Chapter 6 – FELIX
Chapter
Six
FELIX
" W heeeee!" Juniper spins in the leather executive chair like a kid at an amusement park, her brown hair flying out in a perfect circle as she hangs upside down, her knees draped over the back. "Felix, this place is fancy . Like, eat-gold-leaf-on-your-cereal fancy."
I lean against the floor-to-ceiling window, watching her reflection in the glass. Twenty-third floor. Corner office. The kind of view that costs a month's salary per square foot. "Stop spinning. You'll throw up on their Persian rug."
"It's probably insured." She drags her feet to slow down, grinning at me upside-down as her head lolls back. "Everything here screams 'we have fuck-you money and we're not afraid to use it.'"
She's not wrong. The office belongs in a museum, not a place where people actually work. Mahogany desk the size of a small car. Original artwork that I recognize from heist planning research. Even the air smells expensive—leather and wood polish.
My body still aches from her heat. Three days of trying to be something I'm not, using toys and prosthetics to approximate what her biology craves. The fake knot worked, technically. She came. Repeatedly. But I saw it in her eyes each time—that flicker of almost but not quite .
It's getting harder to ignore.
Next time, I should bring in an actual alpha. Someone who can give her what she needs. It wouldn't be the first time, but I keep killing the fuckers after they leave, and that gets messy fast. Literally and figuratively.
But I'm too possessive to let anyone who's touched her walk away. That's a privileged reserved for me and the dead.
"Think they'll offer us champagne?" Juniper hops out of the chair and wanders to the bookshelf, running her fingers along leather spines. "Rich people always offer champagne. It's like their version of a handshake."
"Don't touch anything."
"I'm not going to steal their first edition Hemingway." She pauses. "Unless it's signed. Then all bets are off."
The door opens without a knock. Power move.
The man who enters fills the doorway like he was poured into it—six-four, shoulders that could double as a battering ram, and a suit that somehow makes him look more dangerous instead of civilized.
His scent hits me immediately. Alpha. The real kind, not the synthetic shit I spray on myself every morning.
I have to fight the way my lip wants to curl back in disgust.
Juniper's entire body language shifts. One second she's examining a crystal paperweight, the next she's coiled like a spring. Her hand drifts to her hip where she usually keeps a blade, but she passes it off as smoothing down her skirt.
"Good afternoon, Mr. King. Ms. Addams." His voice sounds like gravel in a blender. "Thank you for coming."
His gaze lingers on Juniper a beat longer.
She doesn't hide what she is. It's often an asset on missions.
Omegas can get in under powerful people's guard where alphas and betas can't. But from time to time, a client has something to say about it.
Depending on the nature of that something, it's often the last thing they ever say.
This man is a professional, though, through and through.
Even though I can tell he's caught her scent, and anyone with eyes can see she's drop dead gorgeous, he moves on as if she's anyone else.
Might have something to do with the fact that my eyes are boring into him like laser sights, waiting for the slightest fuck up.
Smart man.
Juniper cocks an eyebrow and gives me a look that screams, "Addams? Really?"
I fight a smirk, and don't bother correcting the fake names. We gave them to his assistant, he knows they're bullshit, we know he knows. It's all part of the dance. "You said you had a job."
"Straight to business. I appreciate that." He moves to the desk but doesn't sit. Another power play, making us look up at him. "My employer has a problem that requires your particular skill set."
"We kill people," Juniper says brightly, folding her hands on the desk, the sparkles in her blue nail polish glinting in the light. "Is that the particular skill set you mean? Because we're really good at it."
The client's mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. "Yes. That's precisely what I mean."
I catalog the exits automatically. Door we came through. Windows that don't open. Private bathroom that might have a service entrance.
"The targets are a team of vigilantes." He pulls out a tablet, sets it on the desk facing us. "They call themselves the Psychos."
"How original," I say flatly, taking the tablet.
Four masked faces stare back at me from the screen. All alphas. All built like they could bench press a car. Military bearing obvious even in the surveillance photos. These aren't soft politicians or corrupt businessmen. These are operators.
"Vigilantes," I repeat, keeping my voice neutral.
"They've been interfering with certain business operations. Costing my employer significant money and resources." He swipes to show a destroyed compound, bodies scattered across the ground. "This was last week. Twelve assets lost."
Assets. Nice euphemism.
