Found

FOUND

Book One

of the

Assassin’s Revenge Series

by

Tara Crescent

Text copyright © 2015 Tara Crescent

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. 

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

An infinite amount of gratitude to my editor Jim and to Anne A. Lois, Richard North and Jennifer Bene – quite possibly the best beta-readers in the world. Found is so much stronger because of your help. Thank you, thank you and thank you again!

Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com.

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Never on a Sunday:
Stephanie Rice has her sex life all figured out. She fucks six different men on six days of the week. Monday is the Chef. Tuesday, the Technician. Wednesday is the Playboy. Thursday, Mr. Buttman has his way with her. Friday, she has an appointment with the Doctor, and on Saturday, the Dominant works her over.

On Sunday, she normally does laundry. However, on this particular Sunday, her worlds collide. All six men find out about each other, and they are determined to give Stephanie an evening she will never forget.

Alexander / Marc:

It was August in Paris and the city was muggy and entirely unpleasant. The sun beat down mercilessly. Heat radiated from the sidewalk. Most Parisians had taken advantage of their generous vacation allowances and headed somewhere cooler.

Of course Paris was always crowded with tourists, but there were never any that ventured to this downtrodden corner in the
banlieu.
Saint Denis had been one of the epicenters of the riots that had rocked France ten years ago. It teemed with poor immigrants from the former French colonies in North Africa, desperate in their search for peace, prosperity and the French way of life.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité,
the Republic’s founders had called it.
 

Yet in this corner of the city, the dream seemed distant. Unemployment was over twenty percent. Massive, crumbling low-income housing projects constructed by the French government quarantined the poor, as if poverty were a contagious disease. Gangs flourished where the law had failed. Until the riots, all of France was happy to pretend that places like Saint Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois didn’t exist.

It was a perfect place to find a bar and take refuge while the plan I’d set in motion unfolded in a much more prosperous part of the city.

I had to admit it chafed that I wasn’t part of the operation. In the early days, I’d have been on the frontlines with a gun in my hand. Now though, the risks were too great. If I died, everything I spent my entire life working for would fade.
That could not happen.
I didn’t care for my own safety; I hadn’t since my seventeenth birthday, when the truth of who I was had been revealed to me, but my plans were of vital importance.

“You are sulking, Marc,” the man sitting next to me at the bar rumbled. Grey stubble covered his face as he scratched his chin in a familiar gesture that had me smiling to myself.

Jean-Luc was right. “Am I that obvious?” I asked wryly. I took a reflexive look around the bar to make sure our conversation wasn’t being overheard. Even though Jean-Luc was a professional and had called me Marc, preserving my cover, I was still fanatical about secrecy. The stakes were too high.

“
Mais oui,
but only to an old friend.” Jean-Luc took a sip of his beer.

In this particular bar in Saint Denis where I was a semi-regular, I was a two-bit thief named Marc. The bartenders here had seen me in rags and they’d seen me in suits that cost thousands of euros. They were under the impression that my clothes swung with my fortunes.

Jean-Luc had devised that cover, the wily old tactician. It was remarkably effective, but then again, Jean-Luc was my second-in-command for the most important portion of my multi-billion dollar empire. He was brilliant at his job.

“Everything is all set?” I asked, not for the first time that evening.

“Relax, Marc,” he muttered. “We have planned for every contingency, you and me.”

Of course we couldn’t plan for every contingency. We had two failed attempts on Stanislav Durov’s life to remind us of that. The first time we’d failed, we’d tried to kill him in his home country of Russia. That had been a mistake. We’d used mercenaries and the cost had been high, both in dollars and in lives. Another attempt had been made when he had been on vacation in the Caribbean. That too had failed.

About the only reassuring thing was that Durov hadn’t traced the attempts to my door. But why would he? I was
trusted
.

My phone rang. I looked at the display and drew back in instinctive revulsion.
Dylan
. I slid off my stool and headed to the door. This call I definitely didn’t want anyone to overhear.

