Chapter 2
Sometimes, the safest thing to do was focus on rage.
Anger was easy. It narrowed situations down to their core, batted extraneous options out of the way like so much fluff, and rendered decision-making simple. A or B, black or white, gun to the head or knife to the heart. Simple.
Only August couldn’t exactly hold a gun to Ricardo’s head or a knife to his chest, because that would definitely be a sign that their marriage was deteriorating even faster than he thought.
But where to put the anger? Where to put the need to rip and rend and hurt?
Where to put the inexplicably brutal pain of hearing “I’m bored” from the man he loved more than life itself?
That kind of anger needed an outlet, and thank whatever gods used to exist on this island for providing him with one.
August dressed briskly, ignoring the putterings and mutterings coming from behind him.
Ricardo might be content to walk into a potential interrogation in nothing but basketball shorts and an FC Barcelona T-shirt, but August preferred to armor up—mostly figuratively, but if he also shrugged on a jacket made from a very particular type of cloth by his favorite Canadian bespoke suit tailor, that was his business.
John Wick, eat your heart out.
Lotus silk tie, Cartier watch that Ricardo had picked out for him last year, handmade leather shoes with custom inserts to cushion his feet as much as possible…
and nothing but silence from his husband.
August attached his cufflinks with quick, irritated motions, bothered beyond measure that Ricardo wasn’t complaining yet.
On any normal day, Ricardo would be calling August out for getting all dolled up when they weren’t even leaving their property.
“What’s the point?” he would gripe, and then August would say, “To give you something nice to look at, of course,” and then Ricardo would say, “I like to look at you naked, get back in the bed,” and then…
But it wasn’t a normal day. Ricardo was spooked and trying not to start a fight, and August was furious and trying not to continue one, and frankly he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this uncomfortable with his partner. His husband.
His husband who was bored with him.
That’s not what he said, August had to remind himself as he pulled a comb through his hair, taming the worst of his wayward locks. Ricardo said he was bored with their lifestyle, but that didn’t mean he was unhappy with August.
Just that he was restless enough to reach out to Heidi, his former handler, about jobs, like either of them ever needed to work again, and—fuck it, this was exactly what he’d done to Eve, wasn’t it?
He’d lied to his ex-wife about his work to the point that she thought he was cheating on her.
She’d asked for a divorce and he’d granted it, even though he still loved her, because he wasn’t willing to be honest with her.
They wanted different sorts of lives, and it simply hadn’t worked out in the end.
August set the comb down on the shelf with a sharp snap.
He would be damned, absolutely one hundred percent damned to Hell itself, red-hot pokers and Catherine wheels and every sort of torture imaginable along for the ride, before he let Ricardo walk away from him.
From them, from the life they’d built together.
He just wasn’t sure how to express that without getting bloody about it yet.
“August?” Ricardo finally spoke up behind him, sounding cautious. Cautious! As if he had a right to sound cautious, like August needed special handling when Ricardo was the one who—
All right, maybe he had a point.
“You can’t rush perfection,” he said, doing his best to keep his voice level as he perused the selection of firearms next to his pocket squares.
It seemed like something small and sleek was called for, especially given that the odds of finding whoever had infiltrated their defenses to be in good health were low. Exceedingly so, in fact.
“I can handle this myself, if you’d rather stay here.”
Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?!
“No need,” he said, grabbing his pretty little Beretta 21A and checking it over before pocketing it.
A gun this small could live in even the tightest pair of pants, and what it lacked in stopping power was made up for with accuracy.
They might have retired, but that didn’t mean August slacked off when it came to range time.
He’d learned to compensate for a hell of a lot of injuries over the years, and he wasn’t about to lose his hard-earned form now.
He added a few subtle, elegant knives to the ensemble, then turned and walked out of the closet at a brisk pace, forcing Ricardo to keep up.
His husband was, as expected, dressed like a fanatic Blaugrana in red and blue, but he held a customized Sig-Sauer MPX submachine gun in a comfortable two-handed grip.
The nerve of him. “Worried about an invasion?” August asked as he headed for the elevator that would take them downstairs into the Labyrinth.
“You have your preferences, I have mine.”
