The Mafia Don's Assassin

Emily

The muffled scream before the knife came down on her throat excited me way more than it should have.

She was asleep on her back, mouth slightly open, one hand curled beneath the pillow like she didn't have a single guilty thing weighing on her conscience. I stood over her for a moment, and for the first time in years, I wasn't afraid. I thought of the bathtub, the cold water, her hand at the back of my neck. I thought of the years of abuse, and the restraints, and the word complications.

She woke up as the knife came down. Her eyes found mine in the dark, wide with a fear I recognized. It was mine, worn for years, finally handed back.

She didn't get to finish screaming as she choked on her own blood.

Jake's door was next. I pushed it open with the knife still slick in my hand, and some small, starved part of me wanted him to wake up first. Wanted him to see me standing there and understand, even for a second, what he had built.

He stirred at the sound of the door, groggy, already reaching for the lamp. "Mom?"

"No," I said.

He had half a second to place my voice before I was on him. He grabbed for my wrist, strong even half-asleep, and for one terrible moment I thought he would win, thought seven years of training my body to go still around him would win out over everything I had decided that night. Then I thought of his hand crawling over my skin every night. His foot under the table. The word sister, said like it belonged to him.

I didn't give him the chance to talk, to smile that smile that made my stomach churn in disgust, to say my name like it was something he owned. I made sure of that.

He barely stirred again after.

My father was last. He was standing in the hallway by the time I reached him, woken by something. A sound, an instinct, seven years too late. He looked at me the way he never had before. He looked at me like he finally saw me.

"Cora," he whispered.

"You watched," I said. "Every time. You just... watched."

I didn't let him finish whatever he was going to say. I don't think it would have mattered. There was nothing left he could say that would undo a decade of silence.

I stood in the hallway afterward, breathing hard, blood on my hands and my hospital clothes, and I waited to feel something. Horror, grief, guilt, anything. It didn't come. What I felt instead was quiet. The kind of quiet that house had never once given me.

I went to the garage, took the keg of gasoline, and poured it through every room I had suffered in. My old bedroom, the storage room that had been my prison, the dining room, and over their lifeless bodies. I struck the match on the porch, tossed it through the open door, and walked away without looking back.

By the time the sky behind me turned orange, I was already gone. Cora Prescott burned with that house.

Emily Vance walked out of the wreckage instead.

I learned fast that grief takes up space a person doesn't have room for when they are busy surviving. I didn't cry on the bus out of town. I didn't cry in the shelter, or the motel I paid for in cash, or the first night I slept in an alley because the shelter was full. Somewhere between the fire and the city, I stopped being able to feel most things at all. It was easier that way. Safer.

I found work cleaning floors at a club downtown, mopping up spilled drinks and worse at four in the morning for cash under the table, no questions asked. By eighteen, I had worked my way behind the bar. Good hands, steady nerves, a face people trusted without knowing why. I was good at pretending. I had a lifetime of practice.

One night, closing out my shift, I cut through the alley behind the club to shortcut home and found a man with his hand around a stripper's throat, pinning her to the brick.

"Plea..se," she was saying, her voice cracking. "Please, I don't have it."

He backhanded her before she finished the sentence.

I didn't think. I didn't plan it, not the way I had the first time. I just moved. I grabbed the nearest thing, a broken bottle from the dumpster, and put it through his throat before he heard me coming.

He went down fast. She stared at me, wide-eyed, shaking, and ran without a word of thanks, which was fine. I didn't need one.

I needed a way to make a body disappear, and I had no idea how to do that twice in one lifetime without getting caught.

I was still crouched over him, trying to decide whether I could drag him to the dumpster without being seen, when a pair of expensive shoes stopped directly in front of me.

"That's an interesting way to end a shift," a voice said above me, low and unbothered, like he found dead men in alleys on a regular basis.

I looked up. Dark suit, darker eyes, a man who looked like he belonged anywhere except a filthy alley behind a dive bar, and yet looked completely unsurprised to be standing in one, next to a body, talking to the woman who had made it.

"He had it coming," I said, because there was no point lying to a man who had clearly already seen everything.

"I don't doubt it." He crouched slightly, studying the body with the detached interest of someone checking a receipt. "Sloppy, though. You'll want to work on that."

"Who are you?"

"Someone who can make this go away." He straightened, brushing invisible dust from his sleeve, and finally looked at me properly. He really looked, the way almost no one ever had. "The question is whether you're worth the trouble."

