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“Somebody needs to tell homie that he’s not supposed to chomp on her pussy like he’s eating a goddamn taco.”

“Muthafucka, stay focused,” my best friend, Revere—otherwise known as Rev—chastised through my earpiece. “You’re always getting distracted by some random shit.”

“The way he’s eating her pussy is what’s random,” I muttered, adjusting my binoculars to get a better look at our target’s whack ass mouth technique.

“It’s like he doesn’t know if he wants to lick up or down.

His spit is drowning her. And what the fuck is his tongue searching for? Lettuce and cheese toppings?”

“Cruz is right,” our other friend, Storm, interjected with a laugh. “He’s straight up destroying her shit, and not in a good way. From my vantage point, I know he didn’t land his wife with that sloppy mouth.”

“Nah, he got her ass by buying her from her father,” Titan, the fourth member of our team, answered.

The taco eater, or Jeremy McAllister as we knew him as, was a crooked business tycoon who had his hands in more shit than his gold-plated toilet had seen in a lifetime. Not to mention he had two wives who didn’t know about each other, and he often fucked around on both of them like he was now.

We’d already taken out several of his soldiers who were wearing the typical black and dark green uniform McAllister wanted his men to wear.

And I guess there were worse places to stalk a target than in the mountainy forest in a small Tennessee town on the outskirts of Pigeon Forge. However, it was too cold for my taste.

McAllister’s lodge estate that loomed ahead was deep in the mountains with large windows and every curtain left open in the darkness. Inside, our target sat comfortably oblivious.

A man like that always had security, and our night vision goggles allowed us to see just where each of his men were located.

“Look alive, fellas,” I cautioned. “He’s done eating and he’s about to fuck her.”

I grinned, not because I wanted to see this small-dicked bastard fuck his side piece, but because I couldn’t wait to see his brains plastered across the wall while he was mid-stroke.

Rev and Storm were to the left of the target, while Titan and I were on the right, with Storm covering Rev’s six and Titan covering mine in a formation similar to one you’d see from a military unit.

The atmosphere always felt different during the minutes leading to a kill.

The soothing calm that consumed the air I breathed in around me right before I took a life.

Even now as I stood in the shadows on the property of a grand Tennessee estate deep in the Smoky Mountains and watched my target stumble with the buttons of his dress shirt that he was trying to remove from the large belly protruding over his pants, I felt a sense of peace.

Yet, I couldn’t contain my excitement either.

“Five bills say he can’t reach that last button that’s underneath his belly and he just rips the shit off,” I said.

“Bet,” Storm accepted. “Or maybe he’ll give up on the second to last button.”

“Nah,” Titan added. “He ain’t making it that far. Half his shirt is still buttoned, but he’s already trying to tug the shit off.”

“And his side piece may be flirtin’ wit’ his ass,” Rev added, “but she’s tryin’ not to laugh at him getting stuck in his shirt.”

A low and satisfying chuckle left my throat. I loved this shit. Killing was exhilarating when I was able to complete the task with my closest friends and frat brothers.

Rev, Titan, Storm, and I formed The Paradox, a hitman organization known for our precision, discretion, and ruthlessness. Rev and I had known each other since the sandbox, and when we met Titan and Storm, the four of us immediately clicked.

We didn’t originally set out to take lives for a living, but one job led to another, and before we knew it, we were forming an association outside of our everyday businesses.

For some hitmen in our position, teetering the thin line between right and wrong was an ethical dilemma.

Not for me though. I was born into the world of organized crime, where deep morally gray lines were the only strokes we drew.

I was a Crowne, and having that last name wasn’t something I took lightly regardless of the fact that I didn’t always get as much respect as some of my cousins did.

My family was one of the leaders of Dark Trinity, a criminal world and a necessary force to ensure that despite our different backgrounds in society, we would work together in a diplomatic way.

The crime organization was rooted in an age-old code of loyalty, violence, and silence.

Maybe that’s why I was game when Rev suggested that we form The Paradox.

I was man enough to admit that I always wanted to be accepted by my family in a way that they didn’t comprehend because the truth was, they didn’t understand me.

