Retribution Read online

  Retribution

  Evelyn Drake

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  1

  Steve

  W ith a long hiss, Steve released the breath he’d been holding. Despite the night air’s crisp chill, he let go of his long-range sniper rifle with one hand in order to wipe beads of sweat from his brow. He was aware of how his heart pounded in his chest, and the irony was not lost on him .

  When faced with ending a man’s life, nothing would change about him. Not his heart rate, not his body’s temperature, and not his ability to think. But watching Michael make a ten foot leap onto the side of the three-story mansion, with only the aid of the crawling vines to hold him up, had Steve’s heart pounding against his ribs .

  “What the fuck’s wrong with me?” He refocused his attention, amazed that Michael had already managed to climb nearly all the way to the mansion’s roof in the few seconds that Steve had looked away. He knew that he shouldn’t have been amazed. After watching Michael for nearly three months, he knew very well the gravity defying acrobatics and maneuvers that Michael was capable of .

  The man was fearless. Steve had seen Michael climb buildings by leap frogging back and forth between two walls. He’d seen Michael jump from one rooftop to another with a sure death waiting below if he’d missed his landing. And, he’d seen Michael traverse obstacles in a blink of an eye with grace and sure-footed agility, spaces that would have taken other men ten minutes to work around .

  Yet Steve was going to kill him .

  The order hadn’t come yet. But he knew it would. It was just a matter of time .

  After serving as a Marine for eight years, Steve had been left unsuitable for any type of normal work. In the first year after he’d left service, he’d broken a co-worker’s jaw when he’d thought the man was reaching for a gun behind his back. Instead, the mug of coffee the man had been reaching for was left unscathed, while the man himself had to have his broken jaw wired shut for months .

  That had been only the first of many overreactions, each one seeming to escalate the direness of Steve’s situation. Finally, prison time had seemed Steve’s surest future. That’s when Operations had stepped in. They gave him a choice: work for them or they would make sure that Steve got the maximum penalty possible, with further troubles ready inside the prison walls .

  Steve had known a secret. He would have come to work for them without the strong arming. They simply needed to ask. The blackmail tactics hadn’t been necessary .

  He was a killer. It was all he was good for, and there was no escaping Operations, even if he’d had another future to go to .

  But sitting seventy-five feet in the air in an oak tree three times older than he was, touching the edge of the wilderness in the northern parts of Washington state, Steve didn’t want the order to kill Michael. Even though the man was a thief, he was not a stress on the world. He was beauty in motion. He was fluid, able to bend in any situation as if he were born for that moment .

  Steve envied him. He envied him with an ache that hurt. Steve was like the unbending oak within which he perched. Michael was like the rain that fed it. Strong but rigid, the oak could be broken. But nothing could stop the rain .

  Refocusing, Steve watched as Michael made it to the mansion’s rooftop. There, in a tuxedo that looked as crisp and clean as if it had just been tailor made, Michael ran across the rooftop. There was a half-circle balcony with French doors inset into the roof. He vaulted over the four-foot wrought iron railing like a gymnast, with one hand on the railing and his legs lifted in unison to one side .

  Steve watched Michael reach inside his dinner jacket and crouch in front of the doors, picking the lock. The doors swung open twenty seconds later, and Michael stepped into the room’s darkness .

  “Fuck!” The glow of a cigarette lit the darkness behind where Michael had disappeared. Steve’s heart stopped beating, and he moved his finger to his rifle’s trigger as his eye registered the glint of a gun in the cigarette man’s hand. Steve didn’t have any kill orders, and he didn’t have any protection orders. He was to watch Michael, and that was all. Yet his finger remained on the trigger of his rifle .

  Two bodies exploded from the darkness, locked in a dance that would turn into a death struggle as one of the men fell over the wrought iron railing, only to hold on, dangling on the steep roof. Michael stood victorious, the cigarette man’s gun held in his hand and pointed right at the other man’s head .

  “Do it. Do it!” Steve chanted, knowing what the outcome would be. Michael’s entire existence hinged on the cigarette man not being able to ID him, never mind the risk of the rest of the mansion’s security being alerted to Michael’s nefarious activities .

  Michael slung the gun, sending it sailing into the night sky to fall somewhere in the cultured shrubs below .

  “Fucking idiot!” Steve swore. He watched Michael vault over the balcony’s railing again and run over the rooftop with the same ease as if he were running on a world-class racing track .

  Behind him, the cigarette man struggled to pull himself up the roof’s steep slope with the help of the railing .

  Exhaling, Steve waited for the space between heartbeats and then he took the shot. A single, silent bullet, and the man whose life Michael had spared fell dead to the ground below .

  There had been no orders. The kill had been Steve’s and Steve’s alone, and he added it to the small group of souls who were his singular burden to carry—a subset of the many, many souls whose lives had ended by his hand but by another’s word .

