I force myself to walk away.

“Fredrik…please…don’t go. Not yet. Please!” she calls out after me.

I hear the chain wrapped around her ankle hitting the floor as she tries to catch up to me, but it stops hard when I step out of her walking range and head toward the basement steps.

I hear her crying. I hate to hear her cry. Goddammit…I hate to hear her cry!

Slowly, I turn to face her, and she looks back at me with the same light-brown doe-eyes that I have come to admire…that I’ve become a victim of.

I’ll need to kill tonight. Just so that I can wash this threatening feeling from my dark heart.

“I’ll be back in four hours,” I say impassively, coldly even. “And you will watch.”

I leave her standing there, drowning in her own tears, as I ascend the steps and out of the basement.

Fredrik

If Dorian Flynn wasn’t part of our new Order, and my assigned partner, he’d be the one I killed tonight. I hate this guy. I might just kill him anyway.

“Tha fuck is this bitch talkin’ about?” Dorian asks, staring down into a magazine with some famous couple posing with a baby on the front. He flicks the center of it with his middle finger, making a short snapping noise and then drops the magazine on the table between us. “Don’t you ever read this shit?”

“No,” I answer simply, uninterested, and bring my mug of coffee to my lips.

I continue to watch out the tall glass window of the coffee shop for signs of my next interrogation. Short, bald man with a death wish long overdue.

“Well, you should,” he says, looking at the magazine again. “This is what society has become. An overpopulated flock of loudmouth, zero talent celebrities who get paid to fondle America’s nutsack with bullshit drama.” He shakes his head and presses his back against his chair. “Y’know, I could make a goddamn killing on pickin’ these motherfuckers off. Hell, I think even Faust would be up for it.”

I really don’t care much about what Dorian is going on about, but I know that if I don’t respond with something soon, he’ll notice and might never shut up.

“Those people, as moronic as they may be,” I say looking across the square table at him, “aren’t hits. At least not yet.”

Dorian shrugs and reaches out to close the magazine with two of his fingers. “Well, for the record, I want the first one that is.”

I nod and look back out the window. “I’ll let Victor know.” And then I add with a smirk, “Seems to me they’re fondling your nutsack just fine. The fact that you care about any of it at all proves that.”

Dorian grins. He crosses his arms, covered by a dark brown leather jacket over his chest. He has short dark-blond hair, clean-cut though spiked-up in the front and on the top. He’s not as tall as I am at 6’3, must be about 6’, with bright blue eyes that he often covers with sunglasses. He’s been killing people for eight years now (he told me this when we first met, as casually as he might tell me he’s been working in real estate for eight years) and I admit, he’s good at only twenty-six years old. But a lot like Niklas Fleischer, Victor Faust’s brother, Dorian is undisciplined and sometimes reckless. Though, I also admit that it seems to work for him.

He shakes his head, smiling across at me. “I’d like to bag one of those bitches. It’s true. You got me.” He puts up his hands, palms forward, and then drops them back onto the table. “But only to see the look on her face when I kick her out of my bed after I’m done with her. Knock her off her pedestal a little.”

My left brow rises. “Oh, I see.”

He nods. “Yeah, I could fuck a woman like that all day long, but at the end of the day, I’m looking for a nice, quiet, respectable girl to bring home to my folks, y’know.”

“I thought your folks were dead?” I take another sip of my coffee.

Dorian shrugs and stretches his arms behind him high above his head. “Yeah, they are, but you get the picture.”

“Sure I do,” I say, though I still wish he’d shut up already. “But somehow I just don’t see you settling down.”

The spot between Dorian’s eyes hardens as he rears his chin back. “I didn’t say anything about settling down.”

“Well, nice, quiet and respectable usually means settling down,” I point out.

He throws his head back and laughs lightly. “Maybe in your world,” he says. “Then again, you’re kind of sadistic and I highly doubt that a nice, quiet, respectable girl would get too close to you for you to find out.”

No, but I happen to have one in my basement. Granted, I have to keep her shackled inside the room so she doesn’t run away or try to kill me, but Cassia is the kindest, most respectable girl I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a lot of women. Broken a lot of women.

A short, stubby bald man wearing a waist-length thick coat steps outside of a black sedan that just pulled into the parking lot. Its headlights are on, beaming at us through the tall window, and the motor remains running. Puffs of exhaust pour out of the rear stimulated by the frigid December air. Snow is thick on the outskirts of the parking lot where a snowplow made its rounds this morning, shoving mounds of it off the parking lot and out of the way.

“It’s James Woodard,” I say quietly, keeping my eyes on him from the tall window.

Dorian turns his head to look as the target leaves the running car and heads to his own car parked three spaces over.

I glance at my Rolex. “Same time. Just like last week.”

“He’s consistent,” Dorian says.

“Yeah, fortunately for us, that’s his first mistake,” I reply.

I stand up and remove my black coat from the back of the wooden chair and slip my arms into it. I zip it up to my throat. Dorian follows suit. We wait until the drop-off car is completely out of the parking lot before we head outside into the winter air. James Woodard glances at us once as we approach my car on the other end of the lot, but neither of us make eye contact. Woodard passes us off as any other customer leaving the coffee shop. He’s not a smart man and it’s a wonder why he was ever employed by any organization like mine to do even the simplest of tasks.

His stupidity is one reason we have to get rid of him. That, along with his selling information of our new Order to another black market organization. It isn’t much and none of it’s true. Victor has been suspicious of Woodard since he took over Woodard’s Order last month. He has been feeding Woodard false information on us ever since. Just to see if he’d sell it. And he did. Twice. It just so happens that the man in the black sedan who just dropped him off was the buyer and one of our guys.

But where I come in, is interrogating him to find out if he’s been selling that information to anyone else. And to find out if anyone else is involved. It’s a perfect night to torture a man. And I have two hours left to make it back to my house with Woodard.

I told Cassia four hours, and I always keep my promises.

Dorian and I hop inside my car and the engine purrs to life. Woodard pulls out of the parking lot first, and already knowing which direction he’ll be going, I wait about thirty seconds before I put my car into reverse and set out to follow him.

“What a fucking idiot,” Dorian says with laughter. “How long did Victor say Woodard was employed under Norton?”

“Two years,” I answer while pulling out of the parking lot and heading east.

“Shit,” Dorian laughs again, “I’m surprised he lasted two days.”

“Yeah, I have to agree with you on that one.” I keep my eyes trained on the dark road, retaining the speed limit and trying to keep Woodard’s car in my sights.

“You don’t agree with me on much, do you?” Dorian asks, glancing over at me briefly. Not that he cares, really, but he’s not so arrogant that he doesn’t at least try to get along with others.