Juniper leans over my shoulder, and I catch her scent, flowers and that underlying sweetness that never quite goes away after heat. "They look like they bite."
She's one to talk.
"The pay reflects the difficulty." The suit names a number that makes my chest tight. Enough to disappear for a year. Maybe two. Enough to find better doctors for Juniper, better medications, better everything.
"That's a lot of zeros," Juniper says, but her voice has gone flat. Danger sign number one.
"My employer believes in paying for quality." The man's eyes stay on me. "Your reputation precedes you. The Tucson job was particularly impressive."
My spine stiffens. We cleaned that scene perfectly. No evidence. No trail. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course not." He smiles now, all teeth. "But hypothetically, if someone were to eliminate a certain senator in his hotel room and leave no trace, that would demonstrate exactly the skill level we're looking for."
Juniper starts humming. Danger sign number two. It's a children's song, something about roses and pockets full of posies. Her tell when reality starts getting slippery around the edges.
"We'll think about it," I say, standing. The meeting's over. I need to get her out before she starts seeing things that aren't there. Or worse, things that are.
"Time is a factor." He produces a business card from his jacket. Thick stock. No name, just a phone number. "I'll need an answer within forty-eight hours."
I take the card. "We'll be in touch."
Juniper doesn't move. She's staring at the tablet, at the hidden faces of the Psychos, and her humming gets louder.
"He has kind eyes," she says suddenly, squinting at the picture.
I'm not even sure how she can see that much detail through the grain.
"The one with silver hair. He has kind eyes. People with kind eyes shouldn't die."
Fuck.
"We're leaving." I take her elbow, gentle but firm. She lets me guide her to the door, still humming.
The man watches us go with the patience of a predator. "Forty-eight hours," he reminds us.
The elevator ride down feels like descending into hell. Juniper presses her face against the mirrored wall, fogging it with her breath. "I don't like him," she whispers. "He smells like broken glass."
"That's not what he smells like." I keep my voice steady, clinical. She's mixing sensory input again. "He smells like alpha pheromones and expensive cologne."
"Same thing." She draws a smiley face in the condensation. Gives it fangs.
The elevator dings. Lobby level. I guide her through the marble and glass cavern, past the security desk, out into the afternoon sun. The city noise helps. Juniper does better with chaos than silence.
"Forty-eight hours," she repeats once we're a block away. "That's not very long to decide if we want to kill four alphas who save people."
"They're not saving people. They're playing hero." I flag down a cab. Any permanent mode of transport is too much risk. "And that much money could set us up for a long time. No more jobs for a while."
She slides into the cab first, scooting to the far window. I give the driver our address and settle beside her. She immediately curls into my side, seeking contact.
"You think I'm getting worse." Not a question.
I could lie. Tell her she's fine. That the episodes aren't increasing in frequency. That she didn't spend twenty minutes last week having a conversation with someone who wasn't there. But lies are for marks, not for her.
And I made her a promise years ago, before I broke us both out of that hell hole. A promise that I would never leave her or lie to her, and I'll die before I break either of those.
"Yes," I say simply.
"The shadows are getting louder." She traces patterns on my thigh. "Sometimes they tell me things. True things. Like how that man back there has killed thirteen people. I could see them standing behind him."
"That's not possible."
"That he killed them?" Her laugh sounds like breaking glass. "Or that they talk to me?"
I don't have an answer to that. Not one she'll like.
The cab winds through traffic. I run the numbers in my head. Four targets. Military trained. Well-equipped. It would take weeks of surveillance, careful planning. Higher risk than anything we've done before.
But that money...
"If we do this," I say carefully, "we do it our way. Full reconnaissance. No rushing. The second something feels wrong, we abort."
She's quiet for a long moment. "He had kind eyes, Felix."
"So do you. Doesn't make you any less dangerous."
"I guess." She yawns, the stress of the meeting catching up. "But if the shadows tell me something specific, we back out. Deal?"
I sigh. "Deal."
She nods against my shoulder. I can feel her relaxing, trusting me to handle it. To keep her safe. To make the hard choices so she doesn't have to.
The card burns in my pocket. Forty-eight hours to decide if we're going to hunt the hunters. Kill the heroes. Become the monsters in someone else's story.
But we're already monsters. At least this way, we'll be rich monsters.
Juniper starts humming again. A different song this time. Something about falling down.
I hold her tighter and watch the city blur past, calculating angles and distances and how many bullets it takes to put down a hero.