  Steve didn’t even notice the weight of the new soul’s addition. The weight of losing Michael before he had to would have been far greater .

  Steve watched, only half seeing, as Michael scaled the mansion’s wall onto a large balcony with open doors that showcased the high-class party inside. In the moment before Michael would have become visible to any other party goers, Michael’s partner, Shaun, distracted two men with a heated and animated debate as Michael touched down behind them. There, with a hand sliding down his clothes to unnecessarily straighten them, Michael joined in the lively conversation with an ease that implied that he had been there all along. As soon as the two men turned their backs, Michael stole a kiss from Shaun, and the two men joined the rest of the party inside, only to leave the mansion through its mighty front doors within minutes later .

  Steve was sure his own jet-black hair was sporting newly sprouted gray hair, all thanks to Michael .

  “What the fuck are you doing up there?” a voice hissed up at him from the ground below .

  Glancing around the large tree limb he was sitting on, Steve could see Charlize looking up at him, her face haloed with golden hair pulled back in a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. She’d been his partner since he’d joined Operations, the covert agency unknown to all but a select few within the government .

  “I’ve been looking for you of the last forty-five minutes! You left the surveillance van again .”

  The weariness of having been up thirty-six hours finally crashed over Steve. He’d left the
van over 100 meters away from the mansion and had traveled to this location through the woods. It was how he did things, whether Operations objected or not. The heavy-handed agency could “force” him to work for them, but they couldn’t force him to follow their protocols .

  “Monica’s screaming for blood—your blood. Did the mark retrieve the package ?”

  The mark , Steve mused without humor .

  “Michael was intercepted during the retrieval attempt. I’m not sure that he was able to get the package. As for Monica, she can go fuck herself .”

  “You going soft on me, Turney?” Charlize asked, keeping her voice low but not bothering to whisper .

  Steve started the careful descent down from the tree, grunting as he went while picturing in his mind’s eye how Michael would do it in a seemingly effortless eye blink .

  “No, I’m not going soft ,” he finally answered after reaching the ground. He heard a leaf snap in the distance and swiveled his hips and shoulders in the sound’s direction, catching the sudden look of uncertainty in Charlize’s eye when he did. Accepting that the noise had been the product of a ground squirrel or some other small animal, Steve moved more slowly when he turned to face Charlize once more. The momentary flash of fear he’d seen in Charlize’s eye was now gone, but the memory of it burned bright enough—and it fed the self-loathing that he carried with him every waking moment .

  During his time with Charlize, he’d seen many of her looks. Over their years together, he’d seen desire, passion, and finally pleasure. But it was only the look of fear that remained now. His eyes dropped of their own accord to her neck, remembering the marks he’d left there from when he’d strangled her in his sleep, and he saw the color of her cheeks deepen even in the low light offered by the moon .

  “That was a long time ago,” Charlize said, her voice low with grief, regret, and even a little bit of embarrassment .

  Steve reached a hand for the back of her neck, meaning to rub her stress away as he’d done so many times before, but she pulled away as his hand neared. It was a movement that caused the knife in his belly to tear itself through another quarter turn .

  He hadn’t been with another woman since. Charlize was the most capable, self-assured, and talented woman he knew. And he’d almost killed her. She’d come to struggling to breathe .

  But there she was, still struggling beneath him as her nails scratched his hand and arms until they were slick with blood. Even when he’d come back to his senses, he didn’t feel the pain. He’d thought it was her blood at first. She’d done everything she could to wake him from his night terror, and none of it had worked. In the end, he didn’t know what had brought him back .

  Their affair had ended, and their blooming love for each other got snuffed out in the last moments of her ending life. It had already died by the time new air reached her lungs to refresh her body .

  I did this to her. It was his private, tormenting mantra, and it sounded in his head every time he caught a flash of memory of what he’d done to her. He hated himself, reviled himself. He didn’t simply wish himself dead. He wished his existence obliterated, as if he had never existed .

  But that wasn’t a kill order anyone had given him, and he hadn’t been able to find the backbone to give it to himself. Instead, he was a waste of space other than as a simple tool for Operations to use. To kill. To watch and spy until the quiet, unseen hourglass on someone’s life ran out and he was tapped with pulling the trigger. He wasn’t good for anything else .

  The remnant of fear that he saw in Charlize’s eyes reminded him of that fact every single day .

  2

  Steve

  S weat poured down Steve’s bare back as he leaned in with a twisting hip and a powerful, extended shoulder, plowing his gloved fist into the heavy bag. It danced in mid-air on heavy chains on a large hook in the ceiling, and stood in where most people would put their dining room table .

  He punched the bag again. The bag jerked and bounced, and Steve grunted. His eyes were blurry and his brain clouded in a fog of fatigue. Forty-seven hours. It had been forty-seven hours since he’d slept .