Most of the time, I was a joke to them. They trusted me to uphold the Crowne name, but from a distance and not in the forefront like some of my cousins and siblings.

Rev had already given me a lifelong friendship, but crossing Omega Theta Tau provided me with a fraternity of brothers who were always by my side, while The Paradox gave me the home I hadn’t known I craved until we built it.

We weren’t in it for the money, me personally fighting a brutal part of my past that made our kills intimate in a way I didn’t often admit out loud to my brothers.

We didn’t trust anyone outside of our circle, so The Paradox only consisted of the four of us.

While we all had different careers, we thrived in darkness together and functioned as one when we had our eyes on a target.

Our unshakable bond was forged in the blood we shed. We trusted each other with our lives, and while we were all equipped with the knowledge needed to complete an entire job on our own, when we were together, every team member had a role to play.

Revere “Rev” Lake was great at navigating the dark web, so he was the one who scheduled and found our jobs.

Ever since we were kids, he’d been hacking into shit on his old, chunky Apple Macintosh Classic, often gaining the attention of some folks far more dangerous than the by-the-book family he’d grown up in.

That’s how he and I got close. Every summer until I was eight, my mom would bring me to Georgia to visit one of her friends. Rev and I met in one of the parks by her house when I was three and hung out every summer.

I wasn’t raised with many of my siblings, so when my mom decided to move to Georgia permanently when I was in middle school, I hadn’t expected to make many friends at all, let alone run into the kid I used to hang out with every summer.

No one understood me like Rev did. I had been embarrassed being held back a grade, but he never made me feel like I was one year older than him, which back then, felt like a much bigger deal when you were in school and was the oldest in your class.

Like many, he’d heard whispers of what my Crowne family was involved in, so when he asked for my help in locating a person trying to blackmail him, I accepted his friendship without hesitation.

Especially since I ain’t know many kids involved in the kind of shit Rev was wit’ his hacking skills.

It didn’t matter that we were young as hell and trying to locate someone who didn’t want to be found, while taking several buses across state lines to find the culprit.

We had each other and that was fine with us.

He was the brother I always wanted, but sometimes, Rev and I got on each other’s nerves.

Back in high school, we’d been fighting over some dumb shit when this dude I’d seen around the block finally called us out on our bullshit and asked if fighting ever got us the resolution we desired in our friendship.

Rev and I had both laughed at his words, but it didn’t take long to realize that Storm Windermere was the voice of reason you needed when your mind was filled with rage.

Storm had a brilliant brain and a philosophical way of thinking.

He didn’t act on violence first, and he was the reason our operations ran flawlessly.

It didn’t matter if it involved surveillance, tech, explosives, or poisons, Storm was gonna outthink the enemy in a masterful way.

He didn’t just see one move ahead. He saw ten.

Which was why it didn’t surprise me when he predicted that we’d all have a bigger purpose in our brotherhood once Titan rounded out our crew.

In all honesty, I hadn’t believed him since Titan had always been that strong, silent type, so the muthafucka didn’t say much.

He could fight though, and not before long, you couldn’t tell any of us shit.

Even when we all got to college, my mouth often got us in trouble, and Titan showed us just how well he could throw punches when we got into a fight with a rival university that landed all four of us in the dean’s office.

Funny enough, my reckless mouth—the same mouth that had started the fight with our rivals—had gotten us out of being expelled.

I was the negotiator of the group with a slick tongue that was my own superpower and aided to my instinct for reading people as I observed how they reacted to my witty remarks. It wasn’t always what you said, but how you said it that got you the desired answer you needed.

At six-foot-five and two-hundred and sixty-five pounds, I was thick-thighed and built like a war machine on the outside.

Because of my upbringing, I was the one with deep underworld connections in The Paradox.

Smugglers, arms dealers, business tycoons, mafia families, political leaders, and crime lords owed me numerous favors that I collected on.

There wasn’t a deal that I couldn’t negotiate, and being a Crowne gave me a certain leverage with our clientele when we found ourselves in a bidding war for a contract kill.