Page 4 of The Hitman's Prince

“I serve the good of the family,” he said.

“I don’t appreciate word games.”

“Yes, Sir,” he whispered.

“You don’t sound sure.”

“Do you want me to light a fire?” he asked again, flexing his hands at his sides. How long had they been balled into fists? Did he want to hit me? I wouldn’t have blamed him. He’d been at my father’s side for years and I’d come treacherously close to murdering them both. A double funeral would have been fitting, considering the nature of their relationship.

I didn’t know yet what I wanted my relationship with Orion to be like. His loyalty to me remained untested, and putting a gun to his head while fucking his throat was far from enough to be certain.

Sex was control, after all.

I remembered Orion tied to my father’s bed, debased and bleeding, covered in his own piss, near delirious fromdehydration and malnourishment. I’d never brought that night up to him or my father, and I wondered sometimes…how much he remembered. If he recalled the things he’d told me as I gingerly worked to free his wrists and his ankles, his thighs, his balls.

Sex was power.

But power had nothing to do with loyalty and even less to do with trust.

“Light a fire,” I said.

Orion rubbed a finger over his collarbone, then confirmed the instruction with a sharp nod. I leaned back in the chair molded to a body that wasn’t mine, watching the way his pants stretched across his ass when he sank down into a squat to fuss with the gas knob. It wasn’t long before a fire sparked to life, casting long and foreboding shadows across the room. As soon as the heat reached me, I realized Orion had been right.

It was cold.

Fucking fall.

“What would you do if I asked you to put your hand into the fire?” I asked him quietly.

He heard me, shoulders going tense. “Are you asking me to do that?”

“Not yet,” I said.

Orion didn’t look at me when he answered. “I would.”

“Why?”

“Because you told me to,” he answered.

“Blind loyalty doesn’t count for shit.”

He straightened his neck, then stood. His hands wereloose at his sides now, fingers long and elegant. I’d never seen them curled around the handle of a knife, the trigger of a gun. But everything about Orion was attractive to me, the competence of him most of all. Even though I didn’t know the depths or the secrets of their professional or their private relationship, it made me angry my father had mistreated him for so many years. Made me angry that was the first thing I did to him. There was no way that one encounter I’d walked in on been a once-off, and there was no way consent had been involved, beyond this broad and unsure kind Orion offered me now to placate me.

“Blind loyalty isn’t driven by emotion or need.” He turned toward me and slid one of his hands into the pocket of his slacks. “Emotion muddies motives. It complicates things.”

I thought again of Bellamy Marchant and the legions of men who’d tried to use him and failed, because the muddied emotions of two men who’d never understood the power at their disposal.

“You’re not wrong there,” I murmured.

Orion regarded me warily, and for the first time I wondered just how deadly his blind loyalty to my father would turn out to be for me.

Chapter 4

Orion

It became our little routine.

Every night, I would find Vince in the office, his stare loosely focused on a piece of paper, or the wall, or out the window. I would come in and ask him if he wanted me to light a fire. Sometimes we would banter about it, sometimes he said yes, and sometimes he said no. Every time, I wondered if it was going to be the last time. He didn’t know he was on a fourteen-day countdown, or if he did, he never let on.