My hands were still slick with someone else's blood, my heart finally starting to pound the way it hadn't since the fire, and some small, cold part of me recognized exactly what kind of man was offering.

"What do you want in exchange?" I asked.

He smiled, faint and unreadable, already pulling out his phone to make a call I wasn't meant to hear. "Come work for me, and find out."

Thane

I don't believe in coincidence. I believe in patterns, and leverage, and the particular kind of person who is useful to a man like me. Rare, and usually broken in exactly the right place.

I had been watching her for three months.

She started as a bartender at a club I owned under a name that led nowhere near Rivers Enterprises, one of a dozen quiet assets that kept my real business running beneath the one the public saw. I noticed her the way I notice anything worth noticing. Not because she stood out, but because she didn't. She was careful in a way most people are not capable of being. Controlled. She never over-poured, never flirted for tips, never let a drunk patron get a reaction out of her no matter how hard they tried. Most people wear their nerves somewhere visible. Emily wore nothing at all.

That alone made her worth a background check.

What I found was better than I expected. A legal name that didn't exist before she was eighteen. A paper trail that started clean and recent, built by someone who understood exactly what they were doing. It took my people three days and considerably more money than it should have to find what was underneath it. A house fire in a small town two years prior, three bodies, a missing teenage daughter never found and never looked for by a town that seemed eager to let the file go cold.

Cora Prescott had killed her family and vanished into smoke.

I read the file again. Then I watched her pour a whiskey neat for a man without a flicker of anything behind her eyes, and I understood, with the kind of clarity I rarely get in this business, that I was looking at someone I needed.

The night in the alley only confirmed it.

I had come to check on a shipment delayed two streets over, and I saw her duck out the back exit the way she always did. Habit, efficiency, never wasting a motion. Then I saw the man with his hand around the stripper's throat, and I saw Emily stop walking.

She didn't call for help. She didn't run. She picked up a broken bottle from the dumpster beside her and put it through his throat with the kind of economy most trained men never develop.

No hesitation or panic afterward. Just the practical, immediate problem of a body she now needed to dispose of, which she was clearly entirely unprepared to solve.

I watched her for a full minute before I made my presence known. I wanted to see what she would do once the adrenaline faded. Most people shake. Most people cry, or vomit, or stand frozen until someone else makes the decision for them.

She knelt beside the body and started calculating. I had seen men in my organization handle a kill worse than that.

"That's an interesting way to end a shift," I said, finally stepping into the light.

She looked up at me without a trace of fear, which told me more than the file had. "He had it coming."

"I don't doubt it." I crouched, studying the wound. Clean, decisive, lucky more than skilled, though skill could be taught. "Sloppy, though. You'll want to work on that."

She asked who I was, and I told her what I could offer instead, because I have learned that people reveal themselves faster through what they want than through what they ask.

She said yes before she had finished weighing the alternative. The body disappeared within the hour, and the scene was wiped clean like it never happened and he never existed. It was the easiest transaction I would make with her for the next eight years.

I took her education seriously, because I don't invest in anything I don't intend to use.

I finished training her through what remained of her schooling, then kept her an additional year inside my legitimate operation. Contracts, acquisitions, the slow architecture of laundering a criminal empire through spreadsheets and shareholder meetings. She learned faster than anyone I had trained before her. She asked the right questions, and more importantly, she knew which questions not to ask at all.

By the second year, she was handling negotiations, and by the fourth, she had developed an instinct for which problems needed violence and which needed patience. By the sixth, I had stopped thinking of her as an employee and started thinking of her as something closer to an extension of my own judgment. The only person in my organization I never had to double-check.

What I valued most was the thing that made other men uneasy around her. She felt nothing on the surface, ever. Not fear, not guilt, not the small human tics that give everyone else away at a negotiating table. She was a closed door with an excellent memory, and in my line of work, that is worth more than loyalty.

I told myself, for a long time, that my interest in her was purely practical.

By the eighth year, I stopped being able to tell myself that with a straight face.

It wasn't sudden. It built the way everything I value builds. Slowly, deliberately, compounding in the dark until one day the math simply resolved itself. I found myself noticing things that had nothing to do with her usefulness.

I am not a man who wants things quietly. I don't ask twice, and I certainly don't lose.

I decided, somewhere in that eighth year, that Emily Vance would belong to me completely. Not as an employee or an asset, but as mine, in every sense of the word I was willing to use.

