Kissing the Killer
B. B. Hamel
Prologue: Emma
They say killers can’t love.
They say killers don’t feel a thing as they move through a room like an angel of death, their guns blazing, bodies dropping all around them. The hit men that work for the Russians and for the Italians don’t care about life or death, only cold hard cash.
He was one of those angels. Instead of wings, he had thick, roped muscles and black tattoos all along his perfect skin. His cocky smile said I owed him my life, and maybe a little bit more.
I never wanted to be owned, not by anyone, not for any reason. My father thought he owned me, and all I got from that was a roof over my head and a black eye every other week.
My father was a stupid man. He was a member of the mob, but not an important one. The only thing he loved more than drinking was gambling, and he owed thousands of dollars that he couldn’t pay to bookies all over Chicago.
It didn’t surprise me when the angels of death came for him with lead and steel. They killed my father and were going to kill me until he changed his mind.
“Look what we have here,” he said to me later, after he’d dragged me from my home and locked me in a closet. Fear and something else lanced through my chest. “You’ve got lips that make my fucking dick hard.”
He was crude and so cocky. He was good with his hands and with a gun, and he thought that made him unstoppable.
But I could see through him.
“I’m taking you with me,” he’d said earlier, his voice deep and soft in my ear. “Unless you want to die here.”
I hadn’t had a choice, of course. I either let him take me or his partner put a bullet in my head.
I knew what he wanted from me. He wasn’t pretending it was anything but my body.
“I’m going to make you glad I took you,” he whispered to me days later, after so much had happened, his hands moving down my skin. “You’ll be begging me to sink my thick cock between your legs before this is done with.”
I couldn’t argue with him. I could barely speak, my body rolling with desire and anger.
I wasn’t going to be owned by anyone, not ever again. I didn’t care if people wanted the both of us dead.
I didn’t care that he was the only one who wanted to see me alive.
My angel of death. He sent chills down my spine. “I’m going to taste you,” he said. “I’m going to slide my tongue along that clit until you can’t breathe.”
I wanted to feel him, his muscles, his dangerous smile. I wanted everything he promised.
But I wasn’t his. I wasn’t giving in, no matter how much I wanted to.
I was going to escape from my angel of death if it was the last thing I did.
1
Brooks
It was supposed to be an easy fucking job. We go in, kill the old, drunk, Russian asshole, and then we get the fuck out of there.
Nothing I hadn’t done a hundred times before, maybe a thousand.
I parked the car at the end of the block. It was a quiet neighborhood, especially at three in the morning. Nobody was moving around and the houses were all dark.
“Nice spot,” Abram commented.
“Not bad,” I grunted. “Which house does the old man live in?”
Abram nodded toward the end of the block. “Last on the left.”
I killed the engine. “We got a plan?”
He shrugged. “We’ll break in the back, kill the guy, and then get back home.”
“Works for me.”
I pushed open the car door and then checked the gun tucked into my jeans. I cocked back the slide and chambered a round and made sure the silencer was on tight. Abram was behind me, checking his own weapon.
He nodded at me and then headed down the block. I followed behind him, keeping my head on a swivel.
I’d done this hundreds of times before. We were hit men for the Italian mob, angels of death working for the Barone family. I had more blood on my hands than I could ever hope to wash off, and mercy wasn’t something I had ever thought about before.
I was young when I joined the Barone family. When I was five, my father ran off with some cheap stripper he’d met downtown, and that only pushed my mother deeper into the bottom of a bottle.
Mom died by the time I was thirteen, drank herself to death in less than ten years, though she’d been warming up for that drinking marathon for years before that. After Dad left, Mom lost her will to live completely, and she did nothing but drink and drink vast amounts of cheap fucking liquor.
One day I came home and found her tipped over in the bathroom, vomit leaking from her mouth. I’d never forget that image, not for as long as I lived. It didn’t matter how much death and violence I saw; I’d never outrun the image of my mother dead in the bathroom.