Chapter One

THREE MONTHS LATER

My fingers tangle through her silky strands as her body slowly rises and falls. My angel is such a heavy sleeper, which is a dangerous thing. What if there was a fire, carbon monoxide poisoning, or an intruder? I wrap my arms around her tighter, plastering my body against hers as I press my lips to the crown of her head.

She doesn’t need to worry about any of that ever again, not when I’m here.

Three months ago, I almost died. The closest I ever got, for sure. Dominic got my half-jumbled text, and he found me out cold in the middle of the street. He said he tossed me into the car and drove me to our doc, where he worked on me off and on for about a week. I don’t remember any of that week. The only thing I did remember was her.

At the first chance I got, I snuck out from my brother’s watchful eye, and I tracked my angel down. It didn’t take me long. She works at a bar just down the block from that alley, and I followed her back to her apartment, which was another mile down the road.

It took virtually no effort to break into the bar and find the schedule in the back. I memorized it and have been sure to make myself available during all her shifts. She’s so oblivious, it’s infuriating. Every day she walks to and from the bar with those fucking headphones on, her head up in the clouds, not looking around at the countless predators ready to sink their teeth into such perfection like her.

It’s been three months, and she hasn’t met my eye a single time. Not on the way to her work or from. Not when she goes out to lunch with her one and only friend Gabrielle Aranda, and not even when she finishes washing her face before crawling into bed.

I’ve been tempted on more occasions than I can count to show myself to her, allow her to rest easy now that I’m here. I want her to know that I’ll never let anything tarnish her, but I think I like it better this way for now. This way, she can’t fight me, can’t attempt to stop me. I’m free to come and go as much as I please without any protests falling from her ruby-red lips. Lips I’ve savored over and over again when she’s at the deepest part of her REM cycle. The way she doesn’t kiss me back, the way I have to work harder for it only makes me want her more.

Sometimes it seems that I’m too late, though. That the darkness of the world has already marred my precious angel. The whimpers she makes some nights, the scrunching of her nose, and the trembling in her body tell a story deeper than words ever could. It’s a pain only I could ever understand, and the first night I saw it, I knew we were going to be bound to each other for all of eternity. Even if I had to drag her to hell with me.

I allow my fingers to dance over her bare shoulder, skimming over her intricately done tattooed sleeve on her right arm. It’s beautiful, just like her.

My phone, resting on her dresser, flashes to life. Only one person has my number, and he knows not to call me when I’m away unless it’s urgent. So begrudgingly, I release my angel and slip out of bed, grabbing my phone before stepping out into the hall where I can still keep my eyes on her.

“What?” I answer tersely.

“Where are you?” Dominic asks.

“Out.”

“Obviously, why the fuck is your locator off?”

“What do you want, Dominic?”

He huffs in irritation before speaking.

“We have a problem. They are going to take in the manager at the shop in a few hours. He called them about an anonymous tip he wanted to make.”

I fucking knew it.

From the moment Dominic hired him to run the business, I didn’t trust him. I could practically see the words “little bitch” tattooed across his forehead.

I’m seething mad. Not because I need to go take care of this pathetic excuse of a man before he costs us everything, but because this means I can’t stay until the sun comes up with my angel. That’s enough to send me into a blind fucking rage.

Turning to her balcony door, I slip outside before locking it behind me. Normally I would kiss her goodbye, but I’m in no mood. I don’t want her to think I’m upset with her. So I’ll make it up to her tomorrow night and instead focus my rage on the person who deserves it most.

The slamof a car door has me turning my head. A man in a matching skeleton mask walks up to me, clapping his gloved hand on my shoulder.

“You disabled the street cameras and their surveillance system?” I ask.

He nods his head, his eye roll practically visible through the mask.

“Of course. We have one hundred and eighty seconds before the police are notified, two hundred and forty before they get here.”

I step into the unlocked house easily, walking down the hallway and to the right before opening the second door. As soon as Dominic hired this guy, I memorized his place just in case a situation like this came up. I also learned that he has a congenital heart defect, so this will be a lot cleaner than I typically prefer, but given the time crunch we are on, it’ll have to do.

Dominic steps in front of me, always needing to be the one running the show as he grabs Arnold’s face, slapping him awake with the other hand.

“What the hell! What the—oh f-fuck,” he shouts before stuttering to a stop.

Dominic turns his head to the side slightly, his face obstructed by the mask, but based on the chill that runs through Arnold, I’d say it was intimidating enough.

“W-who are you? What do you want?”

“I think you know exactly who we are.” I grin behind my mask.

His eyes flash to me, fear and confirmation practically drowning out his normally murky brown color.