  He’d fought Charlize’s decision to pull him off of the surveillance shift. He knew that Michael’s kill order was bound to come soon, and he wanted to be the one to pull the trigger. He didn’t want some hack messing up the job. He didn’t want Michael to feel any pain .

  Adjusting the stance of his 6’1 frame into a deep crouch, Steve rained a flurry of short jabs into the bag, never giving it a chance to rest and find its center. He poured into it all of his angst, all of his confusion... all of his anger. He didn’t bother to breathe, and when his vision darkened at the edges and turned into tunnels, it took him a couple of heart beats to realize that he was sitting ass-flat on the floor with his back against the wall .

  “I’d be dead if somebody came in,” he said to himself, the knowledge adding to his shame. In his current state, he was useless even as a tool. He truly was only a waste of space now .

  His mind went through the list of possible operatives currently assigned to Michael. He wondered which one would take the shot and if it would be a clean kill. “The man deserves to be taken out with some dignity,” Steve mumbled, wondering if any of the others had what it took to do the job right .

  The room’s cool air left goosebumps on his drying skin, and the overhead ceiling fan provided a soft thrum that aided in numbing his brain. He focused on the thrum and the solidness of the wall at his back. He leaned his meaty shoulder into the corner provided by the adjoining wall and let his chin droop forward .

  The wall , he thought. The wall. He filled his mind with nothing else, willing the stable, solid structure to become his world. Nothing else existed, and soon sleep dragged him down into its thick, murky depths. But it was in those murky depths that his greatest terrors lived .

  His first kill loomed over him, a boy of nineteen who bled out on top of him with a short-stubbed knife in his belly, that Steve had to seesaw back and forth to get the job done. He’d had to lock the kid in place on top of him, so that he could thrash and couldn’t alert anyone else. It had taken over five minutes for him to die, growing weaker and struggling less with each passing moment, until the boy’s life was nothing but a whisper that left his body .

  That had been the first piece of his soul that Steve had lost. It had been the biggest chunk taken all at once. The rest were a collection of notches and grooves that whittled away at him until there was little to nothing left. When he’d woken up with Charlize’s life almost strangled out of her, he’d lost the rest of himself .

  Michael jumping between buildings flashed in his mind, bridging a gap. A thread within himself felt more whole. Another image flashed, that of Michael climbing a wall, and Steve felt lifted. He lost himself in all the things he’d seen Michael do over the past months. It was like a melody without music, and it soothed Michael’s soul .

  He pushed his shoulder more heavily into the wall and felt its strength turn into Michael’s strength. Even though the man could float with the wind, he never seemed to lose his center. He always seemed to know who he was and where he was. He always landed on his feet, in control .

  The walls turned into Michael’s arms, surrounding Steve, and he gave himself to them. He projected himself into Michael, searching out his center in hopes that he too would know which way was up .

  Steve had never known a man’s love. He’d never desired it. The soft pliability of a woman had always been the home he’d craved to lose himself in. But since that night with Charlize when he’d almost killed her, his desires had turned into a phobia. But nothing could hurt Michael because nothing could hurt the wind. So, he could give himself to Michael’s arms and know he could never hurt him .

  It was a lie. Steve knew that. Michael would die, he would die soon, and it would hopefully be by Steve’s hand. Yet for now, he would believe that Michael was safe and that he could hold him, could give him the touch of another human being without risk
and without fear—because the wind feared no one .

  Sleep took Steve. The first good sleep he’d had in weeks. For a while, he rested in the arms of someone he couldn’t hurt—and he felt safe from himself .

  3

  Michael

  “L et me see it again,” Travis said with a grin as he backed Michael into a corner .

  Michael laughed good-naturedly, pulling an enormous uncut diamond too big to even disappear into the curl of his fist. He held it up to catch the light and watched with pleasure as his lover smiled and his eyes grew wide. When Travis’s fast hand grabbed for it, Michael’s faster hand spirited the rock away and back into the front pocket of his dinner jacket. He hadn’t taken the time to change after the evening’s high-society heist, but had driven straight to the rendezvous point to report the success or failure of the night’s events. He was glad for them both that he would be reporting a success. The Family didn’t take kindly to failure—rarely giving people a chance to fail more than once .

  “Let me be the one to take it inside,” Travis said, using his best coy look before leaning in to steal a kiss. His hand stroked Michael’s broad chest before his fingers slipped into the lapel of his jacket, but Michael’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, stopping his reach from going any deeper .

  “Not gonna happen,” Michael chided, masking his lack of amusement at Travis’s pouty response with a wink. He’d grown tired of the younger man’s attempts to climb the Family ladder using his back. For sure, Travis was fun, but he was fun in the way that juggling garden shears could be fun. Travis could get his heart pumping, making him feel alive. But if Michael didn’t handle him just right, he’d be left with deep cuts .