Page 3 of The Hitman's Prince

I hung up and slid my phone back into my pocket, giving Ricardo one last look. Carefully, I moved closer to the body. Morbid curiosity driving me to close the space between us. Vince had shot him clean through the forehead, and when I looked past the blood, most of his face was still intact. His lips gaping open a little, like he’d been about to say something. Groaning, I cursed him under my breath, remembering a conversation we’d had so long ago, I couldn’t remember how many years had passed.

“You take ‘em out,” Ricardo had said to me once. Unprompted and out of context.

I was on my back, tied to his bed with his cock so far up my ass I could taste it. He was on a bender and he’d been fucking me for hours. I was sweaty and bleeding, and not just from the fine lines he’d etched into my chest with a razor blade. I was high on him, drunk on the pain, and equal parts angry for how he used my body while alsosimultaneously grateful. It was the brutality from Ricardo that quieted the noise long enough for me to find peace.

“Two million on the head of whatever son of a bitch puts a bullet in me,” he said.

“What if it’s a knife?” I asked, the words garbled in my throat.

“Then you better skin him alive.”

To demonstrate what he meant, he slipped the edge of his blade beneath my skin. My vision went black and I saw stars; then I came all over myself with a hoarse cry. Ricardo had smeared my cum into the wounds on my chest, then he’d added his to the mix.

After that, he’d left me tied to the bed for two days.

Forgotten.

Vince was the one who found me. He was barely a teenager back then.

He cut me loose, called a doctor, and we never talked about it again. His attitude toward me after that had changed, though, shifting from a cool sort of indifference to a calculated judgement. He would no longer look me in the face or speak my name, and I didn’t blame him. Who knew what I must have looked like when he walked in on me, covered in dried blood and days-old cum. I hadn’t eaten or drank anything. I’d pissed on myself more than once.

It was far from my finest hour.

Without thinking, I rubbed my fingertips over the spot on my ribs where Ricardo hadlong ago peeled my skin back before making me promise to avenge his death. It was a stupid agreement, one I didn’t need to uphold.

He was already getting cold. I should have been pissing in his mouth instead of continuing to do his bidding, but…

For all his cruelty, there was no denying that one time, years ago, he’d been the one to save my life. And even after all the things he’d done to me, the things he’d demanded of me, I was still alive.

And once someone put a matching bullet in Vince’s brain, I’d be free.

Chapter 3

Vince

Iwas not attracted to Bellamy Marchant or any of the four men who frequently took him to bed, but I was very attracted to the way they all loved him. There was something commendable, noble—almost—about the way they fell over themselves to keep him happy, to make him come. Sex was a powerful tool in our world, and Bellamy’s four boyfriends knew how to wield it like a fucking longsword.

Sitting in my father’s office, behind his desk, I found myself thinking about the five of them the new Sinclair-North dynasty and what my part in the world was meant to be. When I brokered a deal with Gideon and Fletcher, I’d never intended to come home afterward and put a bullet through my father’s brain, but his rage at my overstep was insurmountable. He would have killed me, given the chance, so common sense said I had to take the option off the table.

It was what he’d taught me.

I walked my fingers up the arms of his chair—my chair—impressed at how clean Orion had managed to get it. He’d called in professionals, and that explained why the entire room smelled of bleach and lemons. It was borderline sickening, but it would have been too much work to haul decades of my father’s paper records out of the drawers and cabinets to make sense of them elsewhere. Forever antiquated, and now dead, he’d been meticulous with his record keeping, just not technologically forward with it. Burning paper was probably easier, if not far more fragrant, than trying to wipe a computer.

“Do you want me to light a fire?”

I glanced toward the door, finding Orion in the doorway. He was dressed the same as he was the day I’d shot my father, in well-tailored black slacks and a white dress shirt, that ridiculously sexy silver chain peeking out from the side of the collar.

“Why would I want a fire?”

We both looked to the ornate fireplace on the far wall of the office. I traced my finger across my eyebrow, chasing after a phantom itch and wondering if he could read my mind.

“It’s cold in here, Sir.”

I was far from cold, heat radiating out of my chest at the sound of the honorific as it fell out of his mouth. The way he groaned and spread his feet in the doorway as if to brace himself, only confirmed the word had beenan accident. An oversight. That didn’t change how much I enjoyed hearing it.

“Sir?” I repeated it back to him, cocking my head to the side and testing the feel of it between us. “Do you work for me now, Orion? Am I the one in charge of things now?”

He didn’t need to know I felt like a little boy playing dress up, sitting behind daddy’s desk and pretending to be more important than I was. That was a secret I would take to my grave, whenever I was unlucky enough to find myself there. Hopefully many,manyyears down the road.