Death of an Assassin (Saint Roch City Book 1) (22 page)

“Han said his father sent him to get us.”

Bran shakes his head. “Don’t know what to tell you. Either the wrinkled bastard didn’t tell the draggers to getcha or he’s not happy about how it all turned out.”

There are so many other things I want to know. How the Serpents knew where Thomas and I were. Who wants me dead and Thomas alive. But mostly…

“Where is he?”

Bran doesn’t need me to clarify. And his eyes tell me that what he knows isn’t going to make me get back to bed.

“Dead?”

Bran puts his hands on my shoulders. “You best get back to bed. You’ve got more healing to do.”

“Where is Thomas?”

Bran sighs. “Don’t know. The Serpents hightailed it when my boys showed up. We torched their dead before the police showed. Bodies were already ash on the wind.”

I know the cost he’s paid. A vague truce between the Westies and the Serpents of the East Passage exists. Two gangs have never had a bloodier history, and my little stone may set off an avalanche. The only hope I have is that Han’s trespass and the ensuing gun battle might be the only tit for tat.

“He wanted Thomas alive. Why would they want him alive? They paid me a million to kill him in the first place.”

Bran’s eyebrows arch at this news, but the impressiveness of the bounty before for two boys seems paltry next to the price on my head. The pride I feel at earning a higher price tag is, depressingly, nonexistent.

His eyes look up and down the darkened hallway.

“I don’t like having rats in my bar, Layla. But I loathe having draggers in my backyard. You want to find your boy?
I can’t help you
.” He points back the way he’s come from and motions down, left, left. “Now. Get yourself back to bed. Rest up. I’ll be by tomorrow to take you
back to my bar
.”

We stand in silence, the crackling of fires playing the role of cricket noises as we stare at each other. His eyebrows arch a few times, beating the dead horse. A debonair spy Bran Dawson is not, but I give him a brief nod and feel my face flush warm with relief. Another sensation for the scrapbook.

With that, he shoulders off his fur-lined jacket and wraps it around me. It fits me like a circus tent, but the warmth of it is so inviting that I don’t care. He kicks off his boots and leaves them on the floor before walking past me, muttering about finding new footwear.

I slip into the boots, and they, too, fit me terribly. I carefully kneel down, feeling the taut rope of my gunshot pulling tight as I adjust the laces to, at minimum, keep the boots on my feet.

It’s cold out in Saint Roch, and I don’t like my chances of getting out of this unscathed. But I’m paid to make people dead.

But this? This I’ll be doing for free.

he midnight air nips at me, and it feels like I’ve skipped over entire days, which I sort of have. As I trudge down the street, Bran’s coat weighing me down but keeping me warm enough that I sweat, I try to remember what day it is.

When was the Donahue engagement party? That’s when all of this went to hell, after all.

It’s another hour of walking before I make it back to the abandoned warehouses, ducking into alleys and tucking myself into doorways when the occasional person seems like they might cross my path. As frigid as the night is, it’s not enough to keep the denizens of Saint Roch from crawling about the corpse of the city at night. I’m just glad it’s not summer when every street walker and their leash holders would be out and about.

Bran’s bar is dark, but when I get to the big green door, I grip the knob, push, and the door swings open. Behind the bar, Bran stands looking over a map and drinking something murky looking.

“Took you long enough.”

I shake his coat as I walk in, bits of frost and dampness falling to the floor. “How’d you get here so fast?”

“Flew?” He winks and grins.

I roll my eyes.

“I drove, girl.”

I crawl onto the barstool in front of him and rest my legs, taking a breath from the warm bar. The cold air did no favors to my injured chest, but the heat of the Old Haunt isn’t making it feel all fuzzy, either. Bran pours me a cup and sets it in front of me. The faint scent of herbs and lemon reach my nose, and that soothes me much more than I thought anything could. I grip the warm cup.

“Might’ve offered a lady a ride,” I mutter in between heavenly inhales of tea fumes.

“A lady might’ve stuck to roads. But I imagine a
siren
might hoof it through the shadows?”

Steam licks my cheeks as I lift the mug and take a deep gulp of the flavorful tea and let it wash away the cold that I’ve brought in with me.

Bran jabs a finger down on the bar. “Here.”

I look down at the crude map to see the corner of an intersection deep in the East Passage. It doesn’t do much more than name the streets and show me how close the eastern docks are to the corner.

“There?”

“That, my lady, would be where Han will be licking his wounds, most like. Daddy gave him a club to run. He’s supposed to be keeping his nose clean, but he runs just about everything through the Garden.”

Bran slides a few pictures across the bar, neon-lit signs of a gaudy three-story corner building.

“Drugs, guns, women. Han buys and sells them all. He’s not picky.”

I sip some tea and savor the warmth it spreads. “Most criminals aren’t.”

Bran growls. “Draggers ain’t criminals, Lay. They’re scum.”

Avoiding a pot versus kettle comment, I study the map. At the moment, the Westies don’t want me dead. The Serpents do. The friend of my enemy. “Security?”

