King of Lies (Empire of Lies 1)

I blinked, unsure of what to say. I felt tears pricking my eyes, but I refused to let them fall.

“I’m also willing to file the cancellation paperwork for the campaign,” he said.

“I thought you did that already…”

“I did.” He smiled, squeezing my hand. “You have to go through five stages to file to run and fifteen stages to get out of it.”

I laughed and squeezed his hand in return. “Okay. We can start over. How’s every Sunday?”

“Perfect.” He let my hand go, and asked me about my day. Before I could answer, the hostess approached our table with a huge bouquet of flowers. It was three dozen white roses, with six black roses standing in their center.

“Oh, wow,” my dad said. “Who are those from?”

I opened the small envelope and blushed once I read the words.

I like you.

I’m outside in my car.

Come out and fuck me once you’re done.

(Is this ‘romantic’ enough for you?)

“My boss,” I said, putting the note away. “She’s really proud of me these days.”

“So, I’ve heard.” He nodded. “Tell me a bit more about that…”

Michael

Before

There was no easy way to admit it. I’d fucked things up in the worst way possible, and the only way things could possibly be salvageable, was if I were to suddenly burst into flames.

I was dating someone for the first time in damn near two decades. Someone who I actually liked outside of the bedroom.

She infiltrated my thoughts when I least expected it, made my nights better with her contagious, raspy laughter, and she kept my mind guessing with her random conversations about nothing at all.

Not only that, but I was willingly sending her gifts. Fucking flowers every day.

In all my years of work, I’d never crossed the line with a target. I’d infiltrated their lives in various ways—posed as a cab driver, pretended to be a security guard or a doorman, the new man at Central Park who has an obsession with feeding the pigeons, but I never said more than a few words at a time.

I was forgettable and memorable all at once.

There was no way that Meredith wouldn’t recognize me when it came time for me to handle her, and I’d lost track of what I was supposed to do to her in a few weeks. Well, I wanted to believe that was the case. I couldn’t focus on that right now, though. Not with another job in front of me.

I looked at my watch and set the timer before taking one last look around a soon-to-be dead businessman’s condo.

Five minutes. Forty-eight seconds…

This was always my favorite part of the job, the storytelling part. It was the closest I’d ever get to writing a damn book. Every scene had to be perfect, and it had to reveal exactly what I needed it to, in my preferred order.

I’d always specialized in self-inflicted wounds and accidents; I never did direct kills unless it was absolutely necessary. I’d freeze the brake lines on a target’s car overnight, so by the time they warmed up on the highway, they’d snap and force the car into a fatal tailspin; the crash investigators always pointed the finger at the manufacturing company. I’d add trace amounts of mercury to an obsessed coffee drinker’s cup, several months at a time. By the time they passed away and the autopsy was complete, their favorite mug being “on recall” was revealed as the silent killer.

I adjusted the picture frames on the wall, opened a few files that the responding officers would need to find, and made sure that the USB drive with his horrific crimes was in the middle of the coffee table. As I was adjusting the pillows on the couch, the door opened, and my target—the fifty-eight-year old CEO of a major toy company walked through the door.

“What the—” He dropped his briefcase onto the floor. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the last person who’s going to see you alive, Mr. Donovan.” I looked at my watch. Three minutes.

“Okay, so you’re a comedian.” He rolled his eyes and pulled out his cell phone. “We’ll see how much you laugh when the cops get here and charge you with breaking and entering.”

“I already called the cops,” I said. “They’ll be here in exactly two minutes and forty-nine seconds.”

“Okay, Clown-Man. Can you please just get the hell out of my apartment and—” He stopped once he saw all of the pictures I’d scattered all over his floor, his printed version of high crimes. Some of them starred his own family members.

“Distributing child-porn is probably one of the most disgusting crimes there is, Mr. Donovan,” I said, noticing how his face was losing color by the second. “But what you do is far more heinous than that, isn’t it?”

He swallowed, looked away from me. “How much money do you need to make this go away?”