He gave no signs of remorse or apology. No explanation. “This morning.”
Ouch. So he must have really hated working with me. What other reason was there to specifically request not to be assigned with a specific merc in the future?
I let that information sink in a moment, tasting the disappointment and feeling the sharp sting of rejection. Then I finished my coffee and nodded.
“Well then. I guess I should head out; I’ve got a plane to catch.”
“Danny—” he protested, but I wasn’t sticking around for the awkward reasoning. It was written all over his sexy fucking face. He’d noticed I was flirting, and the feeling was not reciprocated.
How utterly humiliating.
I walked the fuck away, and Leon didn’t follow.
12
S he walked away without so much as a backward glance, and I forced myself not to follow. Not immediately, anyway. I paid the bill for our uneaten breakfasts, then lurked inside the restaurant until I saw her striding out of the lobby with her bag slung over her shoulder.
I left my luggage with the concierge so I could come back to get it later. For now, I needed to give in to my perverse desire to follow Danny DeLuna.
I’d activated the block on her profile right after I accepted her offer of breakfast. The fact that I’d said yes to that so damn easily confirmed that I was losing my head over her. I needed distance, or she was going to wind up dead.
That hadn’t made it any easier to see the hurt flash through her eyes when I told her, though. Nor did it quell the panic flowing through me over her next assignment. So I fucking followed her like a goddamn stalker through the busy streets of Manhattan.
She never spotted me, because I was more than just… what had she called me? A fucking tech bunny . How insulting.
A couple of blocks from the hotel, she got a call, and I drifted closer to listen in. She was talking to her friend Jude. Judith Mackenzie. I’d done my research on every aspect of Danny’s life several years earlier when I couldn’t get her off my mind, but she’d been particularly hard to get information on. Not unusual for mercenaries, but frustrating when I wanted to know every little detail about this woman.
“…yeah, I know,” Danny sighed as I eavesdropped when she stopped with a bunch of other people waiting to cross a busy street. “This one might take a while, I’m not sure. Will you check in on Stanley for me? You know how he gets when I’m gone for a long time.”
Stanley? Who the fuck was Stanley?
“Thanks, babe,” Danny said to whatever Jude had responded. Presumably that she would visit whoever the hell Stanley was. “I’m not going to bother flying home. This next job is going to need prep work before Halloween.”
She wasn’t going home. So where was she going? Halloween was the date listed on the contract as the first opportunity for contact with the target. The relevant details of where would have been sent to her with the rest of the contract once she accepted. I needed to see that fucking contract.
The traffic lights changed, and she started crossing the street, so I dropped back a bit before she spotted me lurking. In doing that, I noticed someone else was tailing her, too.
She’d said someone within the Guild was trying to kill her, and I was inclined to believe her. Especially now. Her tail wasn’t Guild, but the fact that she would be here must have been leaked from someone within our organization.
I dropped back further still, my focus shifting from gorgeous Danny DeLuna to the dark-haired assassin with eyebrows like black caterpillars. By my guess, he was a local hire. Someone unaffiliated with the Guild and probably totally unable to be traced back to the source.
Danny was leaving the crowded streets, still talking on her phone, and the guy followed. No way in hell was I risking him taking a shot at her, though, so as he rounded the next corner, I sped up to catch him.
“Hey, what—” he protested as I seized the back of his neck and dragged him into a tight alleyway behind a Greek food shop. Whatever else he would have said was lost in a pained gurgle when my knife slammed into the side of his neck.
Not a single word left my lips as I dragged him behind the dumpsters and pulled my knife free. He wasn’t dead yet, but it wouldn’t be long. I ignored his wide, desperate eyes as I patted him down. No ID, but he had a phone that I pocketed. I’d hack it later and trace his calls and texts. Maybe they’d lead somewhere.
For now, I had to be satisfied that he was the only tail on DeLuna, because by the time I sauntered back out into the street, I’d totally lost her.
It was almost embarrassing how easily I accessed the Guild’s main server to download a copy of Danny’s new contract. Then again, it was hardly the first time that I’d taken a little wander through the Guild’s ultra-secure mainframe.
I knew where and when Danny would have her best opportunity to move on her target, and I knew who had accepted the task of being her tech bunny . It irked me more than I’d have liked how long it took me to track down where she was staying while prepping for this mission.
When I did find her, I almost wished I hadn’t. What the fuck had happened to my plan to walk away and never think about ethereal Danny DeLuna again? Huh? Oh yeah, she accepted a suicide mission, and I realized I’d rather risk my own sanity than let her get killed on the job.
Fucking hell. What was it about this girl? She wasn’t soft or sweet. She wasn’t light or joyful. No, she was pure sarcasm and sass. She was all hard edges, quick temper, and wielded her sexuality like a weapon… exactly as the Guild trained their honey traps. In short, Danny was nothing like Layla had been. And Layla was the only woman I’d ever loved.
And yet, there I found myself, staking out the apartment she was staying in for the two weeks prior to Halloween. Every day she would go for a run before dawn, then spend hours working out in the fifth-floor gym before retreating to her apartment. It took me a hot second to get eyes inside so I could stay up to speed on her prep work. Eventually I grew frustrated and broke in while she was in the gym.
My planted camera gave me a full view of inside her apartment, and the bug I placed in her computer let me see what she was researching. Ethical? Fuck no. Necessary? Absolutely.
It was because of my observation that I knew the where, when and how of her plan. So I surely should have been content to just hire some additional backup for her and leave it at that. Right?
Wrong. So freaking wrong.
Knowing what I already knew about my fixations, it wasn’t exactly shocking that I made the choice to forgo my own assignments and tail Danny all the way to Shadow Grove—of all fucking places—to attend a Halloween party hosted by one of the more powerful crime families around right now.
“How very fitting,” I murmured as I flashed my forged invitation to the bouncer at the door. It was a VIP party to celebrate the opening of a new club made from a converted warehouse. Lucky for me, it was Halloween, and I could conceal my identity in a costume.
Not that I gave two craps about the criminal guests seeing me there, but the hostess was a little too observant for my liking. I’d rather fly beneath her radar for the time being.
“Target spotted,” Danny’s husky voice said in my ear.
I smirked as I replied. “Copy that.”