The Don's Deadly Obsession

The wind came out of the west, light, maybe three miles an hour, barely enough to matter. I adjusted for it anyway, the way I always did, without lowering my eye from the scope. Six hundred and forty meters. A rooftop access door wedged open behind me with a screwdriver, in case I needed to leave fast. Below, across the avenue, the Bellamy Club glowed gold through its windows, the kind of place where a bottle of wine cost more than most people's rent. Xavier D'Angelo stood near the far wall of the ballroom in a black suit that fit like it had been sewn onto him while he slept, and every man in that room orbited him like he was the only thing in it worth watching. He was. His shoulders filled that black jacket the way real strength did, not padding, and even from six hundred and forty meters he wore the danger under all that money like it had been cut into the seams. I breathed out slow, the way I'd been taught before I could ride a bike without training wheels. In, hold, half out, still. My finger found the trigger guard, not the trigger. Not yet. I wasn't supposed to fire until the window opened, and right now Xavier was talking to a silver-haired man who kept touching his own tie like it was strangling him. I studied the line of his jaw, the way he held his glass without drinking from it, the way his eyes tracked the room even while his mouth smiled at whatever the nervous man was saying. Controlled. Dangerous. A man who noticed things. *Good. Notice me and you're already dead.* My earpiece clicked. "Confirm status," Graves said, flat as always, like he was reading a grocery list instead of running a hit. "In position. Clean shot in ninety seconds, maybe less." I kept my voice as quiet as breath. "He's about to step toward the window. I'll have the angle." A pause. Too long a pause. "Stand down." My finger didn't move, but everything else in me went still in a different way, the kind of still that came right before a mistake. "Say again." "Stand down, Kim. No shot. Repeat, no shot." "I have a clean line. He's not even looking this direction." I kept my voice level, because Graves had taught me that panic sounded like weakness and weakness got you reassigned to worse things than a mansion job. "This is the best window we're going to get for weeks." "The objective changed forty minutes ago and you're the last to know because I wanted you focused." Graves never explained himself. That he was explaining now told me more than the words did. "We're not killing him yet. We're studying him. Habits, weaknesses, who he trusts, who he doesn't. You're going in." "Going in where?" "His house, Kim. He needs a new event coordinator for the foundation gala next month, and coincidentally, an agency is about to send him a very charming, very harmless young woman with an excellent resume." A dry pause. "You'll be inside his home within the week. You'll smile at him, you'll be useless and pretty and no threat at all, and you'll learn every weakness that man has until the day we tell you to use one." I lowered the rifle an inch. My jaw tightened, just once, then released. "That's not the job I trained for tonight." "It's the job you have now." "And if he makes me before the week's out?" "Then you improvise. That's what we trained you for." The answer came without a second of hesitation, which meant either Graves trusted me completely or he'd already decided I was expendable if it came to that. I didn't waste time working out which. Both possibilities ended the same way for me. I looked through the scope one more time. Xavier had turned from the nervous man. He wasn't smiling anymore. His eyes moved over the crowd, slow, deliberate, the sweep of someone counting exits without appearing to. "Fine," I said. "I'll pack the pretty dress." "Don't be cute with me." "I'm always cute with you, Graves. It's my whole personality." I started breaking the rifle down before he could respond, my hands quick and sure in the dark, each piece disappearing into the case like it had never existed. Three years of training had taught me to hold a hundred versions of myself at once. Tonight I folded away the version that killed people from rooftops and reached for the one who wore expensive perfume and asked harmless questions at parties. I almost respected him for it. Xavier D'Angelo hadn't done anything to deserve a bullet from three floors up, not that I knew of, not yet. He was simply in the way of something bigger, something Graves had never once bothered to explain to me, and I'd learned a long time ago not to ask why The Cradle wanted a man dead. I only learned how. A security light swept across the roofline two buildings over, a slow arc that hadn't been there ten minutes earlier. Someone was walking a patrol closer than the last sweep, closing the distance faster than a bored guard should. Below, through the window, Xavier had gone very still. My hands paused over the case. He wasn't looking at the silver-haired man anymore. He wasn't looking at any of the guests circling him with their champagne and their flattery. He was looking out the window, out across the avenue, toward the dark row of buildings on my side of the street, and even from six hundred and forty meters with no scope to help me now, I could see the exact moment his whole body shifted from charming to lethal. He said something to the guard nearest him. Short. Quiet. The guard's head turned instantly toward the same rooftop line I was crouched on. *Shit.* I didn't wait to see if he pointed. I was already moving, rifle case in one hand, low and fast across the gravel toward the access door, mind running through exits, running through excuses, running through every version of tonight that ended with me not in a cell or a body bag. Whatever had made Xavier turn like that, nobody had trained it into him. Not for show, not as theater for the room. A man didn't develop instincts that clean by accident, not if he was really just a target standing in a ballroom. I hit the stairwell at a dead run, pulse finally climbing the way it hadn't during the whole hour of holding a rifle steady on a man's chest. Two flights down I thumbed on the scanner clipped inside my jacket, the cheap little unit that caught stray chatter off a building's private security channel when nobody had bothered to encrypt it. Static, then a voice I'd already know anywhere, even through the fuzz. Calm. Precise. Nothing like a man who should have just felt a crosshair cross his chest. "Someone was on the Hartwell building," Xavier said. "Find out who." A second voice, younger, faster: "Sir, the police already swept the perimeter. There's nothing out there." "There's someone." No heat in it. No doubt either. "I want whoever's up there found before they leave the block." I killed the scanner and kept running, and for the first time in three years of doing this job, I wasn't entirely sure the hunter wasn't the one being hunted.