“
Oui?
” My tone was curt as I answered. I’d no need to pretend with Dylan. Our conversations were always fraught with tension.

“Speak English goddamnit,” he huffed irritably from the other end.

I rolled my eyes. “What do you want?” I had no time for idle chit-chat.

“You are overdue for a visit,” he told me. “I need assistance with my finances.”

Damn right he did. My lips curved into a satisfied smile. Dylan would be feeling the pinch. The amount of cash readily available to him had been shrinking rapidly, but he’d been too busy training his latest slave girl to notice.

“Do you?” I said coolly. “I’ll check my schedule. Hanoi is a bit too far to fly to on short notice.”

He cleared his throat. I knew Dylan well. He was getting ready to ask for a favour and Dylan hated asking for help. Triumph flashed through me.
Finally.
I had him where I needed him.

“Can you do something remotely?” he asked. “I appear to have something of a liquidity problem.”

“Of course,” I said smoothly. I didn’t gloat – I didn’t need to. “I will transfer some money into your account in the morning. Now, you will excuse me, Dylan. I have matters to tend to here. And no doubt, so do you.”

He’d made a miscalculation with his latest kidnapping. This girl had family. Dylan was hemorrhaging money to keep them off his trail. To add further complications to an already tangled situation, Sylvia Anliker was in the process of shifting her allegiance away from Dylan as well and moving over to my camp. Dylan McAllister didn’t know it yet, but he was in trouble.

“Goodbye,” I said, ending the call.

As I walked back to the bar, I tried to relax. Every time I talked to Dylan, I walked away with a pounding headache. I didn’t need this today.

But when I saw Jean-Luc’s face, I knew my problems were just starting.

“What?”

“A wrinkle. Maybe more.” His face was etched with concern. He was already pushing himself onto his feet. His beer remained on the stained wooden counter, half-drunk and abandoned.

My palms were sweaty with nerves. Durov was scum. We couldn’t fail again. “What happened?”

“One of Durov’s guards was just discovered, his throat slit. He was off-duty, spending some time in a whorehouse. But now Durov’s crew is on high alert.”

“Fuck,” I swore, glancing around instinctively to check if anyone was listening to our conversation. Hassan, the wiry Moroccan bartender, was on the far side of the counter, chatting amiably to an old man, both of them denouncing the tyrants at the European Union and the spinelessness of Francois Hollande in equal measure. They were paying absolutely no attention to us. “What do we do?”

“You do nothing. You stay here.” Jean-Luc’s voice was firm. Though I was his employer, when we were under attack, Jean-Luc was in charge. During war there was room for only one general and Jean-Luc was a soldier who had forgotten more about battle than I’d ever learned. Besides, as aggravating as it was to admit, Jean-Luc was right. Durov could never find out that I was trying to kill him.

“Should we abort?”

“I don’t know, Marc.” Even during a period of high stress, Jean-Luc remembered the cover story. “I’m going to go find out. You stay here. Drink. If a pretty girl walks in, flirt a little.”

I rolled my eyes as he left. The chances of a woman walking into a bar in this desolate corner of the Parisian suburbs were slim. In any case, I didn’t flirt with women. My life was too complicated. The relationships I had with women were carefully controlled interactions. There was no room for spontaneity.

Ellie / Rachel:

I looked down on the body of the man I’d just killed in a Parisian whorehouse and all I could think was –
there was so much blood
.

Ivan Klimov hadn’t died easily. When recognition had flashed in his eyes, he had fought tooth and nail for his life. Had it not been for the Bowie knife in my hand, I would have been overcome. After all, as my mentor Lucien pointed out to me with depressing frequency, I could not become a master assassin in four years.

But the combination of four years of hard training and the sharp blade had been enough.

