Chapter 18
Asher
Iswear under my breath. I’ve checked everywhere, but after almost two hours of searching I still haven’t found the hard drive.
My phone starts ringing. I answer quickly.
“Are you back?” I ask.
“How are you, you sexy thing?” Gable asks cheerily.
My body chills. I’m stuck to the spot, frozen by fear, and hoping to Christ I heard Gable wrong. That’s a code. A code that means serious fucking trouble.
“Are you fucking with me?” I whisper.
Gable’s lets out a fake laugh. “Nope!”
“Are you with Ella?”
“Yep!”
“And Monty is there?”
“Yep!” Gable laughs again. “Slow down, Ella!”
I hear Ella groan and whimper, “I need to go home and puke! And why do you keep laughing like a freak?”
“Puke?” I ask. “What did you do to her?”
Gable must have moved away from Ella because his voice becomes hushed and panicked. “Fuck that; what do we do about Monty?”
Monty, another contract killer, is beautiful, deadly, and scary as hell.
I’m not sure what her real name is; she’d earned the title Monty after she’d been stark naked one night and caught three men breaking into her apartment.
She’d killed them all, quickly, efficiently, and said she hadn't grabbed her robe because “she didn’t have time to be shy.” She’s as close to a black widow as you can get, so Gable and I made a promise to each other never to go near her—and definitely to never have sex with her.
So naturally, we’ve both slept with her at least once.
That would be fine, but Monty is a little interested in me.
And by a little, I mean totally head-over-heels, obsessively in love with me.
The last time I rejected her, she stabbed me with a fork.
And the last woman I slept with hasn’t been seen since.
Which means Ella, innocent, puking Ella, is in danger.
I walk as casually as I can past the living room camera, and the moment I’m in the hallway, I launch into a run. By the time I make it downstairs, Ella and Gable are in the lobby.
When Ella sees me, she whimpers and wraps her arms around my waist.
“Gable gave me tequila.”
“Did he?” I say through gritted teeth.
Gable shrugs. “We were bonding. But let’s talk about this upstairs, with locked doors and …” He uses his thumb and index finger to make a gun.
“Asher Flynn.”
The soft, English-accented voice floats across the foyer, and I physically recoil. Gable is about to make a run for it, and I grip his T-shirt and yank him back. Ella turns in the direction of Monty’s voice.
Monty looks beautiful, as always. A designer dress, not a blonde hair out of place, perfect curls across her shoulders, green eyes filled with a frightening rage that had once turned me on, but now all I can think about is getting Ella as far away from this woman as possible.
“As I live and fuck,” Monty sings, approaching us, her heels clicking across the floor.
“What on earth are you …” Her eyes drift to Ella, and the flash of anger across her face is enough to make me want to throw Ella over my shoulder and run like hell.
I’ve once seen Monty snap a waiter's neck when he got her order wrong.
I really like Ella’s neck.
Ella looks up at me. “Are you going to introduce us?”
Nope, I’m going to run and take you to Canada. Do you like maple syrup?
Monty extends her hand. “I’m Monty. I work with Asher.”
Ella unwraps an arm from around me and shakes Monty’s hand. “You work with computers, too?”
Monty laughs musically. “Computers? Yes. Type, type, keyboard, keyboard,” she sings. “And who are you, exactly?”
“Ella.”
“Ella,” Monty repeats, as if tasting each individual letter, and deciding they all taste bitter. “Asher’s …” She pulls at her necklace. “Girlfriend?”
Ella flushes. “Oh, well … we’re dating.”
Monty keeps the smile on her face, perfect red lips around perfect white teeth. She looks like a Colgate commercial, if toothpaste could kill you.
“Dating.” Monty’s expression remains frozen. “Dating.”
Each word from her mouth feels like a countdown to a bomb that’s going to obliterate us all.
Suddenly, Ella’s stomach makes a noise, and she squeaks. “I need to …”
“Tequila.” Gable grabs Ella’s hand. “I’ll take care of this one.”
Ella must really feel sick because she doesn’t even question Gable’s actions and lets him drag her over to the elevators. Once they’ve left, Monty takes a step closer to me.
“Dating?” she asks, eyebrow arched. “You’re dating Bambi?”
“Don’t even go there,” I say. “You leave her alone.”
Monty shrugs a shoulder innocently, tugging on my T-shirt and looking up at me. “Would I do anything to that innocent girl?”
“Yes, you would. Don’t touch her.”
She presses her nails into my chest, and I wince, pulling back.
“You’ll date her, but you won’t fuck me? Since when do you go for watered-down women?”
Rage races down my spine as I stalk toward her. “You don’t fucking talk about her like that. Leave.”
