Hitman's Hookup: A Bad Boy Romance (11 page)

“You okay?” Ally’s voice floated in from the hallway. “Yeah, I mean, I forgot the pie but I didn’t make it halfway home to just come back here to grab
pie
. You were acting weird.” Ally paused.

I realized Lily’s packed suitcase was in clear view of the half-open doorway.

“Are you going on a trip?” Ally asked.

I wondered how Lily was going to handle that question. “Cr – Phillip is taking me on a trip,” Lily said, her voice even. “It’s a surprise trip.”

“Can I talk to you out in the hallway?” Ally hissed.

I tugged the back of Lily’s shirt in warning out of sight from Ally. It wasn’t safe in the hallway. “Whatever you need to say, you can say it here,” Lily replied resolutely.

Ally sounded angry now. “I’ve seen you do some wild, dangerous shit, Lily. But this takes the cake. You just
met
this guy.”

I saw Lily bite her lip. I kept my breathing as quiet as I could. I knew that Ally didn’t know I was standing this close to her.

Finally, Lily spoke. “You still have a job, Ally. And a family. And a husband. You can’t give me advice.
This
is what I want to do. It’s what I
need
to do. I don’t need you to babysit me.” Lily spat out the last words. It was a surprisingly well-acted bit of bitterness. I wondered if there was more to their relationship that I’d previously suspected.

Ally started several sentences and finished none of them. “I guess I’ll take the pies, then and hope for a postcard.”

“That’s a good plan,” Lily retorted sternly, handing her the canvas bag and closing the door.

“You okay?” I asked her as she marched back into the bedroom.

“Don’t fucking talk to me, Cruz,” she replied acidly. “I don’t want to hear anything from you unless it’s a real fucking explanation as to what in the
hell
is going on.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LILY

We ditched the rental car, Cruz carrying my rolling suitcase up and down the stairs to various subway stations. It cut against every New York instinct I had within me to take up so much room with a bag on the subway. Several people glared at us. I was jumpy; with every stranger sneaking past me and every bumped elbow I felt a shock of fear that was so raw and live I thought I was going to be sick.

Cruz seemed to be in his element. He was like an animal being hunted; alert to every sound, escape route, and possible outcome surrounding him. It was like he was thriving on pure instinct.

We popped above ground for the dozenth time into the perfect, mid-September day. The only thing I could think is that we were changing trains to shake anyone following us. The sun was shining without a cloud marring the perfect blue expanse above us. The weather was a surreal contrast to the situation I found myself in; I couldn’t believe what was happening around me.

Cruz led me down a dirty, stinking alleyway. “You owe me new luggage,” I said to him as he splashed through a particularly toxic-looking puddle of sludge.

“Done,” he replied, stopping in front of a rusty metal door and slamming his fist on it three times in rapid succession. He looked around us constantly, never stopping his eye movements. He was scanning. Listening.
Feeling
the air around him. Despite my immense surges of pure, abject panic, I couldn’t help but appreciate that this same intuition was what made him such an incredible fuck.

The door opened and I jumped a little, lost in my daydream. A white kid who looked younger than I was with messy brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses opened the door. He clutched his chest. “Jesus, man, are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

Cruz pushed past him. “If I wanted to give you a heart attack, that’s not the way I’d go about it,” he hissed.

I waved at the kid. “Hi, I’m Li-“

Cruz cut across me. “He doesn’t need to know who you are. He knows too fucking much as it is.”

I gazed around at the apartment. It was so nice it easily could have been in an issue of
Architectural Digest.
My eyes wandered from the fish tank to a single piece of modern art on the wall behind the white leather sofa. It was a triptych of skinny, vertical white canvases that blended into the pristine wall behind it. The only thing suggesting that it was art was a swipe of tiny graffiti in the bottom right-hand corner. I saw what it said and suppressed the urge to laugh.

Flea saw the muddy, scummy tracks on the shiny white marble floor and shook his head. “I’m glad I don’t have white carpet anymore.”

“I need a plane,” Cruz responded, ignoring Flea’s irritation.

Flea laughed. “You know Priceline is a thing, right?”

“Not that kind of plane.”

Flea clapped his hands together sarcastically. “
Oh, not that kind of plane
. So you need a charter?”

