Chapter Three
A big man caught the smaller woman by the back of her neck and guided her roughly into the rundown house before slamming the door.
Rebel caught the whole thing from across the street where he sat on a retaining wall in front of an abandoned apartment building.
Sitting there had been done on purpose, he needed to keep an eye on his mother. What he hadn’t expected when he got back into town was to find a man living with her.
Just last month, she’d been living alone and now this fucker had shown up. From the way the man put his hands on the back of her neck, Rebel knew the guy wasn’t a good man.
Well, neither was he.
Throughout most of his childhood, he had spent his years either being raped, tortured, or forced to kill.
That kind of thing changed a person.
Now though, Rebel killed for money or pleasure and he sure the fuck would take pleasure gutting that big fat fucker. A leaf crackled beneath footsteps on the sidewalk and Rebel dipped over the side of the retaining wall and melted into the darkness.
His heart pounded, but he stayed still. Nobody would ever make him panic again. After Wrath had killed the two men who had been raping him, Rebel was living a life of freedom.
He answered to no one and never would, not even Savage or Dave, who were constantly trying to find out why he’d moved out. So what if he didn’t want to live at Dave’s place right now? The man’s estate was rich, but he wasn’t comfortable there. He was always afraid of breaking something…not to mention the fucking rules and shit.
“Tell someone if you’re going to leave the house,” Dave had said.
What kind of rule was that? What kind of life was that? Life on a freaking leash was what that was.
His leaving Dave’s hadn’t stopped Savage and Dave from sending people to monitor him. A few had gotten close, but it had been easy to give them the slip. They were good, he’d give them that, but they weren’t small enough to follow into some of the tight spaces he used to escape. For a while, it seemed that every time he turned around there was someone else he had to ditch. Until a few weeks ago, when it had all suddenly stopped. Now, nobody showed up.
It appeared as if they had given up.
Good riddance.
Rebel wasn’t a newbie at being an assassin. He was a fucking pro and the sooner everyone else understood that, the better off they would be.
Thinking about Dave and Savage brought up Crow, but he squelched the vision. Crow was certainly eye candy with his rugged face, dark beard, and blond hair. Under normal circumstances, he would have flirted with the guy, but Crow operated within a set of laws and rules Rebel would never follow. Not to mention, the guy was a bossy SOB.
Why the fuck are you thinking about him ?
One of the local crackheads stumbled past, shuffling on down the street, and Rebel let out a sigh of relief. From his new vantage point, he went back to watching the front door of his mother’s house and pushed away all thoughts of Crow.
It would be best to go in through the window and take the guy out. The place was old and so rundown that the screens were hanging off and the paint was peeling, but she owned it and had for all of his life. It was the house he had been born in, or so he’d been told.
This was the neighborhood he supposedly had lived in when he was younger. The place was rundown with neglect. One row of houses sat across the street from a long line of apartment buildings that had seen much better days—some of the buildings were occupied and several stood vacant.
Crime in this neighborhood was at an all-time high…so the police wouldn’t even blink at another dead body.
Rebel’s only dilemma was that he hadn’t honed any one particular skill. And while that made him pretty good at everything, he wanted this kill to be special.
He wanted the fucker to feel it.
That right there made up Rebel’s mind and he melted farther into the darkness before making his way upward into the vacant apartment he’d taken over. He’d been there for the past couple of weeks and nobody had even noticed. It wasn’t like the slumlord could even rent the fucking dump to anyone.
Pulling up a piece of the floorboard in the small living room near the broken heater, Rebel pulled out a worn leather case and unfolded it.
Several different blades and knives gleamed beneath his dollar store flashlight. He slid a fat one out of its spot. When he was sixteen, Rebel had taken the knife from a man assaulting an older woman in an alley.
Vera Myers had been seventy-two years old and walking down the street to catch the bus when a man in his thirties had dragged her into an alley. Rebel heard her feeble cries on his way past in search of food. Something inside of him wanted to help her so badly and even though he was much smaller than the big guy fucking with Mrs. Myers, Rebel had launched himself at the bigger guy.
His advantage was that he was fast. And that quickness had paid off. He hit the man’s arm in the right spot, knowing that it would go numb, and the fucker dropped the knife. Rebel took it and sliced open the man’s throat.
