Chapter 9
“What the fuck happened in there?” Ricardo demanded as August got into the car.
“I don’t know.” August sounded more confused than Ricardo had ever heard him. “Zeke the Assistant was acting like a fucking mosquito, and then suddenly Redham is there and having this allergic reaction.”
“To what?”
“No idea.” August flailed a hand as Ricardo followed the steady stream of luxury cars out of the venue’s parking lot. “I… and something weird happened on the way out.”
Ricardo glanced at him, unnerved by how unnerved his husband was. “What happened?”
“It—well, I guess nothing really happened, but I saw someone. And I swear I recognized them. I just can’t place them.”
“What did they look like?”
“Like someone who’d be listed in the credits as Generic White Male Waitstaff Number 2.” August exhaled slowly. “There was nothing, like, distinct about him. He was just familiar.”
Ricardo scowled at the Bentley crawling in front of them. “Maybe he’s on the CCTV.”
“Maybe.” August sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “I just… I don’t get it. I mean, I guess it’s possible he had a legitimate allergic reaction that got the job done before I could. But that seems a little too convenient for me.”
Ricardo grunted in agreement. Something about the whole situation was bizarre.
Their one stroke of good luck was that the surveillance devices Ricardo had placed around the venue had done their job.
He’d even checked to make sure everything was stored to the cloud, and he’d backed it up to another cloud just to be on the safe side.
With as weird as this whole job was—as their entire return to killing for hire had been—he wasn’t taking chances.
August pressed back into the seat, and he sounded exhausted, which was probably the adrenaline ticking down. “Did you get all of your cameras?”
“Yes. And all the footage is saved.”
“Good.”
A moment later, August was asleep. Ricardo got it. After watching someone drop dead before him out of the fucking blue, an adrenaline crash was to be expected. As freaked-out as August was over what exactly had gotten to Redham before he could, his system undoubtedly needed a reset.
By the time they were back at the hotel, he’d probably be back to a hundred percent.
But right now, safe in the passenger seat while Ricardo was driving, he could pass out for a little while.
Ricardo said nothing, and he drove while August slept.
He was right—by the time they’d parked at the hotel, August was wide awake and back in the game.
This was no doubt partly because of his brief catnap, but also because of the furious phone call he received just as Ricardo was pulling into the garage.
“Whoa, whoa,” August said. “Slow down. One thing at a—”
“Don’t you dare tell me to slow down!” Rachel shouted through the phone, which was now on speaker. “I told you subtle, August! Subtle! What the hell was that?”
“It wasn’t us!” August insisted.
“What do you mean, it wasn’t you? You were there to get the job done, and now my husband’s dead and everyone is pointing their fingers at me. At me, August! What have you done? My reputation is ruined, and—”
“I mean exactly what I said,” August said. “It wasn’t us. I have no idea what even happened. He came up to me and Zeke, and he was—”
“He was going into anaphylactic shock!” she screamed. “What were you thinking? He’s so secretive about his allergies—everyone knows that’s something only his inner circle would know about! Including his wife! Now they all think I killed him!”
“To be fair,” Ricardo muttered under his breath.
August shot him a glare. To Rachel, he said, “We didn’t even know he had allergies. It was—what even set it off?”
“I…” She sighed heavily. “It must’ve been sesame oil. He’s deathly allergic to it. And he was very secretive about that, which was why I didn’t want to use it for this.”
“Yeah, and you didn’t tell us about it, so how the hell would we know?”
There was silence on the other end. Then, “I’m not paying you. You didn’t get the job done, so I’m not paying you. And do not expect a positive review.”
With that, the call ended.
August swore in French as he put his phone down on his leg. Turning to Ricardo, he asked, “What the fuck is happening? How do two jobs in a row go that wrong?”
Ricardo gnawed the inside of his cheek. That was a damn good question, wasn’t it? Hits could be messy, and few things ever went according to plan, but the way these two jobs had gone awry was… unsettling. “I don’t know. It’s weird.”
“It is.” August thumped his head back against the headrest. “It’s like we’re in some really bad Final Destination knockoff where all the shit’s happening to our careers instead of to us.”