I feel the gun press into my crotch, but I don’t react, because as dangerous as Monty is, and she really is, she loves me. If she’s going to shoot me, it definitely won’t be there. A foot, sure. The dick? No way.
“Monty,” I say quietly, jaw tense. “Leave. Ella. Alone.”
Monty narrows her eyes, and I see the flash of heartbreak, so quick that if I didn’t know her, I wouldn’t have clocked it at all.
I don’t enjoy hurting her, but we’ve had this conversation a hundred times.
I don’t date, and even if I did, I wouldn’t date someone in our world.
I want out of contracting someday—Monty wants this forever.
“Fuck your little vanilla girl,” she hisses, tucking the gun back into her jacket. “And to think I came here to do you a favor.”
I sigh softly but feel myself relax. “What kind of favor?”
Monty presses her finger into my chest. “Whispers of a bounty for someone in this building have reached my pretty little ears.”
“Yes, Barnaby Fisher. He’s been taken care of.”
“Nu-uh,” she croons sweetly, tracing her finger down my chest and lower until I grab her hand. “You.”
I frown. “Me?”
“Well, the Flynn brothers as a whole. It’s not been put out there yet, but you know how I have my little spies.” She grins. “What on earth have you been doing to piss someone off?”
Fuck. It can only be the client that hired us. They must have heard about Gable saving Ella.
“Are you here to collect?” I ask Monty.
She looks genuinely offended. “Fuck you, Asher.” I raise my eyebrows, and she shrugs. “Okay, maybe I considered it, but you’ve reminded me how pretty you are.” She squeezes my cheek. “So, I’ll let it slide. Even for a quarter mil.”
“A quarter mil? Are you fucking serious?”
Monty sighs sadly. “And I wanted a new car, too. My current one is … borrowed. Anyway, maybe I’m getting sentimental.
Or maybe the memory of your dick—” She stops herself.
“Anyway, it won’t be long until that bounty is spread far and wide and you’ll be a tasty little retirement plan to any fucker with a trigger finger and half a brain. ”
Fuck.
“How long do you think we have?”
She shrugs. “A week, maybe. It didn’t take me long to find you, but I’m smarter than most.”
A week. A week to find the hard drive or get the fuck out of San Francisco.
A week left with Ella.
“When the brunette finds out what you are and you feel lonely, don’t come crying to me.” She slips her sunglasses on. “It’s all or nothing now, Flynn. Marry me or don’t call me.”
She walks away, while I’m still trying to gather my thoughts. How has a hundred grand job for a low-life pervert hacker and information now become a quarter mil bounty on my and Gable’s head?
What the hell is on that hard drive?
“Monty,” I call out, and she spins to face me. “Thank you.”
“Tell me on our wedding day.” She waves me off.
One crisis averted, at least.
I take my phone out and call Hunter. He answers on the first ring.
“I was just about to call.”
“Who the fuck wants us dead?” I ask, not bothering to take the elevator, but heading for the stairs.
“No clue. Cleo is on it,” he says. “I’ll make it clear that anyone who accepts that job is picking a side, and it isn’t mine.
No one touches my fucking kids.” My heart warms at the term, one he rarely uses, even if he’s always treated us that way.
He may be barely twelve years older than me, but he feels older. “Any word on the drive?”
“Not yet. Also, I just had a visit from our least favorite Brit.”
He hisses out a breath. “Shit. An attempt or a warning?”
“The latter, luckily.”
“How’d she look?”
Hunter has also slept with Monty. What he didn’t know at the time was that she’d been hired to kill him and tried to slice his throat mid-fuck. He let her go with a warning that if he ever saw her again, she’d regret it. Apparently, she’d cackled as she’d strutted away.
“Why do you care?”
He pauses. “She may or may not have spent the night a few months back.”
“Jesus, Hunter, the woman tried to cut your jugular while you were balls deep, and you went back?”
“She’s charming! It’s the accent,” he says. “I learned my lesson, though. She stole my fucking Lamborghini while I was sleeping.”
Despite the situation, I snort a laugh. That explains her borrowed car.
I’ve finally reached Ella’s floor, and the conversation combined with the walk has cooled me off somewhat.
“Where are you?” Hunter asks.
“Heading to Ella’s.”
“Want my advice? Leave. Come home. Bring her with you if you have to, but drop this job and get the fuck out of there.”
I pause in the hallway. In all the years I’ve been doing this, never once has Hunter told me to leave. He got me into this world, into the agency before he took it over, and taught me everything I know. Bailing on a job was never, ever an option.
“You’re serious?”
Hunter sighs. “I can’t protect you out there, kid. And I can’t fucking lose you or Gable. Come home. Come home before it’s too late.”