Hit or Miss, to Kill or Kiss - Romeo Alexander

Clay

Blood.

The smell of it never quite got any easier to deal with. Despite the number of times Clay had smelled it in his career, he could never rid himself of the natural recoil he felt deep in his guts. It was as though some instinctual part of him, etched into his genes shirked from being around the iron-rich smell of someone’s lifeblood. The smell hung thick in the motel room as he crouched beside the dead man.

The best he could manage was to ignore his own instincts as he hooked a finger under the dead man’s chin and turned his face toward him. Clay’s dark eyes swept over the man’s features, his gloved fingers pressed to the unmoving throat. The man was dead, but Clay didn’t like to leave loose ends. He closed his eyes, ticking away the seconds silently as he waited, feeling no pulse against his fingertips.

His work was clean. The job had been easy, perhaps a little too easy for Clay’s taste, but that came with the territory. Uriel had always told him that an easy job was one done perfectly, but Clay hadn’t always agreed with his mentor. An easy job felt cheap, too easy, nothing to whet the desire for something better. He might be an assassin, a wetwork specialist, whatever someone might want to call it, but damn it, he craved at least something resembling a challenge.

Bloodlust? Maybe. Or he was just a man with specific skills who wanted to flex them to the limit once in a while. Clay had given up moralizing over what he did, at least to a certain extent. It had been years since he’d questioned the blood on his hands, and that was all due to Fate.

Fate was a fickle mistress to most, but Clay demanded everything from the woman who handled his contracts. It was stupid for a hired gun to care about the morality and state of his target, even Clay knew that, but he held to it. Principles meant so little in the modern world, especially for a hitman. Still, he refused to lose that last piece of his humanity.

Let the rich and famous hire others who would kill without regard. Clay refused to kill those whose hands were clean, even relatively so. Leave the cheaters, the scammers, the greedy, to their own devices. Clay craved the men and women who used the blood, sweat and tears of others to further themselves. Child slavers and rapists, peddlers of flesh and drugs, those who were soaked in the blood of their fellow man to get ahead. Those were the ones Clay desired the most, the ones he sought to find on the other end of his blade, or at the receiving end of a bullet.

It was easy to tell himself that these were the same people who had the most security and constant protection at all times. The sort who could afford hired men and women, who killed for money. Those with the best defenses, the ones who would challenge him the most. It wasn’t morality, it wasn’t ethics, it wasn’t the last screaming kicks of his humanity, refusing to go down easy.

It was simply professional interest.

His work was done. Clay pushed against the ground, careful not to stain his gloves, and took to his feet. There was nothing left for him in the tight confines of the motel room. Dead men told no stories, and they almost never gave up their secrets. Then again, he had been hired to deliver what would be a blatant murder, and one from a killer who knew what they were doing.

No one had seen him arrive, and no one would see him leave. The cut had been quick and clean. The man had probably had little time to understand what was happening before his life drained out of him. A simple drive of the blade between the man’s ribs as he’d stooped over to grab the remote for the TV. The dead man had never seen Clay, had never heard him. Death had entered his rented room, and the man had never known. He had gone into the void confused as his punctured heart gave out.

Clay stared down at the body and gave a thought to what the official line would be once the murder was discovered. The victim was, by public account, a small-town businessman who traveled to build contracts and keep relations with partners. As far as Clay knew, even the dead man’s wife wasn’t aware of the