That prompted a snort from Ricardo. “Well, I think I’d rather our careers be the victims of the Final Destination shit than us.”
“Me too.” August peered at him with unnerving seriousness. “But how long before it starts coming our way?”
Fuck. That was a thought.
And suddenly Ricardo really didn’t like being out in the open. Sure, it was a parking garage with cameras all around, but he’d executed a few jobs in places like this, so… time to go upstairs.
Safely in their suite, August paced furiously while Ricardo sat on the bed, turning his phone between his fingers.
He was trained for this, for Christ’s sake.
Both this job and his previous life in spec ops had trained him well to constantly adapt on the fly.
Every op started going to shit as soon as it began, whether in tiny ways or catastrophic ones, and the name of the game was adapt, adapt, adapt.
But this time, he couldn’t figure out what they needed to adapt to.
If these two jobs ending in disaster were coincidence, sabotage, or some higher power with a fucked-up sense of humor.
During his period of being bored and wishing he could go back to being a hired gun, had he accidentally wished on a monkey’s paw or something?
Because that was as good an explanation as any.
August paused in his pacing, and the wince that flickered across his face had Ricardo nearly leaping off the bed.
“Jesus Christ, August.” He took his husband’s shoulders and steered him toward the bed. “Give your feet a rest. What are you doing?”
August made an irritated sound, but he didn’t resist being manhandled onto mattress, even though it wasn’t the way he usually enjoyed Ricardo manhandling him in bed.
Ricardo knelt and started undoing the laces on August’s dress shoes. “You’re not going to be able to walk.”
“I can’t sit still.” The protest was weak. Frustrated but resigned. Ricardo got it; August wasn’t one for lying around with his feet up, especially when he was stressed out.
Unfortunately for him, that wasn’t optional right now.
Not for a man who was missing three toes and had various pins in his metatarsals He could handle standing and walking for longer periods of time than most people would think—the incredibly expensive orthotics and supportive socks were worth their weight in gold—but sometimes, they got to him.
And when he was so far up into his own head that he started pacing like that, well, he could aggravate the shit out of his feet.
Ricardo just removed August’s shoes and socks, and he rolled on another pair of extra supportive socks. These were the ones August wore when he was home and not going out any time soon, and as far as Ricardo was concerned, August wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
With the socks in place, Ricardo ordered him to sit against the headboard, and he propped some pillows under August’s feet. Then he sat beside him and rested a hand on August’s thigh. “Whatever’s going on—we’ll figure it out.”
August scowled, watching his fingers run along a scar on the back of Ricardo’s hand.
“I know we will. It’s just fucking with my head.
” He met Ricardo’s gaze. “I can’t tell if someone’s trying to sabotage us, or if this is just a heinous run of bad luck.
” He paused. “You said you saved all the footage from the party, right?”
Ricardo nodded.
“Can I look through it?” August put the back of his hand to his forehead and added a melodramatic, “It’ll keep me occupied now that I’ve taken to my bed.”
“It’ll keep you out of trouble,” Ricardo corrected, and he got up to get his laptop. In no time, he had the files open so August could peruse the footage, and he handed over the computer. “If you install anything else on this again,” he warned, “I will toss you out the window.”
August batted his eyelashes. “What? It was just one game! I was bored!”
“One game with a million pieces of malware.” Ricardo pointed sharply at the laptop. “Watch the videos. Nothing else.”
“Can I watch videos of—”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Ugh. Fine.” August huffed. “You take the fun out of everything.”
“We’re married. What did you expect?”
August laughed with some actual feeling, and then he commenced looking through the CCTV footage. And, if he valued his life, not downloading games onto the computer again.
While August did that, Ricardo called Heidi.
“Ricardo, thank God,” she said when she answered. “What the hell happened?”
He groaned. “Ugh. I have no idea.”
“This isn’t like you at all! You’re always so professional and—”
“Whoa, whoa. I am a professional, and so is August.” Most of the time, he didn’t say out loud. “Someone got to the mark first.”
