His Princess (A Royal Romance)(108)

Oh, lovely.





11





Quentin





I pace around my basement, trying not to rip the shelves off the walls and kick toolboxes across the room. I want to tear it all down with my bare hands.

Never in my life have I cared about things like this. To me a woman was a lay; no girl ever held my attention after I came. I’m used to being gone the next morning, anyway. There’s always another job, another contract, someplace to go, something to do.

Now I’m staring down the barrel of a life—if I even have a chance to live it—without purpose. It’s been that way ever since the last contract but now it’s in sharp focus. What am I? What am I doing?

“What did you think you were going to do, Quentin? Play house?”

Pacing around the room, I have to think, yeah, exactly that. I never thought about kids before—if you’d asked me a few weeks ago I’d have considered the entire idea absurd. How could I even think about having children? The longest stretch I’ve ever spent in one place can’t have been more than a month or two.

Yet here I am, thinking about the future.

“You have no future,” I tell myself.

No man hunted by Santiago de la Rosa has a future. The Knight of Tears never misses his mark, never fails his mission. He will make my end torturous and brutal.

The worst part?

I deserve it.

I don’t belong here, in this place. Stranger in a strange land, that’s me. I feel dirty, tainted, for the first time ever. It’s Rose, and her family, and this life I see around me. Worrying about where cars are parked, what’s for dinner, when to mow the grass. It’s like an entirely different planet.

I didn’t know how dirty I was until Rose showed me what it was like to be clean.

When I look at my hands all I can see is the blood. How many people died at my hand? How much suffering have I inflicted? It’s easy to shift the blame. If I didn’t take those contracts, someone else would have.

Santiago taught me that death is an art, killing is a vocation. Poisons, sniping, hand-to-hand, knife play, I learned it all at the hands of an expert sadist. I made it quick whenever I could, but when you owe the wrong people money or snitch or do something that justifies suffering in the eyes of the criminal fraternity, the contract calls for more than death.

How many times did I deliver that? Is that all I am? An instrument of misery? An extension of evil people, to be used for evil ends?

It’s not like it matters. You bathe in blood for years, it soaks down to your bones. You’re not getting out of it. There is no cleaning it off, or cleaning it out. It doesn’t matter what I do with my body, my soul is dirty, soiled to the core.

Up until a few days ago I didn’t care.

You never forget your first. I was sixteen years old. Santiago raised me from when I was twelve. My parents died. I don’t know the details, only that they were murdered. That information was kept from me.

I know there’s a reason and the knowing gnaws at me, like a bird pecking my liver.

I never learned the man’s name, what he did, or why someone would pay enough to end his life that Santiago de la Rosa would take the contract. To me he was a pudgy middle-aged man in a chair with a bag on his head.

Santiago stood behind him, watching me. I couldn’t even see his eyes—his mask covers them with a pair of reflective lenses. He always wore a plain black mask that tucked down under the crisp collar of his dress shirt. I never saw him in less than the finest suits and formalwear, always immaculately clean and pressed so the creases had edges as sharp as the knives he kept in a padded leather case.

Santiago held out a suppressed pistol in his gloved hand, and I took it.

“Shoot him,” he said. He has an accent but no one can place it. It might be a blend of accents from other languages, places he’s been or trained. It might be to throw people off.

My palms sweated against the wooden grips, the checkering digging into my palm as I tightened my fingers around it. I snapped the safety off and slowly slipped my finger inside the trigger guard, as gingerly as if I’d never done it before. The trigger had three grooves on it.

“What did he do?”

“It doesn’t matter. The contract was offered, an advance was paid. If you don’t pull the trigger, I will.”

I aimed, and pulled it.

It wasn’t clean. I flinched. Santiago took the gun from my hand and fired twice more, and did it properly.

“What now?”

“Now we’re going to get rid of the body.”

My eyes snap open and I jerk to my feet, scrubbing at my face. I haven’t slept since I talked to Rose last night. The buzz is gone but I can still feel the bottle of Jack sloshing around in my guts, trying to burn its way out. Fuck it, I need pancakes or something.

There was only one person back then who could give me any comfort. I ran to her right away. Santiago knew it, the son of a bitch, and he used it later.

I lurch into the car and pull out. As I drive by the house I imagine the curtains fluttering, picture her standing there watching me pass. She probably hates me now, and with good reason.

You are such an *, Quentin Mulqueen.

I should be obeying all traffic control devices and driving five under the speed limit. The last thing I need is some local cop pulling me over and putting a blip in the system. That’ll bring Santiago down on me like ringing a bell. I should leave everything, even the car—go now, just put as much distance between myself and these people as I can.