I glanced at the body for a few seconds, imprinting the image in my brain. Then, I reached for the roll of paper towels helpfully placed in the room so the johns could clean up before they tucked their cocks back in their trousers and headed back out onto the streets of Paris. I wiped away the blood on my naked body as best as I could. I needed to hurry. Our struggles hadn’t been silent; the overturned furniture in the room bore witness to that.  

Six years ago Ivan had shoved his cock down my throat until I’d gagged uncontrollably. When my teeth had grazed him, he had pulled his belt free, doubled it calmly and had whipped me for ceaseless minutes. I’d begged and pleaded for mercy as the agonizing blows rained down on me, but I’d found none.

“Six years of borrowed time, Ivan,” I spoke aloud to the corpse with its staring black eyes. “But your clock ran out.” I wiped the blood off my knife with his shirt, then threw the crumpled cloth down on top of the body, putting the knife back into its sheath and tucking it in the waistband in the small of my back.

I let myself out of the bare room. The woman in the room next to me came out at the same time, her expression weary. “You okay?” she asked me. “You are new here, no?”

I faked a bored expression. “Fucker couldn’t get it up,” I waved my hand in the direction of the room. “Too much to drink. Now he doesn’t want to pay.”

She spat in disgust. “
Merde
,” she cursed. “Always the way. You tell Francois. He’ll straighten him out.”

“I will,” I promised. I couldn’t stay and talk to her any longer; my French was good but I wasn’t a native. I would be remembered.

As I made my way to the safe house in Saint Denis, I stopped at a McDonald’s near a busy metro station, bought myself a cup of coffee and asked for the restroom key. In the tiny washroom, I quickly removed the black wig I had set over my hair. The clothes I wore, a distinctive short leather skirt and a bustier went in the trash, along with the wig. There was a slight risk that the items would be found, but it was a chance I was willing to take. The McDonald’s was nowhere near the whorehouse and the minimum wage workers were not going to be looking through the trash as they threw it out.

I pulled a much less revealing dress from my bag and slipped it on over my head. I peeled off the sparkling fake eyelashes, removed the blue contact lenses and wiped off my makeup.

The woman who went into the McDonald’s had long black hair, lots of makeup, and very little in the way of clothing. That woman would be remembered. But the woman who emerged from the washroom was just another resident of Paris taking the metro home late at night. I went straight to the safe-house, making sure I wasn’t followed. The apartment was all the way across town in the desperately poor neighbourhood of Saint Denis. Lucien would be waiting there, fingers drumming on the coffee table, smoke rising from the tip of the cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, anxious to know how the operation had gone.

***

Once upon a long,
long
time ago, I had been a girl who was always lost in a book. I wasn’t particularly popular at school but I wasn’t unpopular either. Rather, I was poor, and even in a public high school in Cleveland, poverty made you invisible. So, I read about faraway worlds to escape my own.

Once upon a long,
long
time ago, I’d worked at a Victoria’s Secret store in the mall to make some money so I could contribute towards rent and household expenses. On good days, my mom was a functioning alcoholic and on bad days, she was a drunk. She didn’t hold down jobs very long and I didn’t want to be forced out on the street. So I prayed that my rust-bucket of a car held it together so I could get to work and I poured every penny from every paycheck into survival.

Once upon a long,
long
time ago, I’d had dreams, modest though they were. I’d dreamed of escaping the daily grind of my life by going away to college. My grades had always been good and I was poor enough to qualify for financial aid. I had hoped for a brighter future.

All of that had ended six years ago when I’d been kidnapped from a parking lot in Beechwood Mall. I had been the perfect target. I was beautiful and poor; my mother was a drunk. The police just assumed I’d run away from my life. Nobody looked very hard for me.  

I’d been taken out of the country. I’d been raped repeatedly by the man who had called himself my master and by his five guards. I’d killed two of them already. Ivan was the third. Two more and then I would find Dylan McAllister and I would kill him as well. This was the road in front of me now; this was the only future I cared about.

