Dark Romance AU (Because Canon Sucks #4)

Chapter 1

Notes:

This might come as a surprise, but I’ve never been a hit man or a whore. All mistakes are my own.

Rowan

Naked and tied to a bed. In a luxury hotel room. On a flower-patterned duvet. This cannot be how I go.

The client seemed okay at first. Badly dressed, but fine. I’m not one to judge over a rumpled suit.

Nervous. Shy.

Not, and I’m no professional, but not fucking psychotic.

“…a sin for a man to lie with another…”

Jesus Christ. Is he serious? I’ve never given in to any shame or guilt about being gay, but I can’t help but flinch at his words.

The man is muttering as he approaches from where he’d been rifling through a duffel bag he dropped by the door. He’s holding some kind of a knife. Or is it a dagger?

Whatever it is, it looks big. And sharp.

“Shit.” I tug at the straps around my wrists again, but they don’t budge. The more I twist and pull, the more I tear at my skin.

They warned me this job could be dangerous. Had a few clients get rough. Never pictured something like this.

The psychopath with the bad comb-over presses an ear to my chest, making me afraid to breathe. He’s still muttering things—to himself, I assume, since I can’t really understand. The word “abomination” floats to me.

My heart tries to pack itself into a tight little ball.

“Look, scientists disproved all those stories about redheads a long time ago, man. I don’t even know any magic spells.” I’m shouting to hear myself over my erratic heartbeat.

If I thought that might break the guy out of his trance, I was so wrong.

I’m wrong a lot, though. This is not my first poor decision, just terrible timing.

When the guy drags the blade across my chest, I think I’m going to be sick. And here I thought nothing could make this situation worse. The cut’s not deep, but a faint red line rises in the knife’s wake.

Then he rises on his knees with the big knife thing clutched in both hands. He’s got it aiming straight down. Straight down. At my heart.

He’s aiming a knife at my fucking heart.

“No. No.” More tugging at the straps. My wrists might be bleeding. I’m afraid to look. “Fuck. Please. I don’t know what you think I did, but—”

A sort of “tch” sound hits my ears. Suddenly, the man slumps forward so that bad comb-over waves at me from the top of his head. His body’s completely still. The weird knife, still clutched in his hand, stabs into the mattress beside me.

“Oh, fuck. Fuck.” I’m trapped underneath the body of a… “Is he really dead?”

“Lucky thing, right?”

“Jesus! What the fuck?” Ignoring the pain in my wrists, I twist frantically again. Searching for the source of the disembodied voice. A smiling face appears over the shoulder of the dead guy.

Platinum hair with smiling gray eyes. Cheekbones as sharp as that goddamn knife. What’s more fucked up? How cheerful he looks, or that he’s holding a gun?

Or that I’m noticing how red and full his lips are, when I’m still underneath a man who tried to kill me. A weird sort of high-pitched giggle escapes my throat.

This is a psychotic break or something. It’s got to be.

“Pro tip, buddy: Never let a stranger tie you up.” He nudges the customer’s fleshy shoulder with the muzzle of… I guess it’s a silencer? I’ve only seen them in movies.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. “Really? Is that a pro tip? No fucking kidding.” I jerk my arms again, wincing at the pain.

“I didn’t let him do anything. He gets me on the bed and starts kissing me with more slobber than my old church’s youth pastor, and next thing I know he’s got these loops tightened around my wrists.

Must’ve set them up before I got here or something. A little help, by the way?”

I don’t care if he’s holding a gun. Right now he’s the only help I’ve got. My phone is out of reach on the bedside table, and God knows how long it would take a hotel employee to find me.

“Right. Fine. Keep your pants on.” He glances down at my decidedly pants-less body and has the nerve to grin even wider. “Well. You know what I mean.”

“Is this funny to you?” It’s difficult to give a man with a gun an intimidating glare when you’re naked and trapped under a dead guy, but damned if I don’t give it my best effort. I’m bigger than him for sure. Which doesn’t mean shit right now.

The blond guy still has a gun. I’ve got raw wrists and a dead body. Oh, and this line of blood on my chest. It’s not bad-bad, but it’s still a knife wound. God knows when I got my last tetanus shot, but I think it was when I fell over a barbed-wire fence in middle school. Is that good or bad?

Blondie shoves the limp pile on top of me, shifting it so the client’s sightless eyes face me. I swallow against a sickening surge in my throat.

