I swipe the heavy folder off the table and thumb through the target’s crimes.
A serial domestic violence offender. Fists for breakfast, bruises for dessert. He jumps states like flies on a pile of shit, always one step ahead of a system too soft and too slow to keep up. My favorite type of guy—because they always think they’re the hunter.
And because he reminds me ofMarcus.
Fucking Marcus. The roadman bastard who killed my sister and still breathes like the world owes him something. I hate him more than any man alive besides my father, and lucky me—I’m still indebtto him.
My stomach clenches at the thought.
When Zay dragged me back to the Raiders’ hideout six months ago, they made it very clear where I stood. I wasn’t family. I wasn’t even property. I was an example. They beat me until I was swallowing my blood like air. My ribs cracked like cheap china under boots and knuckles.
And through all of it, I was silent, minus the few grunts, and sharp inhales.
It was the only beating I’ve ever taken in the States that came close to what my father used to do. And eventhen—my father wouldn’t have stopped until I was seconds from brain dead. Those fuckers have nothing on Charlie Heart.
So yeah, this guy? This coward who leaves his wife and kids in splints when he gets bored?
He’s mine.
And he’s not walking away with his jaw intact.
Conner joins me a second later, slipping off his gloves with a snap. “That one’s newer,” he says, tapping the top of the file with his knuckle. “Still under internal review. Quiet case. DPD won’t move on it for at least three weeks.”
“Plenty of time,” I mutter, flipping it open. Inside: name, address, photos. Receipts. Patterns. A predator waiting to be caught.
“You keep feeding me scraps like this,” I say, eyes scanning the pages, “and maybe I won’t let the thing inside me out for anyone else.”
Conner’s gaze flicks to me—tired, knowing. “That’s the arrangement.”
It is.
While Conner spent his childhood studying anything with a pulse—watching how long it took before it stopped and became a corpse—I spent mine being carved into the soldier my older sister refused to become.
My father even did the demented, crack-head speech about how every dark corner of London was meant to be mine one day. All I had to do was survive long enough. Endure enough.Withstandenough to grab it with both hands.
As a kid, I believed him. And when the first shadow bloomed inside me, he nurtured it like it was hisrealson. More than I ever was. By the time I was fourteen, the beast within me had spent more time in the sun than I did. The beast was angry. Murderous. A fuckingterror. My own mother flinched when I walked into a room. That’s something Conner and I share—mothers who didn’t know what to do with the things they helped create.
My sister was the only one who saw any good in me, even when I didn’t thinkgoodandmewere compatible in the same sentence. She escaped to the States the minute she turned sixteen, after my father had set her up to marry Emil Smirnov, a fucking animal in the drug market of the East. She left the next day and told me to come find her when I was ready.,
I followed two years later, right after I failed to kill my father. Too afraid of what perpetual darkness would do to me, and too afraid of what the Butchers would do to me if I stayed in London any longer. But now the only person who allowed me to see any light is dead.
Now, this—this deal I made with Conner—is the only thing that calms the monster long enough to stop it from trying to kill me to be in the sun again. The deal is, he gives me the names. The ones that slip through the cracks. The ones with lawyers, money, connections, or shady dealings. The ones the cops “monitor” but never touch.
And I use them to feed my beast. I protect society—clean up the filth no one else will touch. I’m basically fucking Batman, just without the wholeno killingphilosophy.
Because unlike him, I actually have morals, and I don’t just want to stroke my ego. And I don’t get off fighting the same three villains in a revolving door of justice. I end them. Permanently.
Conner methodically disposes of the cleaning supplies and his gloves in a black plastic bag, as he reads over the files with me.
“This is the last one for a while. ” Conner comments, tying a knot in the bag.
I look up at him, slow and calm. “You’re taking a break while you play college professor?”
Conner shakes out his blonde pin straight strands and snorts. “I am not pretending.”
I watch as Conner begins to methodically clean up hiscleaningsupplies, and if it weren’t for the cold vacancy behind those pale green eyes, I might even admit he’s attractive.
Hell, tomorrow when Jasmine walks into her forensics class and sees him, I bet her pupils will blow wide and her thighs will clench in that telltale way she does when someone hot walks into a room.