Cruz pursed his lips. “I need a plane. You can’t get me a plane?”

Flea scoffed. “Like…for you to commandeer? Like you’re Harrison fucking Ford? No, Cruz, I’m not aware of an Uber for Citation Xs.”

“You have no idea whether or not I can fly a fucking plane,” Cruz snapped. “So you can’t get a plane?”

Flea nodded. “That’s correct.”

Cruz ran tapped his palm on his thigh. “So how much money do you have in this place?”

Flea’s jaw dropped. “You’re joking.”

“I’ll pay you back. You should know I’m good for it.” Cruz was clearly growing more impatient by the second.

Flea nodded. “Dude, I know you’re good for it about eighteen
thousand
times over.
On fucking paper you’re good for it.
But do you really think when this is all over that you’ll have access to
any
of that?”

Cruz gnawed the inside of his cheek, then reached into the back of his jeans and pulled out the black, shiny gun he’d had out at my apartment. He cocked it at Flea. “Give me all the cash you have. I’m tired of fucking around.”

“Cruz!” I yelled, my stomach dropping.

He ignored me.

Flea sighed and walked over to the kitchen. “It’s not even in a fucking safe, dude.” He pulled out a cardboard Lucky Charms box and dumped it on the countertop. About two-dozen rubber-banded rolls of hundred-dollar bills fell onto the countertop. “Just fucking take it all, dude.”

Cruz kept the gun on Flea and looked at me. “Put it in my duffel bag.”

I paused, slowing my breath down like I did when I was in surgery and about to cut someone open. “Not until you put the gun down,” I breathed, staring at Flea who had his hands back up in the air. He was blinking rapidly and looked pale and sweaty.

“Get the –“

“No, Cruz. No,” I insisted. “I’m not doing anything until you put the gun down. Look at this kid. He’s about to shit himself.”

Cruz lowered it. “Fine. Hurry up.”

I rushed over to the counter and gathered up the rolls of money, crouching on the ground and unzipping the duffel as fast as I could. I stood up and brushed off my knees.

Flea was leaning against the countertop. He looked green.

“I need passports. I know you have some somewhere. You have to have some.”

Flea looked panicked. He said nothing.

I looked back to Cruz and saw realization dawning on his face. He knew something I didn’t. “You already promised them to someone else.” He paused. “She’s coming, isn’t she? Corina is coming here.”

Flea gulped.

There was a knock at the door.

Before I knew what was happening, Cruz had swept me over his shoulder; my suitcase and his two bags hanging from his arm. He said nothing and moved wordlessly into the bedroom. He shut the door quietly and set down the bags and me. “Carry these,” he said in a low voice that was just under a whisper. “When I tell you to move, you move. Run, you run. Got it?”

“Like I needed to be told that,” I replied sarcastically. I held the bags in my hands, listening for the opening of the front door that we’d walked into only minutes before while Cruz slid open the drawer of the nightstand. He pulled out something that looked like a calculator and paused, running over something in his mind.

“Cruz-“ I started to say.

He held his hand up to silence me and then closed his eyes. It was like he was meditating. When he was done, he hastily typed in a sequence of numbers. Nothing happened.

I heard the front door open.

“Corina, long time no see,” Flea said in a hearty voice that nearly cracked.

“You know what I’m here for,” the feminine voice replied.

Cruz was shaking, still thinking. I rushed over, switching all three bags to my left hand. I grabbed the number pad from Cruz and input a series of numbers. The wall opened. Cruz looked shocked. I gave him a single shake of my head. “Later,” I mouthed. “I’ll explain later.”

We stepped into the dark room. Cruz shut the wall behind us. All I could hear was a faint whirring and buzzing sound. It was warmer in here than in the rest of the space.

“Samantha,” Cruz said in a normal voice.

I jumped about a foot at the sound of him speaking.

“Yes,” a feminine voice responded.

“Danger, Will Robinson. Danger.”

The lights flicked on and I realized we were in a small office space, wires artistically arranged on the walls. A rack of servers stood to my left.

“Evacuation procedure enabled?” the voice said.

“Yes,” Cruz replied.

A three foot-by-three-foot square of drywall opened where the far corner of the wall met the ceiling.

