2. Rowan
TWO
ROWAN
Twenty-four hours.
Just twenty-four hours of downtime before we were being called in to accept another hit contract.
This one was special, though. Or at least that’s what St. Clair told me on the phone when she called at eight in the fucking morning to wake me up.
Now, I was sitting in her office, a dossier in my hands, open to a picture of a woman that was blurry at best. Hell, I’d seen CCTV footage from the nineties that was clearer.
My eyes skimmed the file, listing off the details on the target. "Ms. Hannah Flagg. Late twenties, works in a mechanic shop. No known family, lives on the seedier side of the Wharf District in a second-story apartment that charges— holy shit, landlords really charge these prices for a studio? Fuck me, I’m glad I don’t rent from public homeowners."
Across the desk, St. Clair laughed at my outburst. "Yes, rent here is reasonable, at least. And your landlord, I’d like to think, is a reasonable woman."
"Yeah," I agreed, mumbling as I read into her more thorough details in the folder of intel. "Not much on her, is there?"
Lilly shrugged. "All I know is that she’s living under an assumed name, and the client brought us evidence of her involvement on a low scale. On their side, everything looks like it’s on the up and up."
I quirked a brow at her tone. "I sense there’s a but in there somewhere."
Her head tilted, giving her away. "They offered a whole lotta money to have her taken out, and the time frame is short on this one. You’ve got two weeks. He wants her dead by then, with a lock of hair for proof."
Lilly St. Clair rarely, if ever, got a hinky feeling about a case. When she did, it was usually justified, and I learned long ago to heed her warnings. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to be careful.."
The folder made a funny sound when I snapped it shut, rising to shake her hand and accept the contract. "You know I’m thorough."
Her hand slipped into mine for the cursory rattle we all performed when accepting a job. "I know. Your reputation precedes you. I’m not surprised at all that your team was hand-picked for this contract."
I stopped in my tracks as I was turning around, throwing a glance back at her over my shoulder. "Hand-picked, you say?"
She nodded once, the frown on her face deepening. "Yeah. The client said he’d heard of your rep. Said he wanted my best and sharpest crew on the job." Her lips pursed, and she reminded me of a woman I hadn’t seen in years, who used to do that same thing when looking down the barrel at something she didn’t particularly like. Miss Caroline Daniels, my late stepmother. She used to have that same moue of disgust. It felt like a shock of cold water to see it on the lips of my now-boss.
It stuck with me as I walked out of her office and down the hall to our home.
Ward C.
The whole block of rooms had been repurposed on one side of the hall to connect to each other like some mockery of a singlewide trailer. There was a main room—room seven—that served as a sort of commons area for us. A living room, really. On the left of that was the kitchen and eating area, where they’d knocked down a wall to make it an open floor plan. Beyond that was a larger room that’d been split into two. Those were Angel and Nash’s rooms. There was a bathroom beyond those that connected to both rooms. And on the other side of the living room was our workroom, where we set up contracts, the wall reminiscent of that wild gif with string and push pins along the wall in a million and one directions, with a half-crazed dude pulling his hair out over the shit maze of it all, screaming it’s all connected or some shit. On the other side of that was my room, which had a personal en suite bathroom.
We didn’t really entertain here. There was no need to have a public bathroom. No need for a guest room, no cause for anything a typical household would have. We were far from an average family. But those of us in the Guild were expected to stay in the Guild every day, to protect the city from the wilder members, or some shit like that. It was how Lilly kept her finger on the pulse of this place. All her killers under one roof.
It was far from perfect, but the system worked for her. Who was I to argue it? And we were across the hall from the Neons, a good group, though they were a bit rowdy for my taste.
I flopped on our sectional sofa and kicked off my shoes, trying to resist the urge to stand back up and put them away. I didn’t need to; they wouldn’t bother the others. Getting so frustrated and irate over a pair of shoes on the floor was irrational. But the longer I tried to look anywhere but at those shoes, the more the anxiety over an unorganized house gnawed at me like a rabid mole rat.
