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“She?”
I nodded. “A single mother who was running late to clock in.”
I recalled the surprise that the short, curvy, raven-haired woman could be my target.
That she could be a threat.
I stalked her near her apartment building. I stayed on her tail to the office. I set up camp to spy in through the windows as she worked at a cubicle. Then I lingered to follow her home.
At any second, I could have killed her, but something about her had me pausing.
Even from a distance, her innocence was so obvious.
Maybe it was because she apologized to everyone she bumped into when she was rushing to get to work. Or when a street vender dropped a price sign at his cart, she doubled back to help him prop it upright again. Or maybe it was how she smiled at the little girl when they stood at a red light to cross an intersection.
“She looks too innocent,” I told Paloma. “Too… ordinary.”
She smiled. “Ah… maybe not so ordinary to have captured your eye. Hmm?”
I looked at the ceiling. “Not like that. She looked too ordinary to be involved in anything to do with assisting Gregori in a cover-up of another faked death.”
“Oh.” She frowned.
“I’m heading out to watch her again,” I said. I didn’t have to report to her, but this life could be lonely. It felt good to have someone to talk to at all. “Because if she’s innocent and not actually a part of anything Gregori wants, then it’d be a waste of my time to kill her.”
She nodded. “Sounds like it.” She closed the dishwasher and smiled at me. “You be safe.”
I’d tell her the same, for her to be safe, but that wasn’t necessary. She’d always be safe in my house and working for my family.
When I returned to the rundown area of aging apartment complexes near where Lousia Emerson lived, I couldn’t say the same for her. I watched from a distance as she struggled to carry bags of groceries home, a young boy trying to carry bags himself. The plastic ripped and cans rolled out onto the sidewalk, but she didn’t lose her temper, not even when a passerby kicked a couple onto the road. Later, when she took the boy and a couple of others to a dilapidated playground around the block, a couple began shouting and fighting in a domestic dispute, and she hurried the children back home. Then later yet, when she left the apartment building, wearing the same drab work uniform, she was pestered by a couple of men hitting on her and trying to slow her down on her walk to work.
How the hell is she supposed to be implicated in anything to do with Gregori?
I set up camp in the building across from hers again, watching her through the window. Every second that passed where I didn’t use the rifle to kill her was a delay in doing as Adrik requested. My hesitation gnawed at me, fraying my nerves.
So when my second oldest brother, Maksim, called me, I answered and hoped he could help me make sense of this intrinsic reluctance to just kill this stranger. He was the “problem solver” of the family, and I bet he’d be a voice of reason.
“It feels off,” I told him after he checked in on me with something else and I told him about why I was second-guessing the need to kill this woman.
“It feels off how?” he asked.
“She looks too damn innocent to knowingly be involved in something bad,” I replied
“And you’re basing that on what?” He huffed.
“I don’t know.” I frowned, watching her through the scope as she sat at her desk and yawned, watching multiple monitors of surveillance footage. “She just looks innocent.”
“Nikolai, what the fuck?” He laughed once. “Are you saying she’s captured your attention? So what? It’s not like this never happened before.”
He wasn’t teasing me about my past of thoroughly making myself available to enjoying as many women as I could. I’d even slept with them for intel.
“I don’t think this ever has happened before,” I admitted. “It’s not that I want her.”
I did. There was no doubt that even from a distance, she was a gorgeous, curvaceous woman I’d hold on to all night long and fuck her brains out.
“It’s that I am questioning the orders I’m expected to carry out at all.” I frowned. “She’s got a kid.”
He sighed.
