Silas

SILAS

Assassins, Book
Three

by V. J. Chambers

Silas Drake
doesn
’t do commitments. Or second dates. Or
guilt.

Yeah, he used to be an
assassin. He used to kill people. And yeah, he breaks girls hearts
on a routine basis. He’s an asshole. So what?

When Rolf, a dangerous man
from his past, arrives in Morgantown, Silas is itching to go after
him. The only problem is that he’s the best man in his friends’
Griffin’s and Leigh’s wedding, which is a time-consuming
distraction.

Things get more complicated
when Silas finds out that the random girl he took home the night
before is actually Griffin’s little sister, Christa. For some
reason, Griffin isn’t keen on Silas’ getting involved with
her.

When Rolf captures both
Silas and Christa, he uses them in deadly game of cat and mouse,
hunting them down for his own entertainment. They’re in the woods,
on the run. Rolf has a gun, and he’s chasing them.

Silas has to do everything in his power
to protect Christa.

But trying to keep her safe
might be easier for him than facing the fact that he’s developing
feelings for her.

**Recommended for mature
readers due to explicit sexual situations, coarse language, and
disturbing violence.**

SILAS
© copyright 2013 by V. J.
Chambers
http://vjchambers.com
Punk Rawk Books
Smashwords Edition

Please do not copy or post
this book in its entirety or in parts anywhere. You may, however,
share the entire book with a friend by forwarding the entire file
to them. (And I won
’t get mad.)

SILAS

Assassins, Book
Three

by V. J. Chambers

CHAPTER ONE

“
You never showed up for
your fitting,” Griffin said. He was standing in the foyer of my
house, a garment bag draped over his arm. “So, hopefully this is
the right size.”

“
What’s the right size?” I
said. I didn’t have time to deal with whatever he was talking about
right now. Things had just gotten really serious, really
fast.

“
The suit,” said
Griffin.

I gazed at him blankly.
“Suit?”

“
For my wedding.” He looked
at me with concern in his eyes. “You okay, man? You been hitting
that homebrew of yours so hard that you blacked out the fact I was
getting married?”

Right. Griffin’s wedding. I
was the best man. “Fuck,” I muttered. “The wedding.” I ran my hand
through my hair. “It would really piss you off if I backed out of
that, wouldn’t it?”

He let out a short laugh.
“That’s a joke, right?”

I turned away from him and
went back into the kitchen. It was a nice kitchen. My twin sister
Sloane and I took turns on kitchen duty, so we made sure it stayed
clean. I went to the island and picked up a piece of paper. I was
going to take it back out to Griffin, but I saw that he’d followed
me in here.

He draped the garment bag over the back
of a chair at the table.

I handed him the paper.

He peered at it. “‘See Derek
Rolf on Wildlife Preservation Tuesday at Seven,’” he read. He
looked at me. “So?”

I took the paper back.
“Derek Rolf is the reason I’m in West Virginia.”

“
Who’s Derek Rolf?” said
Griffin.

“
You don’t remember the
name? He was only one of the biggest clients at Dewhurst-McFarland.
Everyone at Op Wraith licked his boots. He bought all kinds of guns
and weapons, mostly for hunting.”

Griffin shrugged. “I never
paid much attention the clientele at Dewhurst-McFarland. I just
went where they told me and shot who they told me to.”

Griffin, Sloane, and I used
to work for a covert wing of the arms corporation
Dewhurst-McFarland. They were working on a project to create
supersoldiers by injecting people with a serum that made it
impossible to kill them unless you severed their spines. The
project was ultimately abandoned on an official level.

Unofficially, a group called
Operation Wraith began gathering up people, injecting them with the
serum, and training them to be assassins-for-hire. We had been
those assassins. All three of us had worked for Op
Wraith.

Until Griffin took the whole
operation down two years ago. Nearly a year ago, we’d blown up what
was left of it, killing the last few people who ran Op
Wraith.

“
Well,” I said. “Derek Rolf
is really rich and really twisted. And I came here to kill
him.”

Griffin folded his arms over
his chest. “We don’t kill people anymore, Silas.”

“
Maybe you don’t,” I said.
“But I’ve been planning on killing this guy for a very long time.
I’ve been waiting and waiting, and he finally showed
up.”

“
You can’t do that,” he
said. “We can’t call attention to ourselves. You could get
arrested. And if the authorities find out that you’ve got the
serum, they’ll treat you like some kind of science project. You’ll
never get free of them.”

“
I won’t get arrested. Give
me some credit.”

He rubbed a hand over his
face. “I don’t get it, Silas. Killing is what they made us do. It’s
not what we volunteer to do. I never liked killing
people.”

“
Yeah, well, that’s you,” I
said. “I happen to be good at killing people. Really damned good.
Maybe it’s the only thing I’m good at. And if anyone deserves to
get killed, it’s this guy.”

Griffin slowly nodded in
sudden understanding. “This is revenge.”

“
Damned right it’s revenge,”
I said.

“
What did he do to
you?”

“
Not to me,” I said. “To
someone I knew. He killed her.”

“
Her?” Griffin furrowed his
brow. “This was a girl.”

