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She sounded defeated as she weakly said, “Then tell me what’s going on. Tell me the truth. Otherwise, I’m not going to make it. I’m just not. I can’t take much more, and feeling like this can’t be good for either of us, me or the baby.”
“Okay. Okay,” I said, raising my voice and directing to Memphis, “Can you come over here? Now?”
“I’m on my way,” Memphis said.
Twenty minutes later, all three of us sat in my living room, me on the soft leather sofa next to Lilith, holding her hand pretty much against her will. Memphis sat across from us in a matching chair, and after taking a deep breath, I told the woman I loved about The Agency.
19
The Agency
The Agency is not a building or a place or any one tangible, static thing. It’s web addresses on the dark web. It’s bunkers, dark rooms, shadowed faces, burner phones, and clipped phone calls. It’s quiet, invisible, clandestine, and stunningly effective.
I was recruited weeks after I was dishonorably discharged from the military for beating my commanding officer’s ass within an inch of his life. He had it coming. He knew it and his superiors knew it, since he’d been reported several times over the years for propositioning young, male soldiers. He came at me, and I fucked him up. They chose to kick me out rather than risk me blowing the whistle.
I was living in a piece of shit hotel when my Agency recruiter, B329, knocked on my door and offered my young, angry ass a proposition I couldn’t refuse. I was informed that my military file was my resume, one I hadn’t submitted, but that was how it worked. You were chosen. I was so young and broke, broken, and pissed at the whole world. My mother was dead. My sister was dead. My father could never be bothered, and the nigga who took my sister’s life and ruined mine was walking free. My fuck-it meter was through the stratosphere. Kill someone for money? Why not? Wasn’t that what the military was anyway? At least this was serious bread, enough to give me a better than good life. At that time, I was twenty-one years old. I was a millionaire by twenty-two. Now? Shit, I was obscenely wealthy. The blood on my hands just never came to mind because those I killed deserved it. Every assignment aligned with my beliefs—fuck up and get fucked up.
Until Lilith.
By the time I received the order, I’d traveled the world with the Gutierrez twins under my employ as backup. Like me, they’d been through some shit and didn’t give a fuck. It didn’t hurt that they had a whole population of relatives to support, so they were down for damn near anything. We worked well together because they were loyal and very good at taking orders. Since The Agency paid extremely well, having the twins on my payroll wasn’t a burden. Plus, those dudes would die for me. You can’t put a price on that shit.
When I pulled up her file and saw her face, I was instantly intrigued. I’d seen beautiful women before, women who checked all my boxes physically. So that wasn’t what caught my attention. I honestly couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew without a doubt that this target was different. Nevertheless, I went about my regular routine—surveillance, research, and to be completely transparent, some good old-fashioned stalking.
She and her man lived in a gated community, so I sent Bruno in to watch her under the guise of a repairman. People who live in communities like that—whether black or white—see a Mexican in a work truck and don’t even blink, which is more than a little fucked up, but it works to my advantage. I bought the vacant building next to her shop to watch her come and go, learn her schedule. Was she a workaholic who stayed late?
She wasn’t and she didn’t. She was a homebody, but I’d received strict instructions not to do the job in her home. This made shit difficult since she barely left the house. Weeks passed without her making an appearance at her own shop. This woman had me stumped, and that was damn near an impossibility.
The thing about The Agency is it’s almost too efficient. Everyone is anonymous—the people who run things, the workers like me, and the clients. No real names besides the targets, just a meaningless combination of letters and numbers. While my recruiter was B329, I was D1006. The clients don’t even get numbers, their anonymity is iron clad. Their hands are kept proverbially clean, hence the hefty fee.
I didn’t know who commissioned Lilith’s extermination, but for the first time, I wanted to. I needed to understand who desired the death of a woman who seemed so unproblematic. Digging into her past told me nothing, and the more I learned about her, the more I liked her. She had done work advocating for better health care for Black women because of her mother’s untimely death from a cancer misdiagnosis. Her boutique sponsored yearly book scholarships for college students. The smile she wore in her pictures fucking melted my cold-ass heart. This woman was everything! It didn’t hurt that she was finer than a whole congregation of motherfuckers.
I’d all but abandoned surveillance of the boutique, so when I decided to return that night, I had no idea she was living there. I’d only just arrived at the building next door when I saw Penny. I wasn’t sure it was him at first, doubting my obsessive knowledge of my sister’s killer. So, I left my perch at the second-floor window in the dark, musty building to get a closer look. It was him, and I can’t lie, a nigga was giddy. I’d probably passed and overlooked him on the streets while in my car a dozen times, but in the still and quiet of night, he’d been unmissable.
There was no way I was letting this opportunity pass. So, I approached him, saw his sorry, alcoholic state, and grew even angrier. This shell of a man, this fucking rodent had snuffed out a bright light and didn’t even have the decency to live a good life afterwards? He was free and for what? To stumble around pissing on himself?
The fucking nerve.
“You know who I am?” I asked as I approached him.
He slowly lifted his head, his eyes dull with liquor, his stench thick and nauseating. “Huh?”
Huh.
Mother. Fucker.
“You killed my sister.”
His eyes widened and he shook his head, mumbling some bullshit that I didn’t even try to translate into recognizable words. Honestly, I blacked out at that point, and when I came back, my hands were bloody and throbbing with pain, my heart was racing, and my head felt like someone was squeezing it. Then I looked up, my gaze colliding with the horrified expression on Lilith’s face, and well, that shit turned me on.
20
“…once Memphis realized what was going on, she started helping me try to figure this shit out. I couldn’t kill you, but I also couldn’t tell The Agency that because all they’d do was reassign you to someone else who could kill you. So, I tried to rectify the situation, stalked you, and then moved in with you to keep watch over you, to protect you. I wanted you, yes, but I didn’t think you’d want me, too. I just got lucky,” Ray was saying. “We had to move here because I finally got word that you had been reassigned. I can keep you safer here than at your apartment until we figure out who put the price on your head and why. I got motion sensors, cameras inside and outside of the house, my property is fenced in, there’s a safe room, and all the windows shutter with the tap of a button. Steel shutters. This place can be a fortress if need be. It’s off the beaten path, no foot traffic. Ain’t nobody gon’ sneak up on us here.”
After he finished telling me about some damn Agency and how he’d been hired to kill me and an entire dictionary of other shit, I sat in silence for a while, my eyes fixed on the cold tile beneath my feet. It was so pretty, patterned in shades of peach and turquoise. I felt Ray’s and Memphis’s scrutiny, but I couldn’t look at them because this was the most farfetched and dumb shit I’d ever heard in all my forty-two years. He was an assassin?
Okay.
Riiiight.