“To the teeth,” Bran admits. “You want to get close to the head dragger, you’re going to have some trouble.”

“Couldn’t get much worse,” I say, wincing as a crack of pain tears through me and I straighten up on the stool.

Bran leans on the bar and looks me over. “Why you so keen on this boy, Lay?”

“They shot me,” I say, picking through the photos, hoping to find some invisible weakness.

He lowers his voice. “That’s reason enough to want revenge, sure. But this ain’t that. You want the boy, don’t you?”

“My picture out there?” I ask, ignoring his interrogation.

“How could it?” He laughs. “All we heard was to watch for a pretty little thing with a boy thinks he shits gold.”

“Thomas isn’t that―”

Bran smirks as he catches me in the trap. But I refuse to indulge him.

“So they won’t recognize me.” I look over the map and spread all of the pictures out.

“I ‘spose not,” Bran says, looking over the pictures just the same, but upside down.

“And I take it you can’t help me out anymore than you have?”

Bran makes an exasperated sigh before shaking his head. “Some people just take and take and take, don’t they? Petey ain’t going to be happy if he realizes I helped you get out from under his roof.”

“He wanted me out.”

“On his terms. Not yours. It’s a slight to the old bugger. He’s got enough trouble with my niece…”

The club looks impenetrable if only because I won’t look the part. But when a rat makes a nest, they have certain expectations. The outside world is supposed to check itself at the door. The best way to get in is to meet those expectations.

“Any chance you fetched my―”

Bran lifts his hands from beneath the bar and drops my sheathed knife and pistol with a
thud
.

“Did you the courtesy of filling you up, too.” He sets a few magazines topped off with 9mm rounds beside my gun. “Just try not to lose this like you did that rifle you bought.”

I don’t have any favors to call in, and apart from lending me some clothes that fit me better than his coat and gargantuan boots, Bran’s done more than enough for me. Which is why I wander into the suicidal plan thought process.

I thumb a picture as I casually explain the idea to Bran.

“Lay, that’s insane. You can’t trust him. He’ll sooner put another few holes through you than help you.”

The spear of pain in my chest reminds me of the likelihood of that. “I don’t really have another choice.”

“You do. Just walk away, girl. Hell, I got a back room here. You can live there until you get back on your feet.”

I shake my head. “Any idea where I can find him?”

Bran shakes his head and waves his hands. “No. Nope. I’m not helping you kill yourself for a little whelp like that boy.”

“It’s not for―”

He slams a fist down on the bar, shaking my mug and cracking his. “Don’t lie to me. And don’t lie to
yourself
. You’re doing this to get back the boy.”

His tea seeps out of the crack in his mug, soaking the map. I meet his eyes. “I can’t let him die.” The admission tastes foul in my mouth, but I let it out all the same.

Bran sighs, a growl of a sound passing through the tendrils of red beard. He flexes his hand. “Never seen a beast like you, Layla.”

My chest twinges at his words, unsure of whether it’s an attack or just a curiosity.

“All the killing power of a siren. Probably the best’ve ever heard of. Maybe the best there’s ever been. And here you are, rescuing a lost pup. You don’t make a bit of sense, y’know that?”

His doubt feels like an echo of my own, as though my ability to bend most men to my will has him voicing my thoughts.

Your kiss didn’t kill Thomas. If you don’t have the siren’s kiss, then what other siren qualities are you lacking?

“I don’t really know what I am at this point, Bran,” I say, staring down at the trickle of tea leaking from his mug.

“You’re a stubborn bitch, is what you are.” Even though he doesn’t want me to go through with my insane plan, I can see the trouble he’s going through to keep from smiling his approval of my mind-set if not my reasons. “We are who we choose to be, and damnit if you didn’t choose to be a pain in the ass.”

The sentiment doesn’t cure what ails me. But it quiets it, for the moment. I may not know what I am, if my mother lied to me all those years. I can’t change either of those things, though. Siren or not, daughter to an even fouler mother than I ever knew, these were set in stone long ago.

But
who
I am. That I change right fucking now.

Bran’s fugitive tea has begun to spread over the table when he picks up the broken mug and throws it in the nearby waste bin.

“I’ve spent my adult life ending the lives of thieves, dealers, enforcers, scum, and even other hitmen,” I say when he turns back. “Thomas isn’t any of those things. He doesn’t deserve what’s happened to him. So you’re either going to tell me where I can find this guy, or I’m going to have to do it on my own.”

Bran grumbles, and looking away like he can keep the secret from himself, he points to a place on the map, quickly soaking up the red tea that’s moving across the bar.

And that’s how, an hour later, I find myself lying in an abandoned train yard on the South End, at the bottom of a storage container that’s been buried beneath the ground as one of the most extreme deadfalls ever. My head is aching after I fell headfirst into the rusted container, sure, but I’m more concerned with the twenty-something standing over the container, peering down at me. I’m not so worried about the German shepherd at his side as I am with the tactical crossbow he’s pointing at me, the laser sight drifting up and down my face.