Sin’s gaze skipped away, and she retrieved her knife.
“Sin?” Lore’s voice cracked. For the first time in a very long time, he was afraid. Not for himself, but for Sin, who had been through more than her fair share of misery in her life.
“He’ll sell me,” she said between clenched teeth. “He’ll hack off my arm so I can’t use it to kill, and sell me to the Neethuls.”
Oh, Jesus. Neethuls were an incredibly cruel race who bred, trained, and traded slaves… particularly sex slaves. Before being sold to Detharu, Sin had suffered as a slave who had to do anything her master wanted, from selling drugs to killing enemies, but the Neethuls would make what she’d gone through seem like a day at the beach.
“That won’t happen,” he swore. “I’ll help you take out your target. Who is it?”
“You have your own mark to deal with.” She tested the edge of her blade with her thumb. “What happens if you miss your deadline?”
“Nothing.”
Her gaze turned steely, silver shards against a black backdrop. “Bullshit. Tell me.”
“If I miss the deadline, Deth gets to double my time of service,” he lied.
She regarded him warily, as though trying to decide if he was telling the truth or not. She had a tendency to question everything, especially if it came from Lore, and he wondered if she’d ever fully trust him again.
“You won’t miss your deadline,” she said finally. “You never do. So what happened while you were trying to take out your mark? It’s not like you to get caught out like that.”
Outside the open window, the high-pitched warble of a bird sounded like laughter, which was fitting. “I got cocky.”
“Now that I believe,” she said wryly. “So who is it? Your mark?”
It was a question no assassin asked another—the risk of someone homing in on your kill and stealing it from under you was too great—but Lore and Sin had always shared deets. “Remember I told you about that human asshole I brought back to life? It’s him. Should have left him dead, I guess.”
Sin’s grip on her knife tightened. “Ah… isn’t that guy friends with…” She trailed off, because she refused to say it. Our brothers.
“Yeah. It’s okay. I’ll handle it so they never find out it was me.” Doubt set her jaw in a stubborn line, so he steered the conversation away from Kynan and the potential trouble Lore was in. “What about you? Who’s your mark?”
Sin stretched out on the couch and tucked an arm behind her head. Dark circles under her half-lidded eyes revealed her exhaustion. “Some werewolf. Loner. Should be a quick in and out.”
Sounded like an easy enough hit for Sin, but still, the second Kynan was dead, Lore was going to help Sin with the werewolf, or warg, as they liked to be called. No way was she going to be sold to the Neethul.
A faint buzzing noise snagged his attention, and he heaved himself out of the chair to grab his cell phone from the scrub pants’ pocket. Figured it would be Eidolon. Again. Sighing, he opened up the message… and promptly stopped breathing.
Come to my apartment. Now. We need to discuss Kynan.
Five
Lore stood outside Eidolon’s door, unable to shake the feeling that he was walking into a trap. And yet, like a cat with a string dangling before it, he couldn’t resist.
But that didn’t mean he was a total chump. He’d play this to his advantage, would use this opportunity to learn anything he could about Kynan. Usually Lore had weeks to plan a hit, to educate himself about his marks’ jobs, friends, families, vulnerabilities, and habits, but the expiration date on this assignment was bearing down on him too fast for comfort and with extra complications, and the whole thing was about to go sour.
As he raised his fist to knock on the door, a tingling sensation prickled the back of his neck.
“Well, well,” a female voice purred. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“Idess.” He pivoted around. She stood a few feet away, her faded, ripped jeans revealing tantalizing slashes of skin from her slim thighs to her knees, where the denim disappeared into heeled leather boots. Lore entertained an image of lying on the ground with her straddling him, one sexy boot on each side of his chest as she lowered herself onto him, and shit, his hormones were out of control lately.
She cocked her head to the side, and her ponytail swung behind her, the curled tip brushing her hip and only adding to that straddle fantasy. “What are you doing?”
“I think you know.”
Her sly smile made her eyes sparkle. “You want to see how much your brothers know about you trying to kill Kynan.”
“I don’t want to kill him,” he said easily. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”