Chapter 1
Hunter
“Her.” I point toward the woman in the red dress with brown wavy hair and round brown eyes.
The club lights could fool anyone into thinking her hair is brown, or some dark shade of another color, but not me. I can pick out every woman with this combination of hair and eyes, in any light they sit under. I know how the shade of brown I’m hunting looks in different lights.
She’s flirting with the man seated in front of her at the bar, his back to me. Could be her boyfriend, or some random guy for the night. Hard to tell. Everyone in the club pretends to be too familiar with the people they’ve just met.
Logan reaches her side. She checks him out and gives the same flirty smile to him.
When he speaks, she leans closer, too much for her to pretend it’s because she can’t hear him over the music.
When Logan finishes, she looks toward me.
Her smile falters for a moment, but as her gaze trails down my body, it slides back into place.
She gets up from her stool and comes toward me. The man she was promising the night to turns his head and meets my eyes with a frown, but he can’t hold the contact for more than a second before jerking his gaze away.
Logan always laughs at such situations. He says I have the eyes of a grim reaper, people see their demise the second they look into them.
The woman settles onto the couch beside me. I study her up close. The brown of her eyes is too dark. The hair has the wrong texture, nowhere near the silk my fingers ache to touch. I know what I’m chasing, but I’m getting nowhere.
Logan has tried to set me up with every kind of woman, and no one has managed to pique even my interest, let alone lust or any other emotion.
Lust especially is something too difficult for me.
I don’t feel sexual desire unless I’m dreaming of a faceless woman.
The only time I get hard is while I’m sleeping, because she comes to me in my dreams.
She smiles. “Hey.”
I turn my head away.
Not the right woman.
Never has been.
Only women with brown wavy hair and brown doe eyes draw my interest, but every time they come close, I lose it.
She slides closer and places her hand on my chest. The smell of alcohol mingled with her perfume, and her unwanted touch brings back that familiar nausea. I feel it rising to my throat and push her hand away.
I pick up the glass of my Macallan 25 and gulp the contents down in one go. Cherishing the burn in my throat, I rise.
“He misunderstood you for someone else,” Logan says from the adjacent couch. “I’m sorry for his behavior.” He gets to his feet.
I don’t wait for him to finish his usual speech and leave the club. It has already started to suffocate me. I have a limit to how long I can stay among too many people.
I light my cigarette and wait for Logan to come out. He steps outside and takes the cigarette from me.
“You’re never going to get laid if this keeps up.” He takes a long drag. “She was a really nice girl.”
We walk toward the VIP parking lot where our car is parked.
“I’m sure you got her number.”
And I know she must have given it to him. With his dark blue eyes, curly brown hair, tanned skin, six-foot-four frame, muscular build, and that charming smile, he makes every girl look twice. Unlike me, people have no trouble holding eye contact with him, either.
He chuckles, takes one last drag, then flicks the cigarette onto the wet concrete and crushes it beneath his black shoe.
“Someone has to take care of the beautiful hearts of beautiful women.”
I open the door and slide behind the wheel. He takes the passenger seat.
“To the Piston’s.”
I nod and steer us steadily along the familiar roads of Toronto. It’s our usual route, from our workplace to Hot Spice club to Piston’s roadside food stall to our apartment in Hestin. Everything except Piston’s food—including both of us—belongs to Chris Flisher, son of Declan Flisher.
Logan and I are his weapons. His most precious weapons, as he calls us.
For the past year, we’ve both been working toward one goal, the destruction of four men whom even God can’t touch.
They sit in a place where no one can see them, but they can see everyone.
The man who rules the underworld—Alessio.
His son, Matleon. The man who controls the U.S.
military and the armies of many allied nations—Alexander Bennett.
And his son-in-law, who is also his adopted son—Zloban Bennett.
Zloban killed Declan and took Canada from the Flishers.
Later, his son Charlie tried to kill Zloban but failed, and Matleon killed him for it.
Now Chris wants them dead and to take all of Canada back, which I can now say with confidence is nothing more than wishful thinking.
It’s impossible to reach them, let alone kill them.
There are no loose strings that lead to them, but Chris believes we can do it.
According to him, we’re capable of it. We did great things before we lost our memories in an accident a year ago.
We’re both orphans, raised at the Flisher Orphanage. When we came of age, Declan saw our potential, trained us, and made us what we are today.
Logan and I don’t have any memory of any of this, but we have the knowledge—hacking, breaching the toughest security, killing—it all comes so naturally to us.
There are things we like and things we don’t, for no reason at all.
It was suffocating to live like this at first, but now it’s become a habit.
Living without a soul. I have no doubt that in a few years, if things keep going the way they are, we’ll become just like the robots working for Flisher—no purpose of living and no goal of our own.
I park the car in front of the stall. Fifty-year-old Mrs. Whitaker peeks her head out, smiling at the sight of our car.
We get out and settle onto the small bench with its tiny stools. This stall isn’t for bulky men like us, it’s for college kids. But we like the food here.
One night, six months ago, some local goons were causing havoc here when we saw them on our way home.
I ignored it, as always, but Logan was a knight in a past life, he has a problem with wrong happening to helpless people.
So he made me stop the car. After beating the shit out of those men and giving them a death warning, he helped the Whitaker couple and gave them money.
While he was playing superhero, I sat in the car smoking a cigarette.
The couple gave him two taco rolls out of gratitude. He gave me one even though I hadn’t done anything. We liked them, and from then on, we started eating here.
The couple insisted we eat for free, but of course Logan’s good heart couldn’t accept that, so we pay them twice what we eat.I don’t have a problem with spending money, it’s not like I have anywhere else to spend it. And Flisher pays us enough to afford life’s luxuries.
Mr. Whitaker comes over with two plates of poutine and butter tarts.
“How was your day?” he asks Logan, his weathered face creasing into a grin.
“Fantastic,” Logan answers, flashing at least twenty teeth. “What about you?”
He nods. “Very good, very good. Enjoy the meal.”
“Thanks for the food,” Logan says before digging in.
I’ve already started eating. These pleasantries aren’t for me anyway.
After trying to talk to me a few times, the couple started treating me like I don’t exist. Logan justified my behavior by saying I’m not good with social interactions.
He always does that—justifies my actions, cleans up after me whenever I lose control and create chaos.
He takes the butter tart from my plate and moves it to his. “It’s got nuts.”
I hate nuts. I’m not allergic to them, and they don’t cause indigestion, I just don’t like them.
Whenever I accidentally eat them, I lose my mind.
If not for Logan stopping me, I would have killed many people by now for putting them in my food.
I know it’s not their fault when I don’t specify, but my brain doesn’t care.
Logan’s phone pings. He takes it out, reads the message, then types something and puts the phone back in his cargo pocket.
“We’ve got the entry passes as founders of Rockwell.”
I nod.
“We leave tomorrow.”
A strange tightness grips my chest. I slow my chewing, grinding the food between my molars with more force than necessary. We’ve been working toward this day for a year, but the tightness isn’t from that, and the frustrating part is I don’t know what it’s from.
Tomorrow we leave for the U.S. The day after tomorrow, we enter King Alessio’s house through the party.
Chris handed us this startup—Rockwell—eight months ago.
We made it successful enough that the King, or any other member of that family, would consider investing.
Last month, that happened. We got investment from Matleon.
For the past month, we’ve been working with Matleon’s team, and they’re impressed with us.
Last week we got to talk with him, too. I was just there beside Logan, he did all the talking.
Matleon is smart, really smart. We have to walk on eggshells around him, or he’ll catch us in a blink.