I held out the USB drive. He took it from my hand. His long fingers brushed mine.
Alessandro opened the laptop and plugged the drive in. Sigourney appeared on the screen.
I crossed my arms on my chest and leaned against the wall by the window. If Alessandro ever kissed me, I wouldn’t want him to stop. When he came to see me that time after the trials, asking me to go for a ride, I wanted him so much, it took all of my will to not open my wings and make him love me. In that moment, it didn’t matter that it wouldn’t be real. Being loved by him was all I had cared about.
I got so scared that I would lose control, I called the police and asked them to make him leave. I did it because my magic would take away his free will and chain him to me. I didn’t want that for him. I wanted him to have a long, happy life with whoever he chose. I had to let him go.
The more I looked at his Instagram over the years, the less happy he seemed. Now I knew—the Instagram Alessandro was bullshit. He had created a fantasy and held it up to the world like a shield. This Alessandro, the one in front of me staring at the laptop with the single-minded focus of a predator; this was the real man. Knowing this should have freed me, but I only wanted him more.
My phone chimed. An Instagram alert for Alessandro’s account. On my phone Alessandro surfed, a crystal blue wave curling around him. His wet hair flared around his face. Muscle corded his body under bronze skin. I looked at the tag and held the phone out to him. “Maui, really?”
“Mhm. I’m currently in Hawaii. Did you see his hand when he reached over her?” He paused the recording just before Sigourney’s killer turned off the PC.
“I did. I digitally enhanced it.” I hadn’t mentioned it, because I wanted to know if he would notice it too.
He glanced at me. All the flirting had evaporated. His eyes were clear and cold. He had seen his target.
Alessandro the killer. And if I let my mind wander, it would drift off into imagining the glide of his fingertips against my skin, the warm heat of his lips on mine, the power of his arms around me . . . It would construct impossible scenarios where somehow he fell in love with me and stopped being an assassin and we lived happily ever after.
I was morally bankrupt.
He must’ve seen it in my face because humor sparked in his eyes.
“Can I see the enhanced image? Or will you make me beg?”
“It’s the second file on the drive. You know, you don’t have to pretend to flirt with me. I said I would work with you and I meant it.”
He smiled at me. It wasn’t his dazzling bachelor-of-the-year grin, it was a simple quick smile. “I never pretend with you. Tease you, maybe. Flirt, yes. But never that.”
I wished he hadn’t said that to me. Not helping, Alessandro. Not even a little bit.
“These fingers have claws,” he told me.
“And the knuckles of the hand are abnormally large and oddly shaped. If this was a normal person, he or she would have advanced arthritis. Doesn’t seem like a desirable trait in an assassin.”
He frowned. “If this is arthritis, he wouldn’t be able to open a door. No, I think this is reinforcement to account for the additional finger weight and length of the claws.”
“Yes. The distal phalanges are wider and longer as well. The whole hand appears stronger.”
He leaned back from the laptop. “The warped can’t do magic by definition.”
“Yet here we are. It looks like she had a massive stroke with catastrophic bleeding. Is this a carnifex mage?”
“A butcher? It’s possible, but they typically target the heart. It’s a guaranteed kill. Going for the brain is a lot harder. You would really have to know what you were doing.”
I shook my head. “He couldn’t go for the heart. He needed her breathing so she could die of smoke inhalation.”
His fingers tapped the keyboard. A carousel of portraits appeared, each on its own card, listing name and power. Benedict’s handsome face looked at me with glacier eyes. The card said “Kurt Weber, Ratiocissor, Prime.”
Alessandro swiped across the track pad, and the ring of portraits turned, presenting us with the next face, a Hispanic woman in her late fifties. “Alba Gonzales, Telekinetic, Prime.” The following card showed a black man in his mid-twenties. “Kendrell Cooper, Aerokinetic, Prime.”
How many Primes did Diatheke have? If they were a House, they would be unstoppable.
Alessandro kept swiping, the faces moving too fast for me to register them. He hardly looked at the screen. He must’ve memorized them and was now going through them just to reassure himself.
I counted eighteen cards. The last one said “Average” so they weren’t all Primes. Still. That many killers under one roof would give anyone pause.
Finally, Alessandro straightened. “There are no butchers in their roster.”
“How complete are your records?”
“Complete enough.” He locked his jaw.
“Maybe he’s a recent hire?”
Alessandro shook his head. “Etterson was an experienced assassin. They wouldn’t send a rookie after her.”
He stared at the laptop, his expression dark. How did he get those files? More importantly, why? This went beyond any due diligence one would do to research his competitors. It would have taken months, possibly years to compile this database. Alessandro was hunting Diatheke.
“My turn to ask questions,” I said.
He smiled. “Go.”
“Are you trying to take out a competitor? Is there another assassin firm pulling your strings?”
“I don’t work for a firm. I’m here to kill Sigourney’s murderer.”
I raised my eyebrows and nodded at his laptop. “And so you threw this together on the fly?”
“Fair enough.” Alessandro leaned back against the table and crossed his arms. “Benedict has been on my radar for a while. I need to ask him some questions on an unrelated matter. It has nothing to do with House Etterson.”
“How important are those questions to you?”
“If it’s a choice between the Etterson contract and his life, I’ll kill him. I can find my answers in another way.”
“How did Sigourney hire you, what are the terms of your contract, what do you know about Halle?”
“She hired me through an intermediary. She was in the business, and she was aware of my particular job requirements.”
“Which are?”
“Privileged.”
“Alessandro, she’d been out of the game for almost ten years. How did she even know about you? You would’ve been in your teens when she quit. Have you been doing this since you were fifteen?”
His face shut down. “I have a certain reputation.”
“What kind of reputation?”
“The kind people like Sigourney make a point to note.”
What the hell did that mean?
“The intermediary arranged a call,” he continued, “during which Sigourney told me that her old firm was coming after her. She indicated they had pressured her to come out of retirement for a high-profile job, which she declined. She didn’t tell me who the target was, said we would discuss it in person. She didn’t think Diatheke would move on her immediately. She expected them to come back with a higher offer, which she also intended to reject.”
“Clearly she was wrong.”
“Yes.”
I thought out loud. “For them to insist that she come out of retirement after so many years means the target was someone she had access to and they didn’t.”
“Or they didn’t want it traced to them.”
“Did she say why she wouldn’t do it?”
Alessandro grimaced. “She said that if she didn’t kill him, she would be in danger. If she did kill him, her entire family would be done. I got the feeling that she wasn’t sure she could complete the job. It was a no-win situation. One way or the other, someone would die.”