Page 18 of Ravage

"Your family isn't my concern," I told him through the mask, voice distorted by the leather. "You should have taken the money."

"I couldn't be bought."

"Everyone can be bought. You just valued the wrong things."

The first shot was clean.

Right between the eyes.

He dropped behind his desk, and I thought it was over.

Then I heard footsteps on the stairs.

The wife wasn't supposed to be there.

She was supposed to be three states away, but plans changed.

Bad luck. Wrong place.

She saw me, saw her husband's body, and opened her mouth to scream.

The second shot was messier.

She fell halfway down the stairs, blood spreading across the white carpet.

I stood there for a moment, watching the red seep into the pristine fibers, and felt... nothing.

Just mild irritation at the complication.

But there was another complication I didn't know about.

The girl.

Hiding in the panic room her paranoid father had installed, watching everything through security cameras.

We didn't know about the room until after, when the news reported she'd been found twelve hours later, catatonic, covered in her parents' blood from trying to save them after we left.

My father praised the hit, called it clean despite the complications.

We sat in his office afterward, sharing fifty-year-old scotch.

"Shame about the girl witnessing it," he'd said, swirling amber liquid in crystal. "That kind of trauma... it'll either break her completely or forge her into something dangerous."

"She's fifteen," I replied. "She'll break."

"Maybe. Or maybe she'll become something interesting. Trauma has a way of transforming people, son. Creating appetites they didn't know they had."

I thought he was being philosophical, the way he got when he drank.

Now I realize he was prophetic.

"Are you really waiting for the judge's daughter?" Vincent's voice pulls me back to the present. "That's dangerous, even for you."

"I'm not waiting for anyone," I lie smoothly. "But have Peter and Paul keep eyes on her. Discreetly."

"Why?"

"Call it curiosity. I want to know what kind of woman that fifteen-year-old girl became."