Chapter 24
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Kieran
It was impossible.
Even finding him with a gun in his hand and threats falling off his kissable lips didn’t make me believe what I’d just learned.
Honestly, it only made it harder to wrap my head around. He was too adorable. Too innocent. He was holding the gun backward for fuck’s sake.
How was I supposed to reconcile the file folder filled with the facts written in black and white with the man in front of me who was the very definition of gray?
How had I fallen so fast—so hard—in such a short amount of time? How had my completely organized and clean-cut world become so chaotic?
I knew I had to tell him everything, but I was loath to do it.
Not because I thought he couldn’t handle it.
Even though every fiber in my being wanted to protect him, I understood my little hazard was not weak.
I was thankful for it. There was no place for weakness in this life, and I had no intention of living any more of it without him.
But I coveted his innocence. Incorruptible in a world overflowing with corruption. How guileless those blue and green eyes remained.
What if this was his downfall? What if I was his downfall? What if the answers I promised to give turned him from a stammering innocent into a dissimulating skeptic?
My kill count was high, but butchering that part of him was something I could not live with.
“Why are you so smelly?”
The question snapped me out of the downward spiral, and I glanced down at the man in my arms. His entire body moved with an exaggerated sniff, and as he exhaled, he shifted back, nose wrinkled.
His chin tipped up, but before our eyes could collide, his hand caught on the gun stuffed into the waistband at my back.
He froze, eyes darting up then away. I stepped back, but it was already too late. Haz yanked the gun from beneath my jacket and stared at it filling his palm.
“Oh my God! Did you kill someone?” he demanded. Leaning in, he sniffed me again, his eyes blowing wide. “Is that stinky smell death?”
I snatched the gun from him, irritated that it looked so large in his slight grip, and put it away with my other weapons before closing the door. “You can barely walk, but you can find a secret room of guns,” I muttered, completely annoyed.
I already had one shitty thing to tell him. Now I had two.
“It was obvious,” he stated.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Obvious, my ass.”
“Well, your ass is obviously nice.”
“Hazard,” I barked. How dare he try and distract me from his snooping with compliments to my ass?
An ass he likes.
“The wallpaper was peeling up,” he said, pointing to a spot near the floor. “It was totally sus. A man like you would never put up with such imperfection.”
Observant little shit.
“I’m taking a shower,” I declared, brushing past him to head toward the primary bathroom.
“But I want answers,” he hollered, scrambling after me. “Ahh!” The sound was breathless and followed by a scuffle and then a thump.
I spun back to find Haz in a heap in the center of the hall, the carpet runner flipped up on one side.
“Where did you even get this carpet, ?” he said, sitting up with a grimace. “I’ve tripped on it like five hundred times. It’s giving Final Destination vibes.”
He would like that movie. “Where did you get your feet, ?” I countered even as I lifted him into my arms.
“You smell so bad it’s making my eyes water,” he complained, wrapping his arms around my neck.
My eyebrows rose. “Would you care to walk?”
“Of course not. How about you answer a question while you carry me?”
“No.”
“Where did you go?” he asked anyway.
I didn’t answer.
“What’s your real job?” he asked, clearly not expecting a reply because he followed it up with, “Oh! Why do you have a murder locker in your laundry room?”
My footsteps stuttered. Gazing down at him, I said, “A murder locker?”
He shrugged. “Well, what do you call it?”
“An at-home armory.”
“John Wick would call it a murder locker.”
Imagine my horror when this sweet doll face told me his favorite movie was about a violent hitman. A completely far-fetched and absurd hitman.
“John Wick is stupid.”
Haz gasped as if I’d committed treason. Actually, I did once, and no one was this appalled. Dramatic.
“He killed five people with a pencil.” He sniffed. “He doesn’t even need a murder locker.”
Stalking into the bathroom, I set Haz on the marble countertop between the sinks and reached over to turn on a light. Glowering, I turned back. “It was two.”
“Two?”
“That hack of a hitman only killed two people with a pencil.”
“It was five!”
“I suffered through that movie with you just yesterday. It was two.” Frankly, I didn’t see what the big deal was with the pencil. I once killed a man with a paperclip, but you don’t see me bragging.
“Two on screen. But they reference how he killed three others in a bar off screen.” He defended that long-haired, walking bag of unresolved trauma.