***

“
Ca va
?” Lucien looked up sharply as I walked in.

“I’m going to shower,” I replied. Three times now, I’d killed a man. Every single time, I felt unclean. I was a shitty assassin. Growing up, I went through a prolonged vegetarian phase because I saw a documentary about a factory farm and couldn’t bear the idea of the poor cows sent to the slaughter. Every single one of the men I had killed so far had deserved to die, but I still felt violated.

After a long soak, I got out and towelled myself off. I went back to the living room with a bathrobe around me. Lucien would want to debrief. “There was so much blood,” I muttered as I sat down. I stared blankly at the muted TV screen.

“Were you heard? Followed?” Lucien’s questions were filled with practicalities. He’d been my mentor and my trainer for the last four years. He was always practical first. If there was an emotional impact to what I did, Lucien was rarely interested in hearing about it.  

I shook my head and got up to go into the small kitchen. “Do you want some tea?” I called out to him.

“Here,” he spoke right behind me and I jumped. I hadn’t heard him follow me, but Lucien could always move silently when he wanted. “Let me.”

I stared into the distance as he plugged in the kettle. When it started to whistle, I moved on auto-pilot to grab a couple of mugs from the cabinet above the sink, and popped in a tea bag in each.

“Ellie.” Lucien’s voice had a peculiar note to it. He was right in front of me, too close for comfort. There was a look in his eyes that I’d never seen there before, but nonetheless recognized. I’d seen this expression on the faces of other men before and I was terrified of it.

Desire.
Male desire, raw and carnal.

Panic started to grip me, the way it always did. I watched as his hand reached towards me almost in slow motion. He gripped my shoulder and his head dipped closer and closer. My heart hammered in my chest. I couldn’t breathe. The images were flashing too fast in my head. Dylan raping me that first night, slapping and beating me when I wouldn’t stop crying. Throwing me to his guards after so they could teach me a lesson about silence. The repeated beatings; the unending rapes. Night after night for two full years.

I broke. For four years, I’d been trained to move from pure instinct. As Lucien neared, my mind remained paralyzed by fear, but my body remembered its training. I brought my knee up hard into Lucien’s groin.

He grunted and moved back, sinking to the ground, his expression etched with pain. “What the fuck, Ellie?” he swore at me. His expression was furious. “You told me you took care of this.”

Four years ago, Lucien had accepted me into his fold for the sole reason that as a beautiful woman, I could get into places that he couldn’t on his own. Today’s operation in the whorehouse for example, where the only way I could get access to Ivan Klimov was to pretend to be a prostitute.

For the first few months after he’d rescued me, I’d been so traumatized by my two years as Dylan McAllister’s sex slave that I had flinched in fear every time a man was anywhere near me. As I trained, the overt fear had slowly disappeared, but sexual desire had remained absent from my life.

From time to time, Lucien would depart to seek female company; I had never felt a similar need for a man.

But then Lucien started bringing up the subject. He told me that I needed to do whatever it took to rid myself of this fear. The barely hidden subtext was that my terror wasn’t useful.

The message was harsh, but I understood it completely. We were both driven by our own demons and Dylan loomed front and centre in both our minds. Killing him was
everything
.

I tried. I went into bars, but whenever a man showed interest, I ran away. Over and over again, I tried to push myself, but the result was always the same. Finally, I lied to Lucien and told him I’d taken care of the problem.

And Lucien was now clutching at his groin in agony.

“I have to go,” I mumbled. I whirled to my bedroom and pulled on a pair of track pants and a t-shirt. It was all too much.
I needed out
.

“Fix this now, Ellie,” I heard him call out as I left the apartment. I heard the tone of finality in his voice. I knew that everything I’d worked for in the last four years was on the line. Without Lucien’s money and his contacts in the underworld, I couldn’t get to Dylan. My dream of killing my former
‘master’
was the only thing that had kept me alive the last six years.

I burst into a run.