Page 18 of The Hitman’s Final Job

“His name is Vaughn Reeves. He’s my best friend’s father.”

Zuza doesn’t give me an ounce of a reaction.

“I’ve known him for thirteen years,” I say. “And I have been—” I swallow hard. “I’ve been in love with him for most of them.”

“Okay,” she says, as if she’s recalibrating everything she knows about the situation. “Okay. So, when you said we can’t kill him …”

I throw one of her fancy cushions at her, not caring if it makes her spill the red wine all over her cream top.

“He’s a good man, Zuza. The contract makes no sense. Who’d want him dead? And why?”

“What do we do now?”

“We can’t go to Draven.”

Zuza tilts her head. “Why not?”

“Because if he did his due diligence and he still put Vaughn on the list, then something is wrong with his process, which means he’s compromised.”

“Or he’s been fed bad intel.” She stares ahead before her eyes meet mine. “Which means someone went to considerable lengths to make that happen.”

“Which makes them more dangerous than a straightforward contract. Someone built a case against Vaughn.” Too restless to keep sitting, I stand up and walk around the couch to pace the area between Zuza’s sitting room and open-plan kitchen. “They constructed something convincing enough to pass Draven’s process. That takes resources and connections. That takes someone who really wants him gone.”

My hair is a mess, and my bow tie has been hanging loose around my neck for hours. The thought that someone wants Vaughn dead this badly makes me feel sick and helpless. I’m the guy who ends people, not the guy who saves them. But now Vaughn is on the wrong side of a kill list and I need to do something, because if I don’t, then whoever went to Draven will go elsewhere. While my work comes with checks and balances, there are a lot of mercenaries out there who don’t care about the why as long as the money shows in their bank account.

“We investigate ourselves,” Zuza says, pulling me out of my head.

“We have to. Just us, Zee.”

She nods. “But we need time to do it properly. Right now, Draven is waiting for confirmation the job is done. If we go dark, he’ll just send someone else.”

The words splash over me like a bucket of cold water, making me shiver even in Zuza’s warm apartment.

I don’t like that I left Vaughn at the hotel. He’s alone there right now, in a city where at least two people arrived tonight with the intention of killing him. I don’t like that he doesn’t know any of this. That someone out there with the right kinds of resources and connections decided he needs to disappear.

“He’s alone,” I say.

“I know, which is why we need to move quickly, but for now he’s safe. No one else but us has the contract.”

“That we know of.” The words come out of my mouth before I can process them. “Fuck. What if the client has hired multiple⁠—”

She stands up and crosses the room to face me. “Stop spiraling and come back to me. No one is stupid enough to do that. It attracts too much attention, especially when most contractors out there are as subtle as an angry wasps’ nest. Let’s buy time with Draven, start our own investigation, and figure out who’s behind this.”

I nod.

She grabs her phone from the kitchen counter and connects the call, putting it on speaker.

It rings twice before Draven’s voice fills the apartment, measured and cool. “It’s late. You better have good news.”

“We have a situation,” she says.

“Define situation.”

“The job isn’t done,” I say.

Silence, and then, “Silas.” Something has shifted in his tone. “Is this you rebelling? Making a point? Trying to give me gray hairs? You agreed to one more job. This is it.”

“It’s not that,” I say. “We were unable to complete the assignment tonight because the target wasn’t alone.”