Page 5 of Nasty
God. He was showing me how to kill him. And he was doing it with a loaded gun, forcing me to hold the damn thing over his heart. Guns went off accidentally all the time. I was shaking so badly, I felt like I was going to slip up and shoot him. A part of me felt like it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Fix was dangerous.Sofucking dangerous. Not just because he was a killer, which was clearly a huge problem, but because…his eyes were capable of stripping me bare. The casual uplift of his sensual, full mouth was capable of setting my heart racing. His muscled, powerful body made me want to throw myself at his feet. When he wrapped his arms around me, and held me in his calloused, strong hands, it felt like the world stood still. And the words that just came out of his mouth, words that told a story that was frightening and hard to hear, also struck something deep inside me that made me feel warm, safe, and thrilled me more than I was willing to admit.
God, how was I going to make sense of any of this?
I’d never found myself in such peril. I’d never found myself tightrope walking over such a precarious, deadly fall, knowing I was going to lose my balance at any second, and being oddly okay with the consequences.
Fix calmly removed the gun from my hand, placing it down on the floor beside me. His eyes were quicksilver again, flashing with so much energy and…something else. Something like trepidation, mixed with determination. “As for your second request, are you sure you want to know, Sera?”
He was talking about my murderer. The person who wanted me dead. He wanted to know if I was ready and willing to accept the truth in all its terrible glory. I answered him by straightening my back and staring him directly in the eye. “You don’t need to dance around it. We both know who hired you. The only person who would do such a thing. Just spit out his name and I’ll be able to breathe again.”
Felix’s eyes shone a little brighter, as if they were illuminated from within. They really were something else, those eyes of his. I could feel them on my skin at all times, even when he appeared to be looking elsewhere—an equally comforting and disturbing sensation. “What if your assumptions are incorrect? What if you’re wrong?” he asked
“How could I be?” A knot of dread tightened in the pit of my stomach, though. He’d spoken softly and slowly, adopting a gentleness that didn’t marry up with the gruff, gravely timbre of his voice, and his cautiousness made me panic.
“Sera.” He looked down at his hands. “Sixsmith is a piece of shit. He’s incapable of loving another living human being. I wouldn’t put something like this past him, but…paying to have someone killed costs money. A fuck load of money. Where do you think your father would have come by forty grand?”
I nearly bit off my own tongue. “Forty grand?Jesus Christ!” I had assumed Sixsmith, whatever his perverted reasoning might be, was responsible for this completely fucked up nightmare. But Fix was right: I hadn’t considered where my father would have gotten the money to set a ball this size in motion. He wasn’t below begging and scraping for money, but there was no way he’d saved forty thousand dollars. And none of his worthless, shit-eating loan shark friends would be dumb enough to loan him such an exorbitant amount of money. They’d loaned him plenty before, andI’dbeen the one to pay it back, one way or another. “If it wasn’t Sixsmith, then who was it, Fix? I’m so tired of all these games. Just fucking spit it out!”
Fix blew out a long breath down his nose, rocking his head to the side until his neck cracked loudly. He liked doing that—cracking his bones. I wanted to crack his neck myself at this point. “As I said, Monica never met the client who hired us to take care of you,” he said. “But the person who emailed referred to themselves as a man. ‘I’m not a patient man,’were his exact words. And the email came from a business account. [email protected]. Does that ring a bell with you?”
MPC? Gerrity Holdings? I allowed my gaze to drift as I considered the email address. Was MPC short for something? A position within a firm? I couldn’t think of a job title that shortened down to that acronym. Someone’s initials, then. It had to be someone’s name. I didn’t know anyone with those initials, though. Not that I could recall off the top of my head. And I’d never heard of Gerrity Holdings before. A holding company was typically a puppeteer, pulling the strings on another larger company. In business, they were a great way to hide your true identity if you didn’t want your competition to know you were trying to strike a deal, strengthen your footing in the marketplace. For the most part, holding companies had to be legally registered with the state, the business owner’s details documented as a matter of public record, but something told me I wouldn’t find anything if I looked up this particular organization.