“Oh my God.” I’ve never seen anyone dead up close before. There’s a trickle of blood and God knows what else going down kind of behind his ear and into his neck. “If he drips on me, I’m going to fucking scream.”

“Definitely don’t do that. Geez, dead weight, am I right?” Another shove lands the body with a thump on the floor.

“Fuck’s sake.” I’m too grateful to breathe again to give him shit about his disgusting joke.

He unties me with surprisingly careful fingers; long and graceful, not that I’m paying attention.

Glad to be untied, that’s all.

Once I’m free, I go to rub my wrists and regret it immediately. I bite down on a yell, but a hissing noise escapes through my teeth. “Shit.”

“Yeah, that’s a bad idea. You want to clean those, or they might get infected.”

As soon as I’m off the bed, I run for my clothes, deciding to call it a day once I’ve got my suit pants and undershirt on. No way can I handle a jacket or dress shirt touching me right now. Although… Dammit, there’s blood seeping through the thin fabric.

I duck into the bathroom and do what the guy suggested, gently soaping my wounds and rinsing them with warm water. I’ll need to figure out how to do better later. The hand towel I press over my chest is only going to soak up so much.

It isn’t until I’m finished that I realize there’s still a dead man in the hotel room, and a man who somehow got into our room with a fucking gun.

“Wait, how did you get in here, anyway?”

When I leave the bathroom he’s on the floor, poking at the body with a gloved hand and pulling a wallet from one pants pocket.

He holds up a room key that has Premiere Hotel written on the front. “Master key. Borrowed it off a housekeeper.”

He opens the wallet, frowning at the driver’s license.

“Christopher Mercy. That gotta be fake. Right? Sounds fake.” He looks to me as if I’m going to actually answer him. As if it’s completely ordinary for two guys in a hotel room to be chatting over a dead body.

When he continues to look at me with an expectant raise of his eyebrows, I shrug and say, “He told me his name was John Smith.”

Blondie huffs a laugh. “Bet you get a lot of those.”

“I’ve only been doing this for a few months, but so far it’s about eighty percent John Smiths.” Too late I realize I’m twisting my borrowed suit jacket in my hands. The fabric’s all wrinkled now. Lucky thing Dean, the escort I borrowed it from, said it was too big for him.

Only now it’s occurring to me that this room isn’t the best place to be. I inch toward the door.

The blond guy puts his hands on his hips and nudges at the body with his toe, shaking his head. “Shit. Tough break on this dude.”

“What did he do, anyway?”

My question brings the blond guy’s attention back to me, which suddenly seems as if it might have been a mistake. His friendly smile drops away, and his eyes narrow. “Do?”

Right then is when my stomach growls, and it isn’t subtle. The guy I borrowed the suit from shoved some waffles at me this morning when I went to pick it up, but at this point breakfast was a long time ago.

“Here.” The blond guy grabs a backpack; he must have brought it in with him. He rummages around for a bit before pulling out a shiny red apple. Like the kind that made one of those fairy tale princess fall into a coma. “Have this.”

Almost like it’s happening in slow motion, he steps forward, but his foot catches on something.

Probably the damn body at his feet. The apple falls from his hand.

I bend down to look under the bed, in time to see it roll to a stop on the floor.

Right in the pool of blood and gross shit oozing out of the dead psychopath’s head.

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” he mumbles sadly. Then he makes it worse by picking up the apple and trying to clean it off with a tissue from the bedside dispenser.

I force myself to swallow more bile that rises in my throat. “I’m…not really up for eating. Thanks though.”

He shrugs and puts the apple away in his pack. I don’t get why he’s saving it, but I’m not about to ask.

Dumbly, I gesture toward the body. “You, uh, came here to kill him, right? Like a…like a hit? Isn’t that what you call it? Did he do to someone else what he tried to do to me?”

The blond guy’s hand return to his hip. He looks down at the body again. “Dunno. Wouldn’t be surprised.”

Wait. “How do you not know?”

He’s almost apologetic when he says, “Rowan, you’re the one I was sent to kill.”

My stomach lurches. All at once I’m both hot and cold. Dizzy. No, definitely cold.

What does that mean? What could I have done to make someone want to kill me? I don’t know how to make sense of it.

So I don’t try.

He’s still standing by the bed with the gun in his hand. No chance in hell I’m waiting for him to aim it at me.

I turn for the door, and I run.