Yes, and perhaps they didn’t align as perfectly as August had once thought.
Or maybe they do, and you just don’t want to admit that he might be right.
No, nuh-uh, nope, the voice of reason had no place in his brain right now.
August wasn’t done being mad about this.
He resisted the urge to shift on his feet as he pressed the button for the elevator.
The transition from the soft surfaces in their bedroom to the marble hallways was always rough; maybe he ought to give in and resurface the damn things like Ricardo had wanted in the first place.
Hmph. Home improvements could wait. First, they had an intruder to find.
One of the best things about moving to Malta, in August’s opinion, was getting to build something for themselves from scratch.
No HOA to appease, few zoning requirements to worry about, just taking their little slice of paradise and turning it into the castle he’d always secretly dreamed of living in, complete with moat and labyrinth.
Fine, maybe the moat was only half full at high tide, and maybe the labyrinth was less of a home to monsters and more of a home to a series of ugly traps that got more lethal the deeper someone got, but that was close enough for August.
The fun thing about the labyrinth was that it appeared to be the easy way to get into the house.
Everything aboveground was one step back from a bunker, from visible turrets packing heat to specially designed windows impenetrable to not only bullets but half a dozen surveillance techniques.
There was no outdoor tennis court, no open-air pool for lounging by, no topiary garden where kids could play hide and seek.
Just the castle, large and imposing, and the rocky grounds around it leading to a beach in one direction and a set of ruins in the other.
They weren’t allowed to fuck with the ruins, and August hadn’t.
He hadn’t! He’d merely made it appear like he’d fucked with them, like he’d linked a natural tunnel from the millennium-old temple complex to a back way in and out of their place.
It wasn’t his fault that people didn’t dig a little deeper and figure out that no, that tunnel system was all theirs, and thanks to the beauty of modern technology they could trap, knock out, and electrocute someone in the same hundred-foot stretch of winding tunnel depending on how deep they’d penetrated.
Exactly two people had tried to infiltrate their place over the past few years, but both had gotten stopped in the trap zone, one by a simple metal grate and another by a pit trap. No one had gotten as far as being gassed unconscious.
And yet this fellow…
“Damn.” August stared at the scene on the security camera at the base of the elevator. That guy was dead as hell. He was so dead he was still smoking, which wasn’t supposed to happen at this voltage. “Maybe I need to turn the power down.”
“He was determined,” Ricardo said from where he was reviewing the man’s progress past the tunnel entrance. He froze a few of the scenes for August to catch up with. “And he knew what he was heading into.”
So he did. The man had deftly avoided both the initial traps and had a mask on to take care of the gas exposure.
He’d known which way to turn to head toward the real route to the house, too, not a given when August had doubled down on the term “labyrinth.” He’d made it all the way to the near-invisible tripwires that triggered the low-level electric shocks, which he’d evaded, son of a bitch, and then…
Well, he hadn’t evaded the laser tripwires. Watching the man take a pair of high-powered taser bolts to the neck and convulse until his body gave up was satisfying but worrying. He shouldn’t have made it that far in. “Do you think someone talked to our architects?”
“Even if they found one, we had five of them,” Ricardo said. “And none of them knew the others.”
“Hmm. Bribed the construction crew?”
“Again, we used three, and this last intersection we built ourselves, remember?”
Oh, August remembered. It had been hellish, the sort of work he loathed, but by the end of it they’d had a lovely, secure house all to themselves, so it had been worth it.
But maybe it wasn’t. “We need to figure out who this person is.” And whether he’d brought backup.
“I’ll handle it.”
August glared at Ricardo. “The hell you’ll handle it on your own.”
“The hell I’m going to let you drag a body out of the tunnel when you’ve been on your feet for most of the day,” Ricardo snapped right back. “You go look for his car, I’ll take care of him. Unless you want a local to find his car and probably get themselves blown up trying to open it?”
God, he hated it when Ricardo had a point. “Fine.” He turned on his heel and stalked back over to the elevator, smashing the button so hard it made his finger hurt.
“Take the Land Rover.”
“Whatever.” Obviously he was going to take the Land Rover; it was the only one that had run-flat tires on. Jesus, did Ricardo think he’d gotten stupid since they’d stopped working as hitmen?
