Free Hit Man: A Bad Boy Romance (Hunted, Book One) by Kira Matthison

Chapter 1
Jack
    “ Y ou’ll get the second half on completion.” The man standing in front of me held out an envelope. His eyes tracked it as I slipped it into the inner pocket of my suit jacket. They were pale eyes, giving nothing away, set in a face as still as death. He was the sort of man most people would fear.
    Most people knew nothing about the world. This man wanted a job done, and would play straight with anyone who did it. It was the man behind him who worried me, the one skulking in the shadows in the expensive suit. Adrian Witte. He thought he was anonymous, his clean features shrouded in darkness, but after the first of these meetings, it hadn’t taken much for me to figure out who he was. From the fact that he wanted to hide, from the fact that he was pushing the details of the hit off on someone else, I knew he was one of the worst kinds—the kind that can’t stand violence, but want to be known for it. They might start weak, but they all end up cruel, and more often than not, they end up powerful with it.
    The world isn’t fair.
    I told myself not to care. I had a reputation: I was the man who took down the worst of the worst. Trained by the SEALs. Forged on battlefields most people had never heard about. A living weapon, my crew fallen one by one. All I had left was to carry on their legacy here, on home soil. Wherever the worst of humanity hid, I could find them. I could take them out. Even if I was usually hired by people just as bad, it didn’t matter to me. Chances were, someone would hire me to off them sooner or later. I said the world isn’t fair, and it isn’t, but what goes around, comes around—and I help it come around.
    “Details.” The man arranging the deal held out a folder and waited for me to open it. “Go out only after the man in the picture comes out. The rest is the blueprints you requested.”
    “No after-construction changes?” I gave a cursory glance at the photo and began to flip through the blueprints. In buildings this large, someone invariably made changes.
    “A few panic rooms.”
    I nodded, continuing my scan. That should hardly impede my plans. The apartment was on the eighteenth floor, and registered only to Adrian Witte’s company, Witte International.
    “We’ll make sure she’s alone.” The intermediary’s tone was almost bored, and he was already turning away as my head snapped up.
    “She?” They’d been unusually close-mouthed about who they wanted me to kill, and this was the first, intriguing detail.
    He paused, and I saw Witte freeze as well.
    “Is that a problem?” The intermediary spoke delicately.
    “Not…precisely.” I felt a stab of interest. Very few of humanity’s worst were women—or, at least, very few of those were the sort I was hired to take out. To have a woman rise so far in the underworld was rare, and it meant she was likely more dangerous than either of the men here realized. “You can ensure she’ll be alone?” If not, I was going to have to rethink my entire strategy.
    “We can.”
    “You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure she won’t have her own guards?” Men like this were used to the world bending over backward to accommodate them. They didn’t understand those who’d had to fight for everything they got—as women in crime syndicates invariably did.
    But the man’s lips quirked, as if at some private joke. “She’s not going to have any guards.”
    Behind him, in the shadows, Witte was laughing as well. It was not a pleasant laugh, and I felt unease flicker through me. If they were so sure she wasn’t that sort of threat, why was I here?
    My clients had their reasons. I shoved away the thought and looked at the name typed in block letters at the top of the file: L. THOMAS.
    “Fine.”
    “You’re sure it won’t be a problem?” The intermediary echoed the tone of my question, almost mockingly, but I knew that tone: the sharp, biting questions meant to cloak someone’s own uncertainty. I’d seen it