Blood covered his face and hair and he stepped lightly away when the guy toppled into the alley. He took the cash in the man’s back pocket and then held out a hand to Mrs. Myers.
She looked at him for one moment and then let him help her to her feet. He found her cane and walked with her to the end of the alley.
“I’m Vera Myers, what’s your name?”
“Rebel.”
“Well, Rebel, thank you for today. God will bless you.” She patted his arm and made her way toward the bus bench.
Rebel watched her go before he turned and ran down the street.
He wasn’t going to be the one to tell Mrs. Myers that there wasn’t any God and if there was, the guy had probably forgotten about him a long time ago.
Rescuing her and that kill was one of Rebel’s most enjoyable memories.
The only memories Rebel had were from after the age of seven. Before seven, he didn’t remember much at all. His memories were spotty, but Savage had said that was because most people couldn’t recall earlier than three or four.
So why was it seven for him?
“Because you’re fucking special,” Rebel snickered to himself.
When he’d gotten away from Tanis and back with his mother for a short time, he had relied on her to fill him in and remind him of the things he’d done as a kid. None of it sounded familiar. It all sounded like it was someone else’s life.
Why the memory loss, he hadn’t a clue. Savage had said that could be from the trauma of being taken.
And while Rebel couldn’t recall any major events from earlier in his life, he did remember the day Solomon had kidnapped him from the streets.
And the day Solomon then sold him to Tanis several months later.
All those memories were there and had stayed with him, molding him into the man he was becoming. Because at eighteen, he was smart enough to know he was still figuring shit out.
Sliding the knife inside a sheath he kept hidden beneath his threadbare black jacket, he replaced his tools under the floorboards and left by way of the back stairs that led to the alley.
Rebel tried not to think about his past with Solomon or Tanis. But as much as he didn’t want to remember, it was part of him. As a child, he had been easy pickings for Solomon.
One reason was because he had been smaller back then and couldn’t put up a fight, but the other was because he and his mother had always lived in this rundown neighborhood.
Rebel glanced around at the slums.
This was the place where demons preyed on the weak.
He may not have figured all of life out yet, but he was no longer a child.
Nor was he weak. Nobody would ever take advantage of him again.
Now he was legal. He could make his own decisions. Just last month, his mother had bought a cupcake and placed a candle on it for his birthday.
Rebel had quickly devoured the sugary treat… and it had been a treat.
His stomach growled but he ignored it. There was never enough food, so why bother thinking about it?
If he took that job working for Erebus, he wouldn’t be hungry. Erebus had been some Greek god of darkness and shadow or some shit like that, Rogue had told him.
Yeah sure, if he worked for them, there would be enough money for everything he ever wanted. And for his mother too.
But after the first week of working for them, he had quit.
Erebus had too many rules, and Rebel had felt like there was a noose around his neck. Not to mention, they were always watching him, waiting for him to fuck up.
No, he thought, he was better off going it alone.
Now, he needed to find work.
Crime boss Jimmy Lincoln had offered him a job that sounded doable. Not that working for a drug lord was the best option, but being a hitman on the guy’s payroll wasn’t anything to sneeze at. He had three days to give Jimmy an answer or get the fuck out of his neighborhood.
If he left, that would mean his mother would be alone and he could no longer watch her and protect her from afar.
He had to wait for the next night to do the deed, and that was only because another man and woman showed up at his mother’s house and didn’t leave until dawn.
Tonight, though, was the night.
Now, he just needed to get through the rest of today staying low-key. First, he needed to find some fucking food. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have the energy to make the kill.
The sky over Northridge turned dark blue as the sun started to sink into the horizon and Rebel quickened his pace. There were several eateries with their backs facing alleyways and all he had to do was find one door that wasn’t locked.
Once he’d found them all locked, but he’d been lucky and found a half-eaten sandwich in the trash.
Not today though, today he got lucky. The back of Papa John’s Pizza was open and Rebel slipped inside. He snagged a boxed-up small pizza from the counter and walked out the back door.
That was when he ran. Not a soul had spotted him.
That meant things were going to go his way tonight. He stopped at the corner, crossed one of the main streets, and ducked into a park. There on the wrought iron bench, he devoured the gooey, cheesy treat. He didn’t care if he ate too quickly or too much. If he got a stomach ache later, so be it.
He had walked around starving for a week, so an ache from too much food wasn’t going to faze him.