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“I received an unusual request yesterday,” he says carefully. “From the Ashford family.”
“The real estate moguls?” Eli asks.
“Yes,” Dad replies, but he keeps his eyes on me. “I’ve done some jobs for them in the past, but the one they offered yesterday was so odd that I was planning to refuse. But maybe I shouldn’t.”
“What kind of job?” I demand.
“Bodyguard.”
I frown.
“I know,” Dad says. “That was my first reaction too. Trent Ashford wants to hire a bodyguard for his twenty-year-old daughter who studies business at Ivy River University on the other side of the city. For at least the rest of the semester.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I want you to continue our family’s tradition and become a hitman. I’m not going to deny that. And I am disappointed in how you have handled your three years at Blackwater up until now. But…” He pauses for a few seconds, holding my gaze with commanding eyes. “I am open to making a deal with you.”
I cross my arms. “What kind of deal?”
“If you can successfully handle this bodyguard job for the Ashfords, thereby showing me that you can get your shit together and act responsibly and professionally, then I will let you choose whether or not you finish your education at Blackwater and become a hitman.”
My eyebrows shoot up. Our Dad isn’t exactly known for his ability to compromise. He is used to giving orders and having them obeyed.
I stare at him. “You’re serious?”
“Yes.” He raises his eyebrows. “So, what do you say?”
“Deal.”
He nods.
Relief and astonishment pulse through my chest. This is better than anything I could have hoped for.
Bodyguard to a twenty-year-old girl at a fancy business school?
How hard could it possibly be?
3
KAYLA
The disappointment and frustration pulsing through the air is so palpable that I can almost feel it physically vibrating against my skin. However, I keep the casual expression on my face as I sit there in the chair on the other side of Dad’s desk. Leaning back nonchalantly, I cross one leg over the other while Dad finishes his lecture.
Though, lecture is probably not the right word. Perhaps tirade. Admonishment. Scolding. Yeah, those fit better.
“Do you have any idea how much your childish antics cost me?” Dad leans forward in his chair and angrily stabs his finger down on the glass tabletop between us. “Not only financially, but professionally too?”
I know that he is not actually waiting for an answer, so I just sit there in his pristine office in silence and hold his gaze. Sunlight streams in through the floor-to-ceiling windows that make up two of the walls in his penthouse office. The light plays over the white walls opposite them, and it glints in the sleek metal and glass furniture throughout the room.
“You’ve gone through eight bodyguards this year alone!” Dad continues, his blue eyes flashing. “Eight. And word has spread through their ranks. I’m lucky that my own bodyguards haven’t quit out of solidarity too.”
I roll my eyes. As if they would ever quit. His bodyguards have been with him for years. They’re loyal to a fault.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” he snaps. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to keep finding new bodyguards for you all the time?”
“You could just stop doing it,” I say, raising my eyebrows expectantly. “And just let me live without being shadowed by a bodyguard all the time.”
“After what happened to your brother? No.”
