A flash of bright hair catches my eye. A slim figure in a dark coat emerges from behind a pillar, darting toward the train.
The Clemenza. Even in this lighting, he’s pretty.
Pretty like a poisonous snake, I remind myself.
My fellow hunter has spotted him too, moving forward to cut him off before he can reach the train. I’m too far away to stop him physically, so I do the only thing I can.
“Hey!” I holler.
The hooded figure freezes for a split second, long enough for the Clemenza to slip onto the train and the door to slide shut with a definitive hiss. I run down the platform, but the thug is already backing up. He swivels sharply and bolts for the far exit.
He’s not what I’m interested in, anyway. Not right now.
I pull up and lock eyes with the Clemenza through the grimy window. He glances toward the exit where the hooded figure disappeared, then back to me, a tiny crease furrowing his smooth brow as the cogs in his head turn.
That’s the third time I’ve saved him. Once from losing those expensive teeth to concrete. Once from Jesse Foster.
And once from what I assume was an assassin.
I raise a hand in a mocking salute.You’re welcome.A small smile lifts his mouth, transforming him from pretty to a certified heartbreaker. He gives a slight, regal nod.
Nobody smiles at me usually, or not like that. People smile at me the way they might smile at a pet pit bull. Carefully, hoping I won’t bite. So much for my previous assumptions. This Clemenza is the same as the rest: no self-preservation instincts at all.
The train accelerates, carrying him away from me, leaving me staring at an advertisement for some bullshit meditation app promising inner peace. There’s only one wayI’llever get peace.
And for just a second, something in the way the fluorescent lights flicker overhead dredges up that old, dreaded memory. I’m thirteen again, on my knees on the kitchen floor, and the person I’m staring at is leaving me too. A different golden-eyed Clemenza is standing over us both, drenched in blood.
I evaporate the rest of that memory before it can finish. Ineverlet it finish, keep it buried so deep it would take a jackhammer to reach it. I shake it off and take the stairs back up into the cold night, the Clemenza’s smile still burning in my brain.
CHAPTER 5
CALIGULA
The secondI hit send on my text to Jesse Foster, I think I’ve made the wrong decision. The screen goes dark. I put down the phone. And then I go into the dirty, doorless attached bathroom and throw up all that champagne I drank at Kismet.
This shitty hotel room cost me the very last of my cash, and I’m out of the protein bars I lifted at a bodega a few days back. So I’ve made the right call. Theonlycall. After getting chased down into the subway by not one, buttwocrazy fuckers, I’m ready to admit I’m out of options.
Sure, one of them saved me from the other—but there’s no guarantee he was any safer.
I finish communing with the porcelain, rinse out my mouth, and sit back on the bed. I have no other choice. No. Other. Choice. Not if I want to stay alive. And I do, very badly.
My phone buzzes next to me, and I jump about a foot.
Tomorrow 8pm
A location pin follows.
Panic rises, fast as a freight train. Tomorrow night? I’m not ready. Not emotionally, not physically?—
I end up back in the bathroom, dry heaving.
Fantastic.
When the wave passes, I stare into the cracked mirror above the hotel sink as I suck in breath after breath, praying for the nausea to recede. The man in the mirror is a ghost of the person I remember—the one who assumed his Family name was all the armor he’d ever need. But that name has become a stone around my neck, a target on my back.
“You have no other choice,” he tells me.
I don’t bother arguing. He’s right.