Page 39 of Executing Malice

Does it bother me? No. Why would it? I would wait longer if necessary. Being away from her for as long as I was, I refuse to spend a second without her that I can avoid. Soon, I won’t have to wait out here. I can go inside. I won’t loiter. I don’t want to get her in trouble, but I can wait at the bakery. I can drop her off and pick her up. It’ll be easier. The way it was always meant to be.

For now, a sore ass is a small price to pay.

At least today is going to be fun.

I’m still grinning to myself when Leila appears at the glass wall. She’s in a long, flowy skirt and a loosely knitted sweater. Her long strands are twisted into a thick plait over one shoulder and bound by a red ribbon.

Her soft, emerald gaze sweeps in my direction and narrows. Her lips purse with displeasure, but all I can think is, I’m the only person in the world who knows her nipples and clit have little silver bars through them. I have to bite my bottom lip to keep from groaning at the memory of her beneath me last night. The metal of her clit piercing cold beneath my tongue.

“Fuck,” I groan to myself, struggling with the urge not to reach down and soothe the dick stiffening in my pants.

Really fucked up timing, honestly. All I need is one delicate flower to spot my tent and call the sheriff.

Actually ... maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. I would love to look Reed Weir in the stupid face and tell him I’m remembering how delicious hissister’scunt tasted last night. Not my fault I popped a woodie in the middle of town.

I snicker under my breath.

While I shiver at the delightful daydream, I will my cock to behave. Soon enough, Leila will have my baby, and everyone will know who she belongs to. I just need to be patient.

While I wait, I pull out my phone and settle back to handle some of my own work.

The VPN locks in with a swipe of my fingers. Three firewalls crumble with the efficiency of crumpled tinfoil. My custom OS boots clean. No pings. No alerts. Just code and justice.

Work is definitely easier on my desktop. Punching lines in with my gloves, through a tinted visor is tedious and leaves too many margins open for error, but I’m getting better at it.

I open the secure message thread. Skim the reply.

“Target confirmed. Funds delivered.”

Despite numerous missions with the body on the other end, I tap the tracker feed and pull up the CCTV footage of the Department of Defense. I have to tilt my phone sideways to watch the video of the middle-aged man being escorted out of a glass-paneled office. His lanyard swings wildly as he makes a feeble attempt at resisting. Judging by the splotches of purple bloating his already doughy features, he’s not pleased by the warrant the officers are holding up. His meaty fist waves with righteous indignation, and I wonder where all that zest was when he was selling weapons contracts to paramilitary thugs.

My alert pings an incoming message, but I stay on the video. My need to see my work through has nothing to do with ego — not entirely — I just enjoy watching them get tackled to the ground and cuffed when they try to fight.

This moron just gutted his twenty-year career to fatten up his own pockets. While I appreciate a man who hustles, not at the cost of innocent lives. That’s when I come in and help right the scales.

He sold weapons to bad people.

I sold him out to his enemies and leaked all his naughty behavior to the powers that be.

Circle of life.

My phone buzzes again.

Wesley Halbrook is trying to throw off the three government agents wrestling him to the ground, but I swipe to the message.

A crypto transfer blips across my screen. Six figures. A nice, round number that only makes me happy once I’ve deposited it into Leila and my future fund.

It’s a pretty good number already. Enough that Leila never has to work again if she doesn’t want to. Enough to buy or build a house and raise our family. There’s enough in there to start a whole life together without worrying about a thing.

I shut the phone off and slide it back into my pocket.

The weight of the money is nothing compared to the buzz in my chest. The rush of adrenaline I get after a successful job. The clean digital sweep. The dummy trails. Accounts rinsed and tucked into five offshore vaults no one’s ever going to trace unless they’re me.

It’s damn good work for a gutter kid with barely any education who happened to find a laptop in the trash one day and taught himself how to repair it. From there, it was a matter of learning everything so I could find Leila.

Took a long fucking time, but I never stopped. I dug up every news story, every whisper. I tracked every camera within four hundred meters of her school, the last place she’d gone. I slipped into their database and watched her arrive. I watched her round the corner and walk up the block leading to the main gates. She’d been in her jeans and one of my gray shirts. She went inside and left at three, a little after the final bell.

I watched her jog down the steps and start down the same way we’d taken a million times. All the times I dropped her off and picked her up. I should have been there, waiting in my usual spot by the gates for her. But Everett had broken three of my ribs the night before, and moving...