I tapped my fingers on the arm of the couch, listening to the sound of Angel moving around in the kitchen, probably prepping for breakfast, or Nash thrashing around in his room, likely in the throes of a night terror again.
After two minutes of this annoying cacophony of sounds, I sighed, stood up, and marched my shoes over to the organization rack, grunting as I bent over to lay them in their cubby.
Completing this banal task filled me with a sense of relief. In the kitchen, Angel chuckled. I knew it was at me—it was always at me.
"You made it two and a half minutes, Ro. That’s a record for you." His stupid, quiet clap only served to irritate me further. "Good job, pal."
"Stuff it." I lifted the dossier from the coffee table and tossed it on the counter beside him. "We’ve got a new job. A special request for our team to handle it."
Nash stumbled out of his room with one hand around a bottleneck, the glass nearly empty, from the looks of it. His hair was askew, his forced grin a little lopsided as he glared in our direction.
"Up early, for you, Nash," Angel snapped, taking offense at the bottle in his hands. Nash had taken to drinking pretty heavily after the disfiguration, and I didn’t have the heart to take it away from him. "What’s the matter? Bottle too empty?"
"Fuck off," Nash snapped back, grumbling in the general direction of our brother as he slammed the bottle on the counter and hunched himself over the sink. "I’m an adult. I’ll do what I want. If that means drinking until I black out, then I dare you to try and stop me."
I rolled my eyes at his stupid, childish tantrum. "You need to chill out. It’s not even ten in the morning."
Nash’s gaze turned to me, confusion warring with irritation on his features. "Why the hell are you up? I know damn well you’re not usually a morning person."
"New contract. We’ve been requested for this one." Waving the dossier in the air, I stepped in his direction, offering it like an olive branch. "Take a look."
Angel leaned over his shoulder to read it through, his eyes widening almost comically. "Why would anyone request us for this kind of job?"
I shrugged, knowing damn well the unasked question in his words. "Client knows who we are and the type of work we do. I suppose that’s a good enough reason as any."
"That doesn’t make me want to do it more," he quipped, cracking an egg into a nearby bowl. "But you’re the boss. If you say we take it, we take it."
He hummed to himself, back to making breakfast as Nash plopped down sideways in the armchair. "Sounds to me like a fun time. Been awhile since I got to carve up a pretty girl."
He palmed the heel of his boot, where I knew he stashed his favorite blade. Sojourn, he called her. Fucking whacko named his blades. Who names a weapon?
My stomach turned at the thought of him mauling some girl. I worked with him, and damned if I didn’t love my brother, but fuck me, some of his habits really turned my stomach. Slicing up every girl that reminded him of her felt like the biggest injustice ever. But we all healed in different ways, so who was I to tell him how to cope?
Nash took a seat in the nearby armchair, pinching the bridge of his nose with a groan. "Fuck me, I ain’t sober enough for this shit." His eyes rolled sideways, and he glared at me pointedly. "Thought we were gonna get a break before the next gig?"
My shoulders shifted as I crossed my arms, the two of us locked in a standoff. The eldest child and the youngest.
Nash never wanted to be in charge of us. I’d offered the position to him countless times in the past, but he wasn’t one for responsibility, nor was he one for organizing shit. He didn’t like to plan and didn’t have any interest in delegating jobs. He was perfectly content to sit back and let someone else pilot this ship. Angel wasn’t a leader, which left the job to me.
It was a good thing I was born to do this.
Okay, so maybe not born to kill, but I was born to organize my brothers into a semblance of a functional unit. To the outside world, we were the Skeleton Crew, not quite old hats, not quite newbies. Our team was efficient, execution flawless, and we always delivered.
We had a reputation, yeah. And it was pristine.
The sizzle of frying eggs hit my ears just about the same time as the smell assaulted my nostrils, and I grinned as Nash closed his eyes and gagged behind gritted teeth.