It was good that he always looked dressed for a funeral because, if I met him, I’d send him to his.
“It doesn’t count.” I refused.
“Why?”
“Because I said so,” I snapped, stepping away to peel off my ruined clothing.
“Are you jealous?”
“Of that fictional grudge holder? No.”
“Because I like him.”
My pants hit the floor with a smack, and I reached into the shower to turn on the water. Haz gasped, the sound so loud I heard it over the falling water.
I glanced back just as he catapulted himself off the counter.
“Watch your knee,” I groused.
He didn’t listen—did he ever?—and rushed over, his hands cool against the skin of my back as he pushed me around. “What happened to you?” he demanded, his fingers gently brushing against my side.
I looked down at the large bruise, dismissing it almost immediately. “It’s fine.”
“Are you kidding? It’s bigger than my entire hand.”
“Your hands are small,” I retorted, but it was half-hearted because those small hands formed a small frame for the discolored section while he leaned in to gently kiss it.
The breath in my lungs withered like plants denied of sun, while my brain dropped offline like a radio unplugged.
For long moments, there was nothing but his lips and the solace they offered to a wound I would have ignored as if it weren’t there.
Comfort was not for men forged in war and kept alive because they became death.
I guess I could understand now because killing requires a lack of empathy and a disinterest in pain.
But his eyes saw. His heart wept. For the first time, the merciless was offered mercy, something else I wholly believed had ceased to exist.
A swell of powerful emotion crashed over me, and I was momentarily blinded.
The freefall left me grappling for something solid, and my fingers anchored in the thickness of his hair.
The soft sound he made reverberated against my flesh and filled the emptiness of my mind.
My fingers turned rough and greedy, a refusal to let this moment become part of my past.
Even though he couldn’t possibly, Hazard acted as if he understood and pressed another kiss to the bruise, feathering his lips over the area as if the injury hurt him more than me.
Scratching against his scalp, I held his face against me, relishing how fast someone so empty could suddenly be so full.
“What happened?” Hazard whispered. “Who hurt you?”
The wall I’d built around myself, the wall that grew thicker with every passing year, suddenly crumbled, and I discovered everything I thought had perished had really been concealed.
The young man I’d once been managed to hide himself from the man I was today.
And so here I stood, two men in a single body.
The only thing they had left in common was unwavering devotion to the boy who seemed to like us both.
No. He can’t like you if he doesn’t know you.
“I’m a hitman,” I croaked, the weakness in my tone a fucking abomination. Clearing my throat, I forced my hands to untangle from his mop of hair. “I’m a hitman.” This time it was unapologetic and matter-of-fact.
Hazard drew back, one blue and one green eye steady on my face.
Is that how he did it? Two different eyes for the two different people within me? The thought made me angry because it suggested I would share. There would be no sharing. The idealistic man I once was didn’t need Hazard the way I did. I would not share. Not even with myself.
“W-what?”
My tongue slid over my teeth. The water falling in the shower behind us slowly dampened the air with steam. “If you’re going to have a favorite hitman, it’s going to be me.”
A little bit of relief filled his eyes, and he smiled. “You can’t become a hitman because I said I like John Wick.”
I shook my head. “I lied before because I’m not supposed to tell anyone, for obvious reasons. I’ve been a hitman for over ten years. I kill for a living. Before we met, I’d been out of the country for nearly a month on a job.”
“A job where you killed someone,” he repeated as though he were trying to understand.
“Yes.”
“And was it a successful trip?”
“Yes.”
I watched his face, but it gave away nothing. The longer it stayed emotionless, the more panic built inside me. Panic was foreign to me because, for panic to exist, you must first give a damn.
If it hadn’t been clear before, it was crystal now.
I gave a damn about Hazard. I gave a lot of damns.
The urge to pull him close, to demand he kiss my bruise and look at me with his heart in his eyes, was so strong it nearly felt like anger.
But I couldn’t demand he not be changed by this.
I could no more run from the truth than he could his DNA.
His head tipped to the side as he watched me. “Did you leave tonight for a job?”
At my side, my hand balled into a fist. “Tonight wasn’t a job. Tonight was personal.”
“Personal required a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill someone tonight, Kieran?”