“I-I don’t understand. W-what have I done to you guys? Did someone put a hit on me?”

“Yes,” Dominic says. “The Graves brothers.”

Understanding passes across his face as he tries to run. Dominic overpowers him immediately and slams him back against the bed.

“P-please. It wasn’t personal. I needed the money. A cop came by a few months ago, said if I could ever pass over useful information that I’d be taken care of. I have a sick mom, I was desperate!”

What the fuck?

Dominic and I share a look. That’s not fucking good. Why the hell are cops snooping around our front? We are nothing but an upstanding business to the naked eye. It’s been a useful mechanic shop to launder our money through over the years and we’ve never so much as sneezed out of line there. So what the hell is going on?

“What was the cop’s name?” Dominic asks.

“Sanderson. U-uh…James. Jimmy, I think. Yeah, Jimmy Sanderson.”

I nod at that, tucking away that name for later.

“Thank you. That’s very helpful,” Dominic says.

Arnold exhales in relief, and I can’t hold in my laughter at the fucking idiot. I step up beside my brother, forcing him to release the sad sack of shit on the bed, my gloved hand gripping his neck tightly as I pull out the syringe from my pocket, biting off the cap before spitting it into Dominic’s waiting hand.

Arnold begins to thrash under my hold, but it’s almost too easy to keep the man down. I sink the needle right into his heart, his eyes going wide as I allow my smirk to bleed through in my voice.

“Night, night.”

I push the extremely high levels of potassium in, forcing it directly into his heart and causing his entire body to tighten almost immediately. A little bit of potassium for the average person is no big deal. A good amount of potassium for the average person can be deadly. A lot of potassium directly injected into the heart of someone with a pre-existing heart condition is immediately lethal and just the kind of clean kill we need today.

It will present as a heart attack, and by the time they beat down the door, declare him dead, and get a tox screen, the potassium will be out of his system.

Dominic hands me the syringe cap back, and I place it on the needle before sliding it back into my pocket as we make our way out of the house. My brother glances at his watch as we get to his car.

“With seventeen seconds to spare before the police are notified of the outage.”

“Yippee, what do I win?”

“Your freedom,” he says dryly as he slips into the driver’s seat while I sit in the passenger’s seat. We are gone in seconds, and once we are a few blocks down the road, Dominic does something on his phone, assumingly turning the street cameras back on. I wish I had power at the touch of my fingertips like that.

He weaves in and out of the streets of Seattle with ease as he takes a left toward my warehouse in town. I could have gotten an apartment or a house if I wanted, but this place has a loft upstairs, a place for me to park my car inside, and a hidden room where I have all my toys.

Dominic parks the car outside the door, keeping the car locked as he takes off his mask. Looking at a carbon copy of yourself should be strange, that is if I hadn’t lived with it for the last thirty-one years. We have the same black hair, the same six foot five build, the same sharp chin, and the same dimples when we smile. The only difference is that I have blue eyes, while Dominic has brown.

In identical twins, the odds of having different eye colors are 0.1 percent. Probably the same chance that that set of twins would grow up to be full-fledged mercenaries. Or the same chance that we would turn out semi-normal given our background. Though I think my proclivity for bloodlust and his for overpowering control shot those chances in the face.

“Where were you?” Dominic asks.

I don’t pretend to act stupid because he’s too smart for that, but I’ll also never tell him about my angel. She’s too precious for my brother to lay eyes on. She’s too precious for me to have laid eyes on her, but it’s too late for that.

He clearly understands I won’t be giving him any information, which only confuses him more. His brows furrow as he turns his head to the side.

“What is going on with you? Ever since that night in the alley, you’ve been…off.”

“Worry about who this cop is and why he is looking into a business you guaranteed would be the perfect front, brother.”

His eyes narrow on me.

“It is perfect. There is no way he was telling the truth. Cops don’t just show up to places and try to bribe the manager to give them intel. For all a cop would know, he would be the owner of the place. He was lying.”

I nod. “Well, I trust you to handle it then.”

“Always do,” he mutters.

I roll my eyes at his dramatics before unlocking the car door and throwing it open.

“Text me when we have a job.”

He nods and takes off before I’ve made it inside. I unlock the door and deactivate the security system before grabbing my bike. I walked from here to my angel’s work today, and I could take my car back over there, but I haven’t ridden the bike in a while, and our window is closing on riding weather in Seattle.

Tossing my leg over the two-hundred-and-fifteen horse-powered beast, I race across town toward her apartment. I still have a few more hours before her alarm clock goes off, and I’m gonna savor every fucking second.