptly sit down and lie back. My feet burn at the sudden freedom, and a sigh escapes me. Thomas explores the small room while I watch his small flashlight moving around like a superpowered firefly. He shuffles some papers as I peer up at him.

“You should get some rest while you can,” I tell him. He turns the flashlight toward me. I hold up my hand to block it.

“Why am I not going crazy over you anymore? Throwing myself after you like a love-sick zombie freak?”

It’s a fair question, and one I’ve been wondering myself. I shrug, but more because I don’t want to venture a guess. “When I was a kid, like really young, Mom told me that I could never kiss anyone.”

Thomas moves, the room going dark around him as he drops the flashlight to point to the floor as he makes his way to me. He sits across from me, leaning against the metal sheet of a wall that protects us from all the hitmen of the city.

“She said it would kill them, and it would be obvious it was me. What happened to your parents? To Mal? That’s what she said would happen.”

He passes the flashlight from hand to hand absently, trying not to grip the situation as fully as he could. “So. That girl was a siren?”

“If you had asked me that half an hour ago, I would’ve said definitely.” I slip off my hoodie as the small room starts to warm up from our bodies alone, the stuffiness descending. I sweep the sandy blond hair back. “Now? I don’t know. I can’t say it was a siren because I might not be.” The words don’t make much sense to me. Too many people besides my mother confirmed what I was.

Or maybe, they just saw you for what you are.

An ice-blooded bitch. A murderer by choice, not nature. A thing that could be decent, but decided not to.

“Well… either way, it sounds like your mom lied.”

I roll my eyes more at the obviousness of the statement than the guy who’s said it. “Yeah. Well, Mom wasn’t a model parent.”

“Something definitely happened when you… you know.” He dabs fingers to his lips, and even in the pale glow of his flashlight, I can see a face reddening.

“For a guy who tried to beat me into killing him, you’re soft.” I roll on my side and rest my cheek on my hand as I stare at him.

“I was drunk,” he mutters. “Still am, if truth be told.” He opens his eyes wide like it might release the inebriation he’s feeling. While the lingering tendrils of alcohol still cling to me as well, they come as more of a dull haze than full-on drunkenness. “Just… didn’t want anything to happen to you.”

I smile and immediately grimace at the feeling of warmth flitting through me. I catch my breath a moment later. “Yeah, something definitely happened.”

Thomas looks at the door and sighs. “So how does this work? Sleep in shifts?”

The concept makes sense to me, but I know that if it’s Thomas’s shift, he’ll fall asleep. In spite of my self-confidence, I’m certain I will, too. I shake my head.

“No point. If someone knew we were in here, they’d probably just blast through the walls. Or blow up the carousel.”

Thomas flits his flashlight to the door for a moment. “You’ve got a sunny disposition, Layla. Anyone ever tell you that?”

I chuckle, grabbing my sweatshirt to stuff beneath my head as I lie back and close my eyes. “Just a few hours, okay?”

Thomas doesn’t speak, but I hear him adjusting and spreading out on the floor beside me, only a few inches away. Far enough that he doesn’t have to touch me but close enough that I can feel his breath drift over my cheek when he exhales. Both possibilities set my heart racing before I can rein it in. After the loud click of his flashlight, my lidded eyes no longer have the slight bit of light to keep them awake. Despite his vague shifting on the metal floor, I feel myself falling… falling… falling…

My body is a machine, but when I awake, even I can tell only that some time has passed. Not how long. Sealed up in the dark room with only a slight hint of an outline of the door beyond, I can’t tell what time it is. Or even what day it is. My eyelids, heavy with exhaustion, try to convince me to keep them closed. But after a few seconds, the reality of where I am starts to fall into place like so many puzzle pieces.

But not where I am in general. I’m in the control room of a long-dead carousel. That part is easy. What is not easy is the sound of the ocean in my ear, and the light drumming there. The warmth coating my body as though I’m curled up by a fire like the many homeless that wander the city.

My head no longer rests on my sweatshirt, and I’ve lost the hoodie to the darkness of the room. Instead I’ve made a pillow of Thomas Donahue, my cheek resting on his slowly rising and falling chest. I feel shame for the movement I’ve made in my sleep. Shame for the arm I have draped over his torso, gripping his body with the fervency of a swimmer to a life raft. Shame for the leg entwined in his, somewhere between pulling him to me and pulling me on him. But mostly shame for the way my own body reacts to being so close to him. As close as I’ve been to many men before him, but never so deliberately. Never so… blissfully.

As I stir, a hand brushes my shoulder, and I realize he’s put an arm around me. My pulse bubbles at this, and before my mind can rise to full consciousness, my hand grips him harder.

What the hell has happened to you?

