She studied him, wishing like hell she’d figured him out sooner. “You don’t care whether or not this Langston guy is innocent?” She tried to sound detached, apathetic, while her insides twisted at the mention of Hugh’s name.
“Last chance,” he reiterated, returning his hands to his lap.
The client definitely had an ulterior motive. And her boss…was he in on it?
During her twelve years with P.I.E. they’d never talked much about Veilers. Funny, she thought, staring him right back in the eye—something that made up such a big component of her occupation was the subject least talked about. Instead, they all carried out their jobs without examination.
“Can I ask you a question?” she ventured.
“You can.”
“Have you ever met a Veiler you liked?”
The slits of his eyes narrowed further and while slight, his eyebrows furrowed, causing a wrinkle above his nose. She’d caught him by surprise. Seconds ticked by before he shifted his weight to the side of his high-back leather chair.
“Yes.”
An honest answer, she surmised by his contemplation, and one that scared the hell out of her.
Two days later, a cool breeze wafted in through the bedroom window as Tess sat motionless in the middle of the floor. Her legs were crossed, hands on her knees, back straight, head forward. She stared at a tiny speck on the wall beneath the open window.
She took a cleansing breath in. Held it, slowly let it out. Repeated this for the umpteenth time. The wind picked up outside, the Santa Ana breezes stirring up pollen, dust and trouble. The unsettling air tore her attention away from the focal point she’d tried to maintain for the last twenty minutes.
Trouble. She was shoulder-deep in it.
The digital numbers on the clock next to her bed said 8:26. Three hours and thirty-four minutes until Friday. Not that she was counting.
The elimination she’d been assigned to take over for Francesca turned out to be more difficult than she thought. It had taken the entire allotted time. Not because she’d lost her touch. No. She was still the best goddamn eliminator out there. She could have had the deed done in the first few hours. No one would have been the wiser. There was just one problem.
She didn’t want to do it.
She couldn’t bring herself to kill him.
The him was a forty-something working-class man and demon. He owned his own business, had a family and yes, had done some nasty things.
But he wanted to change.
When Tess had caught him earlier that evening in the act of stealing a man’s soul in the alley behind his small Italian restaurant, he’d slumped to the ground and confessed his sins…
“I can’t help myself, Tess. I want to better myself and what better way than taking the good I see in others?”
“You’re killing innocents, George,” she answered.
“I know,” he groaned, “I’m cursed. If my wife finds out, she’ll divorce me. My kids won’t want to see me. I’ve been trying to stop, really I have, but the devil won’t let me. Says I traded my soul to marry the love of my life.”
She looked down at him, his potbelly stomach hanging over his belt. “Did you?”
“Of course I did. But that’s beside the point.”
“What’s the point then?”
He pushed himself up against the brick wall, but still his double chin was evident. “True love.”
“Come again?”
“I want to be a better man for my wife. I want the goodness in me to overcome the demon. To beat it. What the hell did I know twenty years ago when I agreed to the deal? All I knew was that I was madly in love and would do anything to marry her.” He took a deep breath, looked up at her with reminiscent eyes. “There was another man, you know. A better man than me. He had money. Lots of it. She would have left me for him.”
Tess felt sorry for the guy. “How do you know?”
“Just a feeling I had. In case you haven’t noticed, I still don’t have much self confidence.”
“So you bargained with the devil.”
“She was my sunshine, my rainbow on a cloudy day. The way her eyes sparkled made me weak in the knees. She laughed at all my jokes. Liked her pizza the same way I do. Zucchini and pineapple.”
“Yuck.” Tess liked her pizza with mushrooms and red onions.
“I had to have her. It would have killed me if she walked away. So you see, I had no choice.” There was no mistaking the sadness in his voice.
“There’s always a choice,” she replied.
One of the cooks poked his head out the screen door. “We’re getting low on provolone, boss. You want I should switch the special to mozzarella?”
“Sure,” George answered. “Whatever you think.”
The screen slammed shut with a thud. George flinched.
As usual, Tess didn’t know who had put the hit out on George, but she wasn’t sure he deserved to die. Be punished, yes. Stealing souls was so not okay. But however messed up his reasons were, they were sort of unselfish. He did it for love. Yes, he cheated and molded his wife’s free will to fit his own desires, but love made people do stupid things. And the marriage was still working and they had children together.
Still, she had a job to do and it was now or never.
His head lolled forward into his hands. Perfect. She couldn’t ask for a better position. She pulled out the small sword from underneath the back of her shirt, knowing it would take all of two seconds to slice it through his neck and be done with it.
There was just one problem. When she lifted the sword ready to swing, her arms started to shake, sweat dripped from her temples, and her conscience screamed for her to pause, to think about what she was about to do. The man was hopelessly in love. She couldn’t fault him that.
But this wasn’t about him.
It was about her.
She didn’t want to kill anymore. Regardless of what George had done or if his sins were pardonable, she didn’t want to be the one to end his life. She didn’t want blood on her hands anymore. She had a choice to make and she wanted to stop. Stop eliminating.
He looked up and his eyes bugged out, his mouth opened wide, beads of sweat trickled down the side of his face. “What are you doing?”
Tess lowered the sword. She grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him up. “Listen carefully,” she demanded, pushing his back against the wall. “Someone wants you dead. You need to call up the Devil and make a new deal. Plus, you need to get out of town. For good. And when you leave you need to promise me no more soul stealing. I know people who can keep tabs on you and if I find out you’ve stolen another soul, I’ll tell the Devil myself to take care of you. Do you hear me? Can you do that?”
“I-I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“Wrong answer. You don’t have a choice. It’s the Devil or me. Take your pick.” She lifted the sword and hoped since she was currently George’s most pressing threat, he’d wise up. He didn’t know she had no intention of killing him.
He shook, blinked a hundred times, worried his bottom lip. For a demon, he sure was a wuss.
“Wait.” He raised his arm in defense. “I can do that.”
She pressed her arm against his chest. “You sure? Because if I let you go, I could be dead.” Fuck. What was happening to her?
“I got it.” He pushed back, finally showing some backbone. “That soul I just took must be working. I won’t let you down.”
Sirens blaring in the distance brought Tess back to the present. God, she hoped George had kept his word and left town.
She glanced back around her bedroom and her thoughts shifted to San Diego. There hadn’t been time to get there, and now she wondered if she really wanted to. Hearing George’s devotion to his wife had sent her mind reeling in a direction she’d tried hard the past two days to forget.