of people, or a saint who worked his ass off to donate millions to charity.
The facts meant little to me.
All that mattered was that he had a price on his head. Two million dollars to be exact.
The only details that I needed to know were that he was a heavyset middle aged man standing approximately six foot, that he lived in a gated community northwest of Hollow Lake, and that he’d be home for the night after ten p.m., alone in his first floor office where nobody would bother him for some time.
Nobody but me, at least. The man who would kill him. The interloper that couldn’t give a damn about why the bullet should be in his brain, just that it should be there.
And it was.
At fifteen minutes past ten, Liam took his final breath, his brain worse for the wear, a small hole at his right temple that led to a much larger one on his left.
By all accounts, Liam had been depressed, had held the weapon himself, had gunpowder residue on his hand to prove it. His body was left slumped at his desk.
I was nothing but a ghost, an unseen force that guided his hand. And I would have remained just that if his daughter hadn’t come to check on him shortly after I closed the window.
It was stupid for me to turn back when I heard her voice. I knew better. I never get involved. She was a detail I didn’t need to know.
But still, the scream that left her throat stopped me in place, the agony pouring out of her when she called her father’s name caused me to spin to look at her.
Breath leaked out of me, a white gust against the cold night air.
I wasn’t sure what I recognized in her that trapped me in the shadows to watch her for the first time, but that moment was the beginning of a mistake - the end of a life lived without concern for another person.
It was the first night I saw her, and the last I had the ability to walk without guilt for what I’d done.
Adeline Kane was sixteen years old when I first found her, a vision with raven black hair and skin so pale she would glow beneath moonlight. She had crystal blue eyes and red lips that defied every shade a lipstick could provide. And she had the bone structure of an angel, not the round cherubic type, but the ones fallen from Heaven and designed solely to punish a man’s soul.
I didn’t want to know she was an artist who preferred tragedy to romance.
It shouldn’t have mattered that she felt most comfortable when she was alone.
It wasn’t in me to care that she’d lost her mother only months before I killed her father and that she was the heir to the small fortune they left behind.
All that concerned me in the years I watched her was that she’d fractured the night her father died, that I’d left her at a moment when her life would spiral out of control. That I felt responsible for the girl becoming a woman. And that she pulled at something inside me I had never known before.
I was ten years older than her.
A trained killer.
A skilled assassin.
But I became one more thing on the night I first saw her:
A stalker.
A constant shadow.
And the man that would protect her from the world.
. . .
The last place I want to end up on a Saturday night beneath a full moon and shrouded in the first flurries of snow is outside a nightclub.
I can’t stand these types of places. Always with the garish lights, thumping music and pungent scent of youthful hormones mixed beneath a layer of alcohol and cigarettes. I’ve avoided the cramped quarters and brush of sweaty bodies for many years.
Only she can bring me to a place like this, The Black Orchid, a club that caters to those with a penchant for the macabre.
I have to admit, it isn’t your typical nightclub. The interior is designed to mimic a dungeon, the exterior a facade of fake stone like the walls of a castle. Every person standing in line is dressed in black on black, some pretending they’re vampires, others too stupid to know that fantasy is always more convenient than reality.
Yet, here I am, standing near a small tree planted in the center of a sidewalk, my shoulder leaning against the iron cage that circles it, my eyes set on a newly