Chapter Two Blue
Chapter Two
Blue
I never visit the same establishment more than once if I can help it, and most definitely not two nights in a row. My profession—scratch
that—my old profession of hired killer makes me wary of patterns and predictability.
But I’m retired now. I’m a new man. Or so I keep telling myself.
The truth is, I wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for the phone call. Tommy Vance, low-level information broker with a
talent for finding people who don’t want to be found. Five years of searching, five years of dead ends and false leads, and
suddenly he claims he’s got a lead on Sara Mitchell.
“White Note cabaret,” he’d said. “Meet me there tomorrow night. I think I found your girl.”
Your girl. As if she belongs to me. As if I have any right to her after what happened to Peter.
The smoke in this place is thicker tonight, clinging to everything like guilt. Every shadow in the corner could be hiding
threats, every patron could be a Crow who followed me here. Old habits. They die harder than the people I used to kill.
I scan the dimly lit bar, my old instincts kicking in despite my best efforts to quell them. The bartender is the same as
last night. He catches my eye and gives a slight nod of recognition. Damn. So much for anonymity, but it was important for
me to come to the bar last night to scope it out before this meeting. I like knowing what I’m walking into. In my line of
work, surprises equal death.
I sidle up to the bar, trying to appear nonchalant. “Whiskey, neat,” I mutter, avoiding eye contact with the bartender. He
slides the drink over without a word, but I can feel his gaze lingering. Taking a sip, enjoying the fire liquid as it sizzles
down my throat, I check my watch for the tenth time in as many minutes. Where the hell is Tommy?
Peter’s dying message plays in my head on repeat: “Blue, they found me. If something happens, promise me you’ll find Sara. Keep her safe. She’s all I have left, and she’s perfect.
She deserves better than this world I pulled her into.”
I’d been three whiskeys deep in some dive bar, drowning in my own demons after a job gone sideways, when his call came through.
Let it ring. Figured Peter could wait an hour while I finished feeling sorry for myself.
By the time I called back, Peter Mitchell was dead.
The man who was trying to save my soul, and I couldn’t even answer his fucking call.
We were opposites in every way that mattered. He believed in second chances, I believed in permanent solutions. He saw the
good in people, I saw the targets they painted on themselves. But somehow we’d ended up walking the same dark circles, two
men from different worlds trying to survive in a business that didn’t have room for conscience.
Peter was the light trying to pull me out of the darkness. I was the shadow that followed him, cleaning up the messes his
decency couldn’t handle.
Peter and I met fifteen years before on a job in Prague. I was supposed to eliminate a witness. Some college kid who’d seen
too much. Peter took one look at the boy, barely eighteen and shaking like a leaf, and stepped between us.
“There’s another way,” he’d said, calm as death. “There’s always another way if you want it badly enough.”
He was right. We made the kid disappear instead. New identity, new life, clean slate. Peter paid for it out of his own pocket.
Never asked for anything in return except a promise that I’d think twice before my next kill.
That one conversation changed everything. Peter saw something in me that I’d never seen in myself—the possibility of redemption.
He was the one who convinced me to walk away, to try building something instead of just destroying.
“You’ve got enough blood on your hands for ten lifetimes, Blue,” he’d said the last time we spoke in person, about a week
before he died. “Maybe it’s time to find out what those hands can create instead.”
Peter believed in second chances the way other people believe in gravity. With absolute, unshakeable faith. He was probably the only decent man I’ve ever known.
And I failed him when it mattered most.
The singer finishes her set, and the sparse applause dies down. As she slinks off stage, I catch her eye. She winks, a coy
smile playing on her crimson lips. I raise my glass in a silent toast. Oh yeah, there’s going to be a repeat of last night.
No doubt about it.
Her Amy Winehouse meets Wednesday Adams vibe is everything I ever craved. She’s darkness wrapped in delicate silk, with just
enough edge to keep me on my toes. And in my line of work, former line of work, I remind myself, staying on your toes is a matter of life and death.
Everything about the way she looks is familiar, yet dangerously new. Her dark hair cascades in waves, framing a face that
could launch a thousand ships—or sink them, depending on her mood.
Cliché? Fuck yes, it is. But everything about her pulls that kind of sap from me.
I remember how she tasted last night. It was like licking the lining of a whiskey bottle filled with honey—a bizarre mix of
sweet and sin that shouldn’t work but somehow does.
A hand claps down on my shoulder and I nearly reach for the blade I no longer carry before recognizing Tommy Vance’s nasally
voice.
“Blue. You look like shit.”
I turn to face him. Rat-faced, twitchy, with the kind of nervous energy that comes from a lifetime of selling secrets to killers.
“You said you had something on Sara Mitchell.”
Tommy orders a beer, takes his sweet time settling onto the barstool. The little shit’s enjoying this. “Maybe I do. Depends
how much you’re willing to pay for maybes.”
