Page 4 of Crushed

I didn’t wantherto be alone, as much as I was afraid of being alone myself.

“Nothing is ever stable, is it,” I muttered. My parents had worked for Silent Network Consulting and had been on an assignment outside of the SNC’s approval when they died. At first, the blank spaces had been unnerving for us to deal with. But Lizzy helped me move forward. She had taught me that I couldn’t wait around wondering about the what-ifs, because that’s not what was happening now. I had to stay present and experience the world for what it was. If my parents were gone, then they were gone. I couldn’t let that kind of thinking hold me back. It’s what my parents would have wanted.

At least, that’s what I told myself, anyway.

“When I’m gone, you’ll find a new home with someone else easily,” Lizzy said. She squeezed my shoulder and we walked towards the car.

“But I don’t trust anyone else.” A few months earlier, a secret bodyguard had ambushed me and was about to kill me when Lizzy put a bullet in his head, and in the target. That didn’t help with my trust issues. My parents’ suspicious deaths didn’t either. I opened the car door and slumped into the passenger seat.

“There are plenty of options,” she said. “People you can trust. I trust Dahlia.”

“You probably shouldn’t,” I said.

“I trust you.”

“And I trust you, but that’s not the point.” I shook my head. “I could die tomorrow on an assignment and be done with it. Maybe there’s no point in trusting anyone if you know you’ll die soon anyway.”

“Or,” she started the engine, “you can live until you’re seventy-eight goddamn years old, no matter how hard you try to die in the action.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re not seventy-eight,” I said. She snickered. “You’re eighty-seven.”

She smacked me in the arm. “Shut your mouth.”

“Can you believe Dahlia called me a ‘child?’” I asked.

Lizzy laughed. “Scarlett, you’re less than half of our ages. In our eyes,yes, you’re still a child.”

Whatever. “How old is the target again?”

“Cormac is thirty-six, I believe,” she said. She kept her eyes focused on the road. “A bit older than you, but not by much.”

“Still a child, then?” I asked.

She shrugged. “More or less.”

Lizzy handed me her tablet and I flipped through the pictures. There were laugh lines around his eyes showing his age, but he didn’t seem like the kind of person that would laugh often. There was pain in the way he held his mouth, as if he was always one step away from releasing it all. Letting it go. Crushing the world with his anger and hatred.

These were the kinds of things I had to use to my advantage. All people, even good-looking billionaires, had weaknesses. Cormac had anger built up inside of him, anger I could use to draw him out.

Cormac Stone had weaknesses. It was my job to find them.