Emily

After years of working for Thane Rivers I had learnt to read a room before I walked into it. That night, I misread his completely.

He had called me up to the penthouse after hours, which wasn't unusual. Half our real business happened after the office emptied out, contracts no lawyer would ever see, conversations that existed nowhere on paper. I expected numbers. A shipment, a negotiation, a problem that needed my particular kind of handling.

I didn't expect him standing by the window with two glasses of wine already poured, the buttons on his shirt half done, his usually perfectly slicked hair now falling on his face and no files in sight.

"Sir." I stayed by the door. "You said you needed the Calloway numbers reviewed tonight."

"I lied." He turned, unhurried, and held one of the glasses out toward me. "Sit down, Emily."

I didn't move. "I don't drink during work hours."

"There is no work." He set the glass down when I didn't take it, something flickering across his face I had learned to recognize as the early stage of a man not getting what he wanted. "I think it's time we stopped pretending this is only business."

My stomach went tight and cold. "I don't know what you mean."

"You do." He crossed the room toward me, slow, deliberate, the same way he closed every negotiation he had ever won. "I trained you, built you into the only person in this organization I trust completely, and you still think I don't notice the way you've been avoiding being alone with me for the last six months."

He wasn't wrong. I had noticed it too. The shift in his attention, small and deliberate, a held gaze lasting a beat too long, a hand at my back that lingered. I had told myself it meant nothing, because the alternative was something I couldn't afford to want.

"You're my employer," I said. "That's all this is supposed to be."

"It stopped being only that a long time ago." He stopped close enough that I had to move back to hold his eyes, close enough that I could smell the wine on his breath, and something in me went still in a way I hadn't felt since I was sixteen, standing still around something that bites. "I want you, Emily. I don't ask for things twice, and I have never once lost."

"I'm not something you win." My voice came out steadier than I expected, steadier than I felt. "I work for you. That's the entirety of this arrangement, and it's the only version of it I'm willing to have."

Something shifted behind his eyes. Not hurt, because Thane didn't do hurt, but something colder, more dangerous, the look of a man recalculating a deal he had assumed was already closed.

"No," he said simply, like the word itself was a foreign concept he was turning over for the first time.

"No," I repeated.

He didn't wait for me to process it. Before I could step back, before I could raise a hand to stop him, he closed the remaining distance and crashed his mouth against mine. It wasn't an invitation. It was a hostile takeover, his lips hot and demanding, tasting of expensive red wine and absolute arrogance.

Shock paralyzed me for a single fraction of a second, but outrage snapped through my veins with the force of a live wire.

I reared back and swung my palm across his cheek with a crack that echoed off the glass walls of the penthouse.

The blow knocked his head to the side. For a terrifying, breathless moment, the air in the room turned entirely lethal. Thane stood frozen, his face turned away, a bright red handprint blooming across his sharp cheekbone. Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head back to face me. His dark eyes were burning with a terrifying, unhinged fire, utterly stripped of civilization.

"You hit me," he whispered, his voice dangerously low.

"You crossed a line," I spat, my chest heaving, my hand still stinging from the impact. "You do not touch me without my consent. Ever."

Instead of flying into a rage, a dark, twisted smile touched the corners of his mouth. It made my blood run cold.

"Eight years, Emily," he murmured, taking a slow step toward me while I held my ground. "I made you. I could unmake you just as easily, and you know it."

For one long second, something old and familiar rose up in me. The girl in the hallway, frozen, waiting for permission to move. I let it rise, and then I let it go, the way I had taught myself to do a long time ago.

"Try it," I said, low and even. "See how that goes for you."

He stared at me, something unreadable warring behind his expression, and for a moment I genuinely didn't know which way this would break.

Then he stepped back, lifting a hand to brush his burning cheek.

"Get out of my office," he said, turning back to the window. His voice was flat and controlled again, though I could see his reflection in the glass. His jaw was tight, and his hands were curled at his sides like he was fighting the urge to put them through something.

I didn't need to be told twice.

I made it to the elevator before my hands started shaking, the adrenaline finally catching up to me the way it always did once the danger had passed. The doors slid shut, and I caught my own reflection in the brushed steel. Composed, steady, nothing at all like the storm underneath.

I had survived worse men than Thane Rivers.

I just wasn't entirely sure, yet, whether that was still true.