Cruz took the bags from me and pressed his ear against the wall we’d just walked through. “You first,” he said. “I’m right behind you.”

I stood on the shiny, white desktop and pulled myself up into a silver ventilation shaft. I saw little hand and footholds installed in the metal. “We have to climb,” I whispered. “How are we going to get my bag?”

Cruz shook his head. “We can’t leave it. She’ll know for sure. Just climb, Lily.”

I shimmied my way up the shaft, wondering how far up this went. Cruz set the luggage on the desktop, nearly crushing the keyboard there. Then he climbed up easily after me, reaching through to pull up the luggage. “Fuck,” he whispered.

“What?” I asked, freezing a few feet above him.

“Luggage wheel marks on the desk.”

There was no room in the shaft for Cruz to lean out to clean up the mess. He took a moment and then started climbing with one hand, his muscles rippling from the exertion. It seemed effortless to him otherwise. As he moved out of the opening and up after me, I heard the wall close again.

I had no idea where we were headed. I just kept climbing like my life depended on it.

Because it apparently
did
depend on it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CRUZ

Leave it to Flea to come up with the most Rube Goldbergian method to get out of his fucking apartment.

We climbed for five minutes in the blue-lit shaft. My arm muscles felt like they were going to give out from holding the suitcase. With every passing second I was listening for the opening of the door at the base of the duct-work.

That sound never came.

“So, are we good?” Lily asked me tentatively. “This Corina person is likely not climbing up the shaft after us?”

“Silence doesn’t reassure me at all,” I whispered, grunting as I climbed with the weight of our bags. “I don’t put it past Corina to torture the exit point of this escape route out of Flea. And knowing Flea: it wouldn’t even be torture. It would just be sexual favors.”

“So you’re telling me that one blowjob stands between us and certain death?” Lily quipped.

“Basically,” I replied. I would have laughed if it weren’t also terrifying. “You doing okay?”

“I’d be better if I knew what the fuck was going on,” she snapped back.

It was everything I could do to keep from staring up at her bouncing ass in her tight jeans as she climbed. “When we’re someplace safe I will,” I said.

“Yeah,” she shot back. “And where the hell is
that
going to be, exactly?”

I wasn’t entirely sure yet. The only thing I knew is that I wished I’d packed Lily’s clothes in a goddamned backpack. “I’m working on it,” I replied.

The lights went out.

Lily gasped. I didn’t react in time, and rammed my head into Lily’s foot so hard I saw stars glinting in the darkness. “Don’t move,” I breathed, the heavy suitcase pulling on my hand. I’d wrapped my briefcase and duffel bag around my chest, but there was no doing that for Lily’s rolling suitcase. I thought my fingers were going to be permanently frozen in a claw formation.

If I dropped the suitcase, there was no way whoever was left in Flea’s apartment
wouldn’t
hear it. I was pretty sure people in upstate New York would be able to hear that. We waited in the darkness. I didn’t know for how long.

Lily reached down at one point and wrapped her hand around my wrist, squeezing it once. I flexed my muscles to tell her I heard her. It felt amazing that she still was looking to me for reassurance. I liked being her protector.

After another three minutes, I made a decision. “We need to move,” I whispered. “We can’t stay here. Who knows why the lights turned off, we gotta just keep going, even if we have to make noise to do it.”

“Let’s do this,” Lily replied.

After a few more minutes, there was a loud
clang
from above me.

“You okay?” I asked, panicking.

“I hit the top,” Lily said, her sexy voice like music to my ears. “Thankfully my hair hit it before my skull did.”

“Is there a handle or anything?”

“Yeah,” Lily replied. She hesitated. “Do I open it?”

“If you want to get out of here, yes,” I replied, trying to sound light-hearted. Secretly my heart was thudding. Normally I was fearless – calculated, but fearless nonetheless. Having Lily with me was changing everything. I wasn’t making the same decisions I normally did.

There was a hell of a lot more to lose than just
my
life if I fucked up.

I heard a rusty creak echo through the shaft and was blinded by blazing white sunlight. I squeezed my eyes shut, seeing red through the skin of my eyelids. I kept climbing once I heard the sounds Lily had been making in the footholds disappear.