Page 35
Stupid man. Brilliant, lethal, stupid man.
The notification sits at the top of an encrypted messaging app. A thread labeled with a single word: Genesis.
I tap it open.
The message fills the screen with my name.
I launch myself to my knees, the sheet falling away from me, leaving me exposed. But I don’t care.
I flick the screen to scroll down only to find my photograph, a candid surveillance shot from outside my bakery where I'm squinting against the morning sun.
I scroll further down.
The contract summary stares back at me in bold, black text. Target: Neve Castellano. Conditions: Elimination, clean, no trace. Fee: $10,500,000.
And at the bottom, in a timestamp from over a week ago, a single confirmation line.
Accepted by: Thane Cross.
The phone slips from my fingers and hits the sheet with a muffled thud.
My mind goes into overdrive.
He tracked me before walking into my bakery. He told me so himself. But the bar. The bar was before any of that. Or was it? I scroll up with shaking fingers. The contract placement predates his appearance at my door by hours, but the night in the bar predates the contract by a full week.
The bar was real. He didn't know who I was that night.
But everything after? Every calculated word, every touch, every time he called me sweet girl and held my face and promised I was safe?
His words come back to me from the bakery. "I'm the reason that hasn't happened yet."
Yeah, because he is the contract holder. What the holy fuck! His words slam back into me and the surgical precision of them cuts so deep my stomach heaves. He never said he wasn't the killer. He said he was the reason I wasn't dead. Both true. Can’t fault him there.
He let me fill in the gap with the version that made him the hero instead of the threat, and I swallowed it whole because his hands were on my body, his voice was in my ear, and I wanted so badly to believe that one person in this world wanted me.
Ten point five million. That is the price tag on my life.
Bile burns the back of my throat. My hands shake as I grab the nearest shirt from the floor, one of his, and pull it over my head. My sneakers are beside the bed where I kicked them off and I shove my feet into them, standing on legs that barely hold.
The shower cuts off.
Silence presses in hard enough to make my ears ring.
The bathroom door opens and steam rolls into the main room. Thane steps out with a towel around his waist, water dripping from his dark hair, and his gaze lands on me standing beside the bed fully dressed. His eyes fall to the phone on the bed at my side.
He reads the scene in under a second. Phone. My face. The sneakers on my feet. His expression doesn't shift but the color drains from beneath his skin and the tendons in his neck pull taut.
"Neve," he speaks to me like I’m a scared cat.
“Fuck you! Don't you even try." My voice is rock solid. Every ounce of my father's training pours into my words because if I let anything else through I will shatter on this concrete floor and I refuse to give this man the satisfaction. "Don't say my name like you care about me. I guess your MO is to play with your kill beforehand?"
He doesn't move. His hands hang at his sides, open, fingers loose. The same hands that signed a contract for ten point five million dollars and then held my face while he whispered good girl against my skin and spilled himself inside my body.
"What do you plan on doing with the money you were paid to kill me?"
Three seconds of silence pass. The longest three seconds of my life. His jaw works. His chest expands on a controlled breath. Those dark whiskey eyes hold mine without flinching and the raw devastation carved into every line of his face almost makes me waver.
Almost.