"Want some hair of the dog, brother?" I taunted, enjoying the way his skin turned a lovely shade of green a few seconds before he jolted up and made a beeline for his room. "Looks like Nash won’t be joining us for food this morning, Angel."
Our middle brother’s tinkling, melodic laughter was like a symphony as it echoed around the kitchen. "Oh well. Sucks to be him. That just means there’s more for us."
As hungry as I was, I could probably eat a fucking horse.
After breakfast, I slipped into my favorite leather jacket and reached for the handle of the door leading to the rest of the asylum. I tossed a pointed look over my shoulder at Angel, quirked a brow, and marched out into the chaos that was the Guild in the daylight.
The Port Wylde Insane Asylum was home to about ten crews in all, some just two-man squads, a couple that were solo operations. Most were like us, though—three or four guys with a shared past or a shared love of the kill, working in a city that welcomed the most fucked up of her citizens with open arms, trying to make ends meet. Rent was cheap, and if you could stomach our line of work, it was good pay. You got to enjoy a certain level of freedom when you burned the insignia of our Guild in your skin, and many of us were lifers. Hell, the job came with risks, and a lot of guys over the years I’d been here had either fallen in their line of work, let their addiction of choice take them to oblivion, or they broke one of Lilly St. Clair’s house rules.
Lilly was a no-nonsense kind of woman. She didn’t have many rules, but when dealing with a bunch of criminals, there was a particular element of chaos you had to contain in some manner, to keep everything from falling apart. So Lilly did what any den mother would do when managing a rowdy bunch of what amounted to borderline psychos—she made The Rules .
There were only a few, but you were expected to follow them to the letter. She didn’t allow for any sort of leeway or fuck ups. If you broke one, depending on the severity and the consequences, you’d have to pay. And sometimes, the cost was your life.
I’d only seen her off a few guys in our seven-year tenure here for breaking the rules, and all of them deserved it. Angus, a Scot with a nasty limp and a disgusting necrophilia kink, and some jock boy from another crew whose name I never learned were the first to go. Then, two years later, a butch chick named Peanuts thought she could step up and change the rules. She challenged Lilly. And of course, she lost.
Nobody stepped up to Lilly St. Clair if they valued their lives.
Speaking of . . .
I found myself across the ward and on an entirely different floor, staring at Ward A, Room Three. Home of the Rebel Scots—or what was left of them, anyhow. With Angus and Jack gone, their remaining members had banded together and formed a new crew. They didn’t take much work these days, considering they hadn’t worked their kinks out yet. But I wasn’t here to make small talk. A certain someone owed me a favor, and I was here to collect.
My knuckles rapped on the hard surface of the metal door, still stained with the blood of an absent-minded handprint. I didn’t have to wait long before a weary, bedraggled man wearing sunglasses indoors answered the summons.
His fingers tipped the shades down on his nose so he could scan me from top to toe. "Wish I could say it’s a pleasure to see you, but we both know it isn’t." His lips curled into a frown of disapproval as Fergus O’Leary shoved him aside and grinned widely, such a contrast to the moody asshole who’d opened the door.
"Oh." His grin faltered a teensy bit as he looked over his shoulder in the direction of their couch. "Dean, it’s for you. It's the Jamaican jackass from down the hall."
He swung the door open, a blatant invitation, and dared me with his body language to step into their den, unarmed, alone, and willing.
I guess it was a good thing that these fuckers didn’t scare me. I strode in like I owned the place, taking a seat on their sectional like I was one of the team, and this was just another Sunday brunch meeting.
My eyes swung around until they found the man I’d been looking for, hunched over a copy of the daily paper. "Dean."
He didn’t lift his gaze from the sports section. "Rowan."
"I need some intel, and I need it fast. And it just so happens that you owe me."
Now he set his paper down with a folded snap of irritation and glared in my direction. "Are you cashing in?"
I tossed the dossier of our latest job at him, and he caught it in midair. Skimming the contents of the folder, his eyes narrowed. "This isn’t your usual job. What do you need to know?"
I shrugged, leaning back along the cushions of the sofa. "Everything."