“
Yeah,” I said. “And he did
it in the most fucked-up way possible, dude. He hunted her down
like an animal. Him and his buddies. That’s what they do. They get
a bunch of guns, they release people into the woods, and then they
chase them. It’s their idea of fun, and they’re too fucking rich
for anyone to touch them, even if anyone does find out.”

Griffin looked confused.
“You had like a relationship. With a girl.”

That
was what he was confused about?

I glared at him. “Not
really. It was not exactly like that. But it was kind of like that.
The point is that he’s a dick. And I’ve always known that his
little hunting ground was somewhere in West Virginia, which is the
whole reason I came here to go to school in the first place. I was
hoping that at some point, his path would cross mine. And that’s
happened. So, now I kill him.”

“
So, you didn’t have a
relationship with this girl, but you still want revenge for
her?”

“
It was kind of…” I didn’t
want to talk about that part of it. “You know what, that’s not
important. What’s important is that this guy needs to
die.”

“
Call the police,” said
Griffin.

“
You’re kidding me,
right?”

“
No, I’m not. We’re not
assassins anymore, Silas. We’re college students. So, if you know
this guy is bad news, tell the police what you know and let them
hunt him down and lock him up. It’s not our problem
anymore.”

“
Bullshit—”

“
And before you go on
about how it’s got to be you that does him, I want you to really
think about how satisfying it is to kill someone. Do you
really
like
it?”

“
I’d like killing
him.”

“
Trust me, revenge is not
all it’s cracked up to be. It doesn’t make anything better. Mostly,
it makes things worse.”

I studied my shoes. I knew
that Griffin had tortured and mutilated the guy who’d raped him
prison, and it had practically destroyed his relationship with
Leigh. They’d worked through it. They were getting married, after
all. But I didn’t want to say anything that would invalidate his
point of view, because I knew it wasn’t easy for him to talk about
all of that.

I lifted my gaze to meet
his. “I have to kill him, Griffin. Maybe it’s a bad idea, but I
do.”

He sighed.

“
The police can’t get to
this guy. You have no idea how rich he is. How many politicians
he’s got in his pocket because he’s bought them off. He’s
untouchable.”

“
Silas, you need to lie
low,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

You know what? It was stupid
of me to think he’d understand. I took a deep breath. I went over
to the garment bag and unzipped it. The suit was inside. I pulled
it out. “Why is there a t-shirt in here?”

“
That’s how we’re doing it,”
said Griffin. “It’s a suit jacket and pants over a t-shirt. Leigh
and Sloane dreamed it up. They said it was casual chic or
something.”

“
I don’t have to wear a
tie?”

“
Nope.”

“
Cool. Always makes me feel
like I’m being choked.” I zipped the garment bag up. “I guess
you’re right. I should lie low.” Well, I should pretend I was lying
low anyway. It had been dumb of me to think that Griffin would be
on board with my killing some guy. Especially not right before his
wedding.

“
You should,” said Griffin.
“Tell me you’re not going to go after this guy.”

“
I’m not going to go after
him,” I said. What Griffin didn’t know wouldn’t hurt
him.

He looked visibly relieved.
“Thanks, man. You were freaking me out there.”

“
Yeah. Sorry about that.” I
opened the refrigerator. “You want a beer while you’re here or
anything?”

“
No, I should probably go,”
he said. “I was just dropping that off for you.”

“
All right,” I said. “See
you around.”

“
Try the suit on. If it
doesn’t fit, then…” He sighed. “Well, I don’t know. Make it fit.
Because Leigh is so stressed out right now, that I’m not going to
tell her if anything else goes wrong.”

“
I thought this was supposed
to be a simple, informal wedding.”

“
Yeah, me too,” he said.
“But I think women have a different idea of what simple
means.”

I laughed.

He ducked out of the
kitchen. “See you.”

“
Bye.” I got a beer out of
the refrigerator for myself.

He paused in the doorway.
“So, you had a relationship with a girl? Because I thought you
didn’t do relationships.”

I set the beer down, glaring
at him. “It wasn’t exactly a relationship.”

“
But you cared about her,”
he said. “You want to kill the guy that killed her. I guess I can’t
blame you. If something happened to Leigh—”

“
It wasn’t exactly like
that, okay?” Why did I open my mouth to Griffin? “Definitely wasn’t
anything like what you and Leigh have.”

“
Is she the reason you don’t
have relationships now?” He raised his eyebrows.

“
No,” I said. “I don’t have
relationships because I’m too young for that crap. That’s all. Also
because they’re way too much work, and they make everyone
miserable. I mean, you complain more about Leigh than anything in
the world.”

“
I do not,” he
said.

“
You do.”

He laughed. “Look, if you
don’t want to talk about this girl—”

“
I don’t.”

He nodded. “Got
it.”

* * *

I liked craft brews. I liked
local beer. And that meant that the brew pub, officially The
Morgantown Brewing Company was one of my favorite places to hang
out. I dabbled in brewing beer myself, so at any time, I usually
had a batch of something or other brewing in the basement of my
house. I was getting better at it, but one of the things I still
never seemed to quite get right was the carbonation.

I was chatting with one of
the brewers there about it that evening. He often hung out after
hours at the bar, and I was somewhat of a regular.