Fuck, I could really get used to the ways he touches me, the way she's looking at me—like I fucking matter. A lot. Like there's somethin' about me she just can't get enough of.
I push that shit away, because this girl deserves a fuck of a lot better than me.
"Tracker. They must have put one in me at some point."
"Wouldn't you, like…know? I mean, all I know is what they show on TV, but it seems like if these people you used to work for implanted a tracking device inside you, I think you'd fuckin' feel it."
"Not if I was already sedated."
"Did that happen a lot?"
"I had to earn my way up to being an assassin, Terra. You don't just join an organized crime syndicate and decide to be an elite assassin." I can tell she's not following, so I elaborate. "I started out as your basic enforcer. Break knees when some shmuck didn't pay his debt. Scare some guy's old lady so he'd give us what we wanted. No, I never actually hurt any women or kids, but I did threaten to a few times. Made it seem like I would. If you've got a gun to a guy's wife's skull, he'll do just about anything you tell him to, and he don't need to know you won't actually pull the trigger on her, he just has to believe you will." I don't dare meet her eyes. "Ain't proud of it, but that was the job. Other times, it was putting a hit on a rival squad for infringing on our turf. Bullets flew pretty frequently, and at some point, you're gonna get hit. What made me so goddamn good at the job was I didn't give a shit if I lived or died and wasn't scared of getting hit. Which meant I did."
"You've been shot before?" She asks, her voice so soft and so innocent and so caring it fucking cuts through me like a hot knife through butter.
I snort derisively. "Lost count, babe. It wasn't the military. In the army or whatever, you take a round, they send you to Germany or Stateside to recover. If they deem you fit for duty, they send you back. In The Cabal, they don't give a shit about you. Patch you up, and as soon as you're able to stay on your feet, you're expected to get back to fuckin' work. You don’t, you're no good. And when you're no longer of any value to an outfit like that, you're dead weight. Meaning, dead. So yeah, I've been shot more times than I care to count."
Terra frowns up at me. "Saxon…"
I shake my head. "Old news, babe. Point is, they had any number of opportunities to stick a tracker in me."
"But why would they?"
"Because they saw me as an investment. They put a lot of time and money into training me. Turning me into an elite assassin meant training on top of training. My brother Silas and I went through a kind of paramilitary boot camp together, which is a story for another time, and then when Dom picked me to replace Grigori after he got killed, they put me through a whole other series of training programs."
"What kind of organized crime family has boot camps?"
"The kind that's not a family. I told you—they're not the mafia. They're more of a multi-billion dollar global corporation than a gang or crime family. They have a CEO, CFO, investors, a board, a business model, and office buildings. They have what amounts to a private army, and because they have so much money and so many resources, they can afford to train their soldiers with the latest in warfare strategy and arm them with the latest gear. The cartels down in Mexico, Central, and South America are very similar."
"So we're being hunted by people with endless resources."
"Yes. Right now, they're operating under the assumption that I'm out of practice, and thus easy pickings—send a few bottom-of-the-barrel dumbfucks like these after me and it'll be over in half a day. They're not even sending actual Cabal soldiers after me. These guys are street thugs they've contracted out."
"Isn't that a good thing?"
I snort. "Yeah, actually. It is. But they're gonna wise up. They're gonna remember who they're dealing with, and they're gonna start sending the real deal after me."
"So what's our next move?"
The way she says "our" next move makes my chest tight and makes something in the pit of my stomach warm up. What that means, I don't fuckin' know.
“You change out of that sexy-ass dress, first of all. Second, we send your girl and Tommy somewhere far the fuck away. Third, we go get some collateral so I can get this fuckin’ chip out of me, or whatever the fuck."
"You know how to do that?" She asks.
"I don't, but I know someone who does. But in order to get him to do it, I'm gonna need somethin’ of value he wants."
"Which is?"
"A 1968 Ferrari Daytona."
"And where do you plan on getting something like that?"
I sigh. "My dad."
"Won't he miss it? I mean, I don't know shit about cars, but that sounds valuable."
"He would, if was alive."