“Wait, what? So that wasn’t you?”
“No! And August told Rachel it wasn’t. We weren’t going to use something that would put the suspicion on her. We didn’t even know about the allergy anyway.”
Heidi exhaled. “So… what? Someone else took out a hit on this guy? On the same day? Which, okay, with a dickbag like him, I could actually see that happening.”
“Me too. But after how our last job went down—something’s going on. And I can’t figure out what.” He paused as some threads tried to connect in his mind. Then one of them did. “And… I wonder if it’s related to the weirdness with RateYourHit.”
He sensed August watching him. When he turned, his husband was indeed peering over the laptop, eyebrows up.
On the other end, Heidi said, “Go on.”
Ricardo shifted his weight and ran with his thought. “There’s someone climbing the ratings fast while our ratings are coming down. And now we’ve had two jobs in a row go wrong.”
“Which has already hit your ratings,” Heidi said dryly.
“Of course it has. Is it…” He held August’s gaze. “There’s no way someone is fucking with our jobs to make their ratings climb, is there?”
“Actually…” August sat up and gestured at the screen. “Put Heidi on speaker.”
Ricardo did, coming over to see what August was pointing at.
The video had been paused, and there was a somewhat grainy black-and-white still of a white man in a waistcoat and glasses coming through a door.
He had a tray in his hand with what looked like some kind of hors d’oeuvres, and he was focused on something outside the frame.
“What am I looking at?” Ricardo asked.
“The waiter who looked familiar at the party today.” August tapped the screen. “And I realized I do recognize him. From the last job.”
“What are you talking about?” Heidi asked, and Ricardo had the same question.
“He was at the restaurant where I was eating with Jaxon Bremmer. He was working the tableside, and doing a piss poor job of it.” August sat back against the headboard again as he motioned toward the screen. “And he was working as a waiter at Redham’s party.”
“How the fuck was he at a restaurant in Chicago and a party in Tucson?” Heidi asked.
“Probably for the same reason we were at a restaurant in Chicago and a party in Tucson,” August said. “To complete a job.”
“But that’s insane,” she insisted. “Who the hell is booking multiple assassins for the same job? That’s just asking for someone to go to the cops and say, ‘hey, they’re hiring assassins over here.’”
“I don’t know,” August said. “But it’s the best explanation I can come up with.”
“Me too.” Ricardo frowned. “I think we need to find this guy and talk to him. Figure out who he is and who he’s working for.”
“Maybe I should do some digging first,” Heidi suggested. “Do some searching on the back end and see if I can figure out who his liaison is, or if he even has one.”
“I’ll bet he’s connected to NightPigeon,” August grumbled.
“Who?” Heidi asked.
“NightRaven. He’s the guy whose ratings are going up while ours are going down.” He scoffed. “Someone’s going to some pretty serious lengths just to knock us out of the number one and two spots.”
“Victor sent a fucking army after us,” Ricardo said.
August grunted in agreement. “True.” He scrunched up his face.
“Oh God, is this guy going to be another Victor? With the minions and the catchphrases and everything?” He made flapping motions with his arms as he said in a mocking voice, “To the NightPigeon go the spoils.” He followed that with some squawking that had Heidi laughing.
Ricardo would’ve chuckled, too, except he was worried August was right.
Not that NightRaven would be as insufferable as Victor had been, but that he might be as good.
As dangerous. Victor had been an actual psychopath, and he’d been determined to do whatever it took to knock August and Ricardo out of their top spots on RateYourHit. Whatever it took.
“Do some digging, would you, Heidi?” he asked. “Because I think we need to figure out who this asshole is sooner than later.”
“I’ll get on it. It might take some time, though—everything on that site is encrypted to hell and back, and people are hard to find by design.”
“I know. Just do the best you can.”
“Will do.”
They ended the call, and Ricardo sat on the edge of the bed again, eyeing the frozen image on the screen.
“You’re sure it’s him?” he asked August.
His husband nodded. “I’m sure. Hopefully Heidi can find something on him.”
“Let’s hope. Because I don’t know how else to end this streak of bad luck.”