“Cut the games, Tommy. What do you have?”
“Girl matching her description. Dyed her hair black, used to be lighter according to my sources. Early twenties, showed up
in the city about five years ago with nothing but a badly forged ID and a story about being from Seattle.” He takes a swig
of his beer, watching me over the rim. “Been singing in clubs around the city, keeping her head down, blending in with the
crowds.”
My pulse quickens despite my efforts to stay calm. “Where is she?”
Tommy’s grin widens. “That’s the beautiful part. She’s been right under your nose this whole time.”
He nods toward the stage, where the singer is adjusting her microphone for the next set. “Currently going by Saylor Mitchell.
Stage name or something. Been here almost every night for the past two years, singing her little heart out.”
The whiskey glass slips from my numb fingers, exploding against the bar in a shower of crystal and amber liquid. The crash
cuts through the ambient noise like a gunshot, and half the bar turns to stare.
No.
No, this isn’t possible.
But even as my mind rejects it, the pieces slam together with brutal clarity. The familiar way she tilts her head when she’s
thinking, exactly like Peter used to do when he was working out a problem. The stubborn set of her jaw, the way she sings
like she’s pouring her soul out through her voice, the same way Peter hummed old jazz standards while he worked.
Oh fuuuuuuck . . . I didn’t just go down on a stranger last night.
Holy shit.
I had my mouth on Peter’s daughter. His unsuspecting, perfect, angelic daughter! Made her come with my tongue while she moaned
my name in that dressing room.
Peter always said he’d put a bullet in any man who touched his little girl inappropriately. If he wasn’t six feet under, I’d
be a dead man.
What the fuck did I just do?
As if I didn’t already carry enough guilt about Peter, now I’ve violated his daughter. The girl I swore to protect. The innocent
he died trying to save.
My stomach lurches, and for a moment I think I might vomit right here at the bar.
The weight of what I’ve done crashes over me—not just what happened between us, but the complete and utter failure of everything I promised Peter.
She’s been here for two years. Two years I could have been watching over her, keeping her safe, honoring my debt to the only man who ever believed I could be better.
Instead, I’ve been drowning in my own self-pity while Peter’s daughter sang in dive bars, alone and unprotected.
“Jesus,” Tommy breathes, apparently reading my expression. “You know her.”
I can’t answer. Can’t do anything but stare at her as she starts her next song. Her voice carries across the smoky room, raw
and beautiful and heartbreaking, and I hear Peter in every note. He used to sing to her when she was little; I remember him
telling me that once, years ago. How she’d fall asleep to his old blues records.
This girl learned music from him. Learned to find beauty in dark places the way he did.
The way I never could.
“I need to go,” I manage, my voice coming out rougher than sandpaper.
“Hey, what about my payment?”
I pull out my wallet and drop a thick roll of bills on the bar without counting. “This conversation never happened. And Tommy?”
I lean closer, close enough that he can probably smell the whiskey and regret on my breath. “If anyone else comes asking about
Sara Mitchell, anyone, you’ve never heard the name. Are we clear?”
He nods so fast his head might fall off.
But even as I threaten him, the cold reality settles in my chest like a stone. If Tommy fucking Vance can find her, so can
the Crow. It’s only a matter of time before they put the pieces together, before they realize the girl they’ve been hunting
is singing every night in a Greenwich Village jazz club.
She’s not safe here. Hell, she’s not safe anywhere, but especially not out in the open like this.
I leave him at the bar and push through the crowd toward the exit, but I can’t stop myself from looking back. She’s still
singing, still lost in the music, and she has no idea that the man she let put his mouth on her last night is the same man
who failed to save her father.
In the smoky light of the club, she’s achingly beautiful.
Tonight she’s wearing a deep emerald dress that hugs her curves, different from the scarlet sequined number from last night but equally stunning.
Her dark hair falls in waves past her shoulders, framing a face that’s all sharp cheekbones and soft lips.
She’s smaller than I remembered, probably no more than five-foot-four in those heels, but she owns that stage like she’s ten feet tall.
There’s something ethereal about the way she moves, graceful but with an edge that speaks to the darkness she’s been carrying.
Peter’s eyes, I realize with a jolt. She has Peter’s dark, intelligent eyes, but where his held warmth and humor, hers burn
with barely contained fury. The same stubborn chin, the same way of tilting her head when she’s lost in thought. But everything
else about her is uniquely Sara—the defiant set of her shoulders, the way she transforms pain into art with her voice.
She’s twenty-three years old and more beautiful than any woman has a right to be, especially one who’s been missing since
she was barely eighteen.
Peter’s little girl, all grown up and hiding in plain sight. The guilt threatens to choke me.
She has no idea who I really am. The same man who’s been hunting her for five years.
The same man who now has to figure out how to keep her alive while fighting the urge to finish what we started in that dressing
room.
If I can’t protect her this time, she’ll be my failure all over again.