Thomas murmurs in his sleep, and his breath billows out to meet me. Despite having drunk enough whiskey to knock out a horse, I can still smell hints of Bran’s concoction, including the finest Irish cream in the bar. I sit up slowly as Thomas murmurs again quietly. His hand drops down my arm and strokes my back as it falls, and he stirs beneath me. I can’t see him very well in the darkness, but as he takes a deep inhale, I put my hand to his chest and consider waking him.

His entire scent reaches me now, and our twenty-four hours of running has done neither of us any favors. But it still manages to make me feel weak. Instead of waking him, my hand drifts up his shoulder. To his neck. His cheek. With only the barest hint of stubble there, I let my hand rest. It seems to soothe him, the murmuring stopping and his breath slowing.

Before I can think, I’m leaning down to him, bringing my lips to his. My hope is to chase away the nightmares for good, though I can’t understand why I should really care.

Please don’t die…

In his sleep-ridden state, he’s so slow to respond I think my silent fear has come true. But as I go to pull away, he returns the kiss, his hand lifting from the ground and slipping up my bare arm to the sleeve of the ratty, sweaty T-shirt I’m wearing. With each borrowed breath, I feel him waking more and more beside me, lips becoming more driven, hand moving up higher. Leaning down into the kiss, my heart racing and heat spilling over the dam, I feel his other hand come up my side as he takes a deep inhale between oral assaults.

“Layla?” he asks, drowsily.

I growl at his addled stupidity. “Who else would it be?” I press against him, kissing him again.

“What… what are you doing?” he asks a handful of seconds later when I come up for air.

I pick my body up from the floor as I lie on his chest and my lips trace from his chin to his collarbone. “Honestly?”

“That’d be nice.” He’s confused, not complaining.

“I have no idea,” I admit, pressing my hands to his hips and slipping them up under his shirt, feeling the skin there with my fingertips. He shivers at my touch, and I grin in the darkness as my lips cover skin radiating everything that is Thomas. Everything I felt the first time our lips touched and everything I feel when I kiss him now.

My hands move farther up, and in spite of the winter cold outside creeping into the carousel, I pull the shirt off him before he can object and toss it to find my sweatshirt in the dark. I press down again, one less barrier between my body and his. His heartbeat quickens as I straddle his hips, my hands wandering over his torso, completely unsure of what I want. Something I’ve never contemplated. This has always been a means to an end. Never what I want. What I
need
.

“Layla, I don’t know if this is the right…” He fidgets beneath me, and I rise up, slamming my hands to his shoulders. I peer down at him as my breath comes out in gasps, my chest a jackhammer. Thomas clicks on his flashlight and looks up at me.

“What the…?” His words are more fascination than horror, and he gestures to my hair that falls down on either side of my face in sweaty sheets.

Red strands, blond strands, hazel.

A shard of mirror beside us shows me what Thomas can’t bring himself to describe. My eyes look more like pools of color than eyes, in a constant shifting of browns, blues, and greens, unable to rest on one. Meanwhile my skin ripples beneath them, freckles fading and appearing like a Rorschach test, my lips shifting in between breaths to different shades. All the while I can feel the unrest of my body.

“Are you okay?” Thomas asks.

Instead of answering, I lean down harder, pressing him to the metal floor with a creak as I kiss his lips again, tasting him. Breathing him in. Devouring everything that is him.

Nineteen years without human affection is a long time. And poor Thomas has popped the cork on that flood. All I want is for him to make me feel as electric as I can. Make me drown in the warm fluttering filling my chest.

I lie down, watching his face in the bright but limited light from his keychain as he drops it beside us.

“It’s like I can see a new color,” I try to explain to Thomas as much as myself. “I’ve never been able to…
feel
this.”

For all his naivety, Thomas has a hopeless but understanding smile on his face. “I can’t imagine it’s many hitwomen who get to know their targets?”

I shake my head and loosen the grip on his shoulders, letting my hands run along his arms. The goose bumps that rise make me smile. But it’s his hands moving to my hips, chivalrous to the end as they avoid the hem of my sweatpants. When he holds my waist like a fragile thing, a sharp inhale brings my eyes closed.

He’s not charting new territory for me. I’ve let far too many men and a handful of women touch me. Have me. But they’re all dead, and their touching didn’t help save them.

I reach down and jerk his hand up farther. I have no idea what I look like to him now, but he obliges, moving his other hand to mirror the first. My legs relax as I dip down to kiss him.

“If we’re going to die,” I say, biting my lip as his hands, hesitant though they are, drift higher, pulling my shirt up with them. “I want to make sure we live a little first.” I reach over and click off his flashlight as he pulls my shirt off and drops it beside us.