10. Everly
Everly
Abi side-eyed Sammy. “He’s been stalking me since we left this morning, hasn’t he?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you call him?” she huffed, not moving as the dark-eyed killer stormed toward her.
“Of course not. He probably hacked the security feed and was watching everything live.” Sammy glared at the man I had sold a piece of my soul to. “Why are you interrupting our girl time? We haven’t even tried on a single outfit yet.”
“You should have left the moment the fighting started. She was in danger,” he growled, his Russian accent thickening as he wrapped his arms around Abi so carefully, I felt like I’d stepped into some weird alternate universe.
It was hard to comprehend that the same man I’d hired to kill my father was the one before me now, snuggling the pregnant redhead against him.
His name was Ghost, and he was an online vigilante, a cybergenius, and a deadly assassin.
I’d found him by chance. Or rather, he’d found me.
My search for solutions had been running thin, and one night back in June, I’d typed in a few keywords that would probably cause whoever was monitoring national security to take notice.
Fortunately, they hadn’t. At least, as far as I was aware.
It wasn’t like the Feds had busted down my door or anything.
Ghost had been alerted by those keywords, though, which told me that maybe he was the reason the Feds hadn’t come looking for me.
Oddly enough, he offered to help. For a price and having to sit through a lecture on being safe on the dark web—and in real life.
The man I’d been about to hire to off my sperm donor gave me a stern talking-to about stranger danger in the cyberverse.
All I’d wanted was Evie. I hadn’t cared how that happened, or how much it would cost, as long as she was safe.
Some piece of me, buried deeper than I ever wanted to look at, realized William had had the same intentions.
All he’d wanted was to protect Evie. Only, his way of protecting her came at the price of destroying her mental health.
I’d listened to Ghost, promised to be safer in the future, and then offered to pay him whatever he wanted to kill William Adams. It was the only way. Not only to wrest Evie free of him, but to protect the people William exploited every day, the victims he trafficked.
We’d gone from an encrypted online chat to meeting in person at a café on Melrose to William being dead—of natural causes—in less than two days. Thirty-nine hours after I received the first message Ghost sent, my sister was free.
To my surprise, Ghost only took one hundred thousand, even though I was sure he could have emptied all my accounts with a few clicks. The money, he said, was more to ensure my silence about our connection. It was his leverage in case I ever decided to spill the beans to any law enforcement.
I hadn’t seen him since that single in-person meeting. When Reid and I’d been walking across Hannigans’ parking lot the night before, I thought I’d caught a glimpse of him. But I had quickly reassured myself it wasn’t Ghost. It couldn’t possibly be.
Wrong. So, so wrong.
“What fight?” Sammy scoffed. “The name-calling and minor hair-pulling? That’s not a fight. No one bled. I doubt anyone broke a sweat until you stomped in here throwing testosterone around.”
“That one was rude to my wife,” Ghost said coolly.
Rory, Jos, and Mila were all tense as they watched the other three. Not so much in fear, but…caution. Rory, flushed with temper only moments before, paled and inched closer to the counter. No, she might have been a little scared. I almost smirked, but I stopped myself.
Nothing about this moment was funny. I shouldn’t know who Ghost was—or what he was capable of. From the way Rory gulped, I was certain she was just as aware of his abilities as I was.
Wait, he said wife .
As in Abi.
My sister’s new friend was married to our father’s assassin.
And Evie had no clue.
What the fuck had I gotten us into?
“You two are giving me heartburn,” Abi complained, rolling her eyes. Affection was thick in her voice even as she scolded them. “You realize you’re both ridiculous, right? Not every minute of the day, but a good fraction of it. Let a girl breathe, damn.”
While she teased and made them grumble, my mind was in chaos.
Why had I picked Creswell Springs to settle down in? I racked my brain, trying to find the trigger that had put the small town on my radar.
Trinity University.
It was prestigious and ticked all our boxes. Small town, below-average crime rate, nice scenery. The school itself hadn’t been on my initial list of places to start over with my twin. There had been something that had sent me into research mode.
An advertisement?
A junk email?
I couldn’t remember the specifics. It had simply popped up in my feed like other random things did whenever a person thought them into existence. I had a need. Trinity University—and Creswell Springs by extension—filled those needs.
Was it a coincidence that we’d ended up in the same town where the hit man I’d hired apparently lived?
It didn’t make sense.
I met Ghost in LA. William lived in Seattle. The connections were few and far between.
Only…
Ghost was a dark-web mastermind who happened to be an assassin-for-hire. One who could make a death appear completely natural. There had been a full autopsy, and it had shown William had died of a heart attack. Ghost was absolutely terrifying.
And it looked as if he had baited me into moving near him.
What the fuck!
What the actual fuck?
“Everly, are you okay?”
Mila’s voice pulled me out of my internal freak-out. I blinked her into focus, only to realize Jos was right beside me too. She and Mila were both holding me up. I didn’t realize I was unsteady until I felt Jos’s arm tighten around my waist.
I blinked again, feeling nauseated and dizzy. And still burning and itching in that place I couldn’t touch in public. Yet all I could think about was, what would I do if Evie found out my dark secret?
“Can you breathe? Oh my gosh, I knew you were uncomfortable, but I never would have let these psychos run around unchecked for so long if I’d thought you were in serious distress. This is a crazy allergic reaction, babe,” Mila said with worry in her eyes. “You need medical attention, stat.”
This reaction wasn’t part of the allergy.
It was panic, pure and simple. Fear raced through me, jacking my heart rate up to the speed of a bullet train.
Because of Ghost. I wasn’t exactly scared of him—although that was a given.
He was a dangerous man. But I’d felt oddly reassured that everything was going to be okay when we had our one and only previous meeting.
He’d been more pissed at how unsafe I’d been during my search for a solution to the whole William problem than anything else. Like some frustrated older brother who was fed up with his annoying, much younger sister.
And maybe I should be terrified for my own life at the moment, but I wasn’t.
Because I had no life if Evie found out her dad was dead because of me. She would get angry and leave me. She might even be scared of me. That, more than anything, would kill me.
But the agony of the possible allergic reaction I was having between my legs was intensified by the anxiety attack that I realized was choking the oxygen from my lungs. My entire body was shaking, shivering, until my teeth were chattering together.
“What is she allergic to?” Jos asked, her eyes wide while her tone remained calm. “Did she ingest something? This isn’t how Lexa responds when she comes into contact with peanuts. Does she have an epi?”
Was that mom mode?
Huh, I’d never seen that in real life before. It was kind of nice, in a weirdly scary, soothing way.
Mila grunted as she urged me toward the chair at the other end of the counter. “I’m only guessing it’s an allergy, Jos. It might not be.”
“Mila.”
That was all she said, all she had to say, in that no-nonsense way. Another first, witnessing that in person. If I hadn’t been struggling to breathe, I might have smiled. Or cried. I really, really wanted to cry.
Mila gave me a look that was full of apology.
It was the last thing I saw before the world went dark.