When he wasn’t under contract, he could usually be found hunting the best waves—the man spent nearly as much time surfing as he did working—and staying off the grid.
“Now that everyone is here,” Uilleam said as he grabbed his suit jacket off the back of a chair. “Let’s discuss.”
Uilleam left the room first, Luna following, and Skorpion after, though he had to jog to catch up after spending a moment longer with the women in the room.
“It’s been long in the making,” Uilleam continued, starting up the flight of stairs. “But it’s finally time.”
“Time for what?”
“Your debt to come due,” he answered, stopping at the top to glance down at her. “This will be … difficult for you, but once this is done, you’ll finally be free of that time in your life.”
“I thought I was already free of that time?”
The smile he offered her wasn’t his trademark grin, nor did she see his usual humor. “Not quite.”
“Just strange,” Skorpion muttered from behind her, making her smile despite herself.
Uilleam shook his head. “We can discuss it more on the flight.”
The flight? “What flight?” Luna asked.
“To California,” Uilleam elaborated once they finally cleared the stairs.
“Kit’s there actually,” she said. Coming back from Bora Bora, while she had taken a car back to his penthouse apartment in the city, he had taken another jet out of the state.
“I’m sure he is,” Uilleam mumbled as he laid a hand on the door and pushed it open, stepping out into the rain.
A familiar black muscle car was parked just about a block down, but it wasn’t there that Luna’s gaze was drawn.
It was to the motorcycle and its rider idling at the stoplight.
Even through the rain, she could see that the light was still yellow, but the rider stayed there—and though he seemed to be facing straight ahead, Luna couldn’t shake the notion that they were being watched.
He was all a blur for a moment before she wiped at the water dripping from her eyelashes and got a decent look at him. It was a man, that much she could see even at her distance from his build and the way he straddled his bike.
He also wore all black, from his boots up to the helmet that covered his entire head, and the gloved hands he had wrapped around the handlebars.
Just sitting there …
As though he were waiting …
Luna realized almost a moment too late as Uilleam cleared the door and the moment he did, the rider pulled a gun, silencer firmly attached the end of it.
“Uilleam!”
Not once in the years she had known his name had she ever used it when it wasn’t only the pair of them. That, coupled with the way she shouted it had the man in question jolting to a stop, his gaze snapping to where she was looking.
But it was too late.
The rider squeezed off rounds in rapid succession, glass exploding as one of the rounds went through the car separating him from his target—but even that one didn’t miss.
Someone screamed, Skorpion shouted a command for her to stay where she was, and the last thing she heard before the blood rushing in her ears drowned everything out was Uilleam’s grunts as multiple bullets plugged their way into his body.
Luna didn’t pause to think about what she was doing, merely shot out the door with her gun raised, squeezing the trigger before she even had a clear shot. She might not have hit the driver, but she did get his attention.
And it was enough to send him speeding off, his tires burning rubber as he disappeared nearly as quickly as he came.
Once she could no longer see him, her concentration broke, bringing her back to the present where Uilleam was still on the ground.
But before she could get to him, Skorpion snatched her back with one hand, and despite her persistence, there was no resisting someone with his strength.
“Stay there,” he ordered. “Use your phone and dial star-seven-six-four and give them this address.”
Skorpion dashed out, dragging Uilleam up with ridiculous ease.
With shaking hands, Luna did as he asked, though she didn’t understand who, exactly, she was calling. She thought he might have misspoken had it not been for the man that answered on the second ring.
She gave their address, making sure to mention that she was calling about the Kingmaker before the person on the other line hung up the phone.
Skorpion stripped out of his shirt, tearing it to shreds as he packed it along Uilleam’s front. There was blood everywhere, so much blood, that Luna couldn’t see anything else.
She couldn’t understand how someone who had lost so much blood could still be awake.
“Calavera, hey! Get over here.”
He didn’t give her a chance to do just that before he was dragging her across the floor, guiding her hands down onto the bloody bundles of cloth that were quickly getting soaked through.
“Keep pressure on these,” he said with fierce eyes, making sure she understood.
“Scar, he’s—”