Fuck that.
August would be lying if he said that having the space for as many cars as he wanted wasn’t fun. That they only owned five was entirely down to Ricardo’s parsimonious sensibilities.
“Where are you even going to drive them all on Malta?” he’d asked more than once, and that was a good point.
Of the five they owned, though, the Land Rover was the most practical for work situations like this one.
It could handle the terrain, its computer was connected to the house’s security system so August didn’t have to fuss with his phone while he was driving, and it could survive being shot at with a rocket launcher—they’d tested it. What more could a man need?
Checking for the would-be sneak’s car was a rote sort of errand. There was just one place for miles it could be, and so August had plenty of time to stew about the rest of the afternoon while he drove out to the ruins.
So, his husband was bored. His husband was bored and Heidi knew about it, and damn her, she’d lean on that if she thought she could tempt him out of retirement.
Ricardo had brought her huge commissions in his heyday, and August knew she’d been against the very idea of him taking himself out of the game.
But Heidi alone wouldn’t be enough to draw him back. Ricardo might be having a mid-life crisis, but he wouldn’t go off and take a job without telling August about it.
He wouldn’t.
Right? He totally wouldn’t make an excuse to go see his family in Barcelona while telling August to host his sister at the house for a while and actually set himself up instead in a Tokyo skyscraper with a target in his sights a quarter of a mile away.
He wouldn’t fuck up his sleep schedule by calling August from a different time zone at a time when August wouldn’t suspect anything, then stalk his target until the perfect shot opened up.
He wouldn’t overlook some crucial detail that he would have seen if he’d been better rested and end up getting cornered on a high-speed train and have to shoot his way out of the compartment and jump out of a window, hoping against hope that he survived the landing.
No, August never obsessed about these sorts of scenarios late at night while staring at his sleeping husband’s face, why?
His phone buzzed. August blinked and looked down at it.
Ricardo
Anything?
Shit, he was at the ruins already? He’d made the short drive in a total fugue state.
That…wasn’t great. August cast his eyes around the ancient temple complex, a little surprised the nearby parking lot was empty today.
Admittedly, these weren’t the flashiest temples out there, having been badly excavated by mainland Europeans back in the mid-1800s, but they were a regular stop for tourists.
Not today, it seemed. The recent rains must have scared any takers off.
No.
Then he had an accomplice.
“Duh,” August muttered, but he refrained from texting as much. Obviously someone else must have moved the car the man had come with; the coastline was too rugged here for a beach landing, unless their would-be intruder was really into rock climbing.
I’m heading back.
He got a thumbs-up emoji, which normally would make him smile because it was such an elder millennial move, but right now August wasn’t in the mood. He stared at the phone, then out at the stormy skyline ahead of him, and considered the potential paths ahead of them.
Malta in the winter wasn’t their favorite place to be, if only because it was wetter than the rest of the year. He and Ricardo had made it a point these last few years to travel when it got rainy and miserable here. It wouldn’t be strange for them to take a trip.
Possibly to the States, shitty as it was there right now.
Possibly to check in with Heidi and see if there was anything to the idea that someone was creeping up on their records on . Which seemed impossible, quite frankly, but…
Fine. Fine. August pulled up the website and checked the rankings. There was Ricardo at the top, which he wasn’t sore about, shut up, no, he totally wasn’t. There was August, cushy right below him, his reviews full of the flair his work merited. And there…
The NightRaven? He snorted. What a pretentious shit of a name, the sort of thing a pretentious shit of a person would come up with. Active for six months, that was all, and yet—
Damn. The NightRaven had flown up the rankings fast.
“Amazing, five stars, I wish he could kill my husband again.”
“So professional and willing to work with me on every aspect of the setup. Highly recommended.”
“If you’re looking for the best, look no further.”
The best? The best? Fuck that.
Maybe…just maybe…Ricardo had the right idea. Maybe they should dust off their former lives and come back for one more hit. One hit to rule them all. Something fabulous and flattering and incredibly highly paid, before swanning back into retirement with the itch thoroughly scratched.
Hell. It might even be fun.