Page 26 of Reaper's Desire

What did he see when I told him my name?

I don't have an answer.

And lying here in the darkness, in a beautiful suite overlooking the Aegean Sea, thousands of miles from home and everyone I know, I can't shake the feeling that I'm missing something that might change everything.

8

JULIAN

I've made a decision.

It's the only way.

The laptop screen glows blue in the darkness of my hotel room, casting shadows across my hands as I type. Credit card transactions scroll past—a luxury hotel in Santorini, a restaurant reservation for one at a cliffside café, a cabana rental for the beach tomorrow. She's making this easy for me. Too easy.

Isabelle Montague doesn't know how to disappear. She's never had to learn, and she has no reason to think that she needs to now. She's a girl who's spent her entire life wrapped in wealth and privilege, protected by her father's name and money, never once considering that someone might be tracking her movements through the digital breadcrumbs she leaves everywhere she goes.

Her Instagram is public. Posted two hours ago is a photo of the Aegean Sea at sunset, the sky lit up in shades of orange and pink. The caption readsFinally feeling freewith a white heart emoji. The location tag says Santorini.

I close the laptop and lean back in my chair, pressing my palms against my eyes until I see stars.

Finally feeling free.

She has no idea. No fucking idea that freedom is the one thing she'll never have again. Not while I'm alive. Not while the contract exists. Not while the New York mafia family that ordered her death is waiting for confirmation that the job is done.

My phone buzzes on the desk with an encrypted message. I know who it is before I even look. It's Maddox. I pick up the phone, my jaw tight, and open the message.

Status update required. Are you confirming the contract?

My fingers hover over the screen. I could tell him the truth—that I fucked the target twice, that I had my hands around her throat and couldn't finish the job. That I can't imagine Isabelle Montague, so full of life and fire, dead with her eyes blank, bleeding out onto concrete or sand or wherever she's standing when the bullet goes through her skull.

I could tell the truth and be dead within days.

Instead, I type:Tracking target. She left the country. Currently in Santorini, Greece. Will complete contract within the week.

The response comes almost immediately.

Call me. Now.

Fuck.

I stare at the message for a long moment, then stand and move to the window. Maddox answers on the second ring.

"Julian. Should I be concerned?"

"No." I keep my voice flat, professional. "The target moved. I'm following."

"So you're confirming the contract?"

My chest tightens. I remind myself that if I don't do it, someone else will. If I don't kill her, we'll both be dead. What'sthe point of that? What in the fucking Romeo and Juliet do I think would be accomplished by dying with her?

I'm not that sentimental, and if I ever have been, it died with the last person I cared about.

"Yes." I bite the word out. "I'm confirming the contract. I'll have Isabelle Montague dead within the week."

If anyone is going to kill her, it's going to be me,a small, sick voice whispers in my head. One that can't imagine anyone else taking her life, just like I can't imagine anyone else touching her after the way I fucked her.

"And you say she moved?"