“I take it from the baffled look on your face that you have no idea who that might be?” Fix continued.
“No. None. Are you telling meyoudon’t know who hired you, Fix? Because I will literally—”
“I have a name. I have a physical address. We searched the user’s IP.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, retrieving a folded-up piece of paper from inside and then holding it out to me. I took it, and my mouth was suddenly drier than the Sahara. Everything was going to change, the moment I unfolded the paper and saw what was written on it. My life was never going to be the same again. I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth to stop my teeth from chattering together nervously as I flattened out the paper.
In blocky, scrawled, undeniably male handwriting:
CARVER
62634 Wood Street, Centralia, PA 00000.
I frowned at the paper. “Pennsylvania? I’ve never even been to Pennsylvania. And I don’t know anyone called Carver.”
“It’s probably not a real name. The address is probably fake, too.”
“Great. Fuckingperfect. So someone wants me dead, and it could be fucking anybody. You reallydon’tknow who hired you.” I screwed up the paper and threw it at the couch, snarling at the back of my throat. I wasn’t prepared for this. I’d been so sure in my head that Sixsmith was responsible, but there was just no way. Aside from the financial unlikelihood, my father was hopeless with computers. Couldn’t even log onto Google to look something up, let alone operate an email account. There was just no way in hell he’d had the foresight to set up a limited liability partnership to hide behind, and the man sure as fuck didn’t have the common sense to come up with an alias. Whoever this Carver person was, it wasn’t my father.
“We need to go to there. To Pennsylvania,” I announced, jerking my chin toward the balled-up paper now nestled into the pancake-flat cushions on the couch. “We need to go to that address. Even if it’s fake, we need to go and check.”
Fix leaned back into his seat. His body looked stiff, which was unusual; he was always so fluid and comfortable inside his own skin, but there was something off about the way he was moving now. “So…you don’t want me to take you back to Seattle?” he asked slowly.
Of course. He’d assumed I’d never want to see him again, and he was right. Or hehadbeen right until he’d spilled his guts to me and placed a gun in my hand. I believed him now—that he didn’t want to kill me. I was yet to wrap my head around the fact that Fix had already developed some weird attraction toward me before he’d even opened his mouth to speak to me in person, but...
“No. I don’t want you to take me home. Not yet. I want to find this asshole and ask him why he’s doing this to me. I want to fucking know what I’ve done to deserve this. And when I’ve confronted him and gotten the answers I need…I want you to killhim.”
I was aware of how crazy I sounded. Hypocritical. I’d given Fix endless shit about what he did for a living. I’d told him he was a bad person. I’d been scared and intimidated by him, amongst other things, and now here I was telling him I wanted him to do the very thing that I abhorred. Amazing how everything changed the moment I found out I was his primary target and the blood in my veins turned to molten lava. My life certainly hadn’t started out great. To an outsider, the small, secure, comfortable existence I’d built for myself in Seattle might not have been that impressive, but I’d worked hard for what I had, and I’d be damned if I was going to let anyone take it away from me.
Fuck that. And fuck them for trying.
Fix pressed his fingers to his forehead, closing his eyes for a second. “Let me get this straight. You want me to figure out who this Carver guy is, take you to him, and then you want me to kill him.”
“Yes.”
“I’m having a hard time figuring out how you think any of that is a good idea, Sera.”
“None of it’s a good idea. I know it’s a bad fucking plan. But it’s what I want, Fix, and you’re going to do it for me because you owe me that much. And when it’s over…” The sentence died on my lips. When this was over, I didn’t know what would come next. I literally couldn’t imagine what would happen once I’d dived into this world of chaos and crime with Felix Marcosa, but I was willing to bet it would be messed up and out of the ordinary. I’d have to go back to Seattle. My business was waiting for me, as were my clients. My dog, was there. My apartment, with its shabby chic décor and the mountainous stacks of books I still was yet to read. My favorite coffee shop, and Sadie, and the best clam chowder money could buy. There was no doubt in my mind I’d be returning back to Seattle, but…
