Final Protocol Read Free Page B

it was problematic to accept a job on Aris. The Ariste are not an easy race to assassinate.”
    “Were there guards?” He sounded curious.
    As far as my body was concerned, he might as well have been in front of me, his hands, beautiful and elegant, stripping my clothes away. But my mind blistered with rage and my hands shook with the need to wrap around his throat, to throttle him, to hurt him. I could kill him two times over before he could strip me naked. I’d learned well. I knew how to kill, just as he’d planned.
    Only one thing stopped me.
    The bioseal he had embedded in my brain.
    But one day, even that might not be enough.
    “No.” I managed to keep my tone bored. “But nobody truly understands the Ariste, do they? As he knew I was coming, I didn’t know what else he knew. If he knew to plan for me, perhaps he even knew about you. I didn’t wish to bring that mess to your door.”
    There was a sigh, heavy, regretful. “You say the right things, Silence. If only I could believe those words.”
    “What good does it do me to lie? You hold my life in your hands.”
    “Hmmm.” There was a pause and then I heard a soft crackle. “Come to me. I have another job. It’s…important, and if you do it, we will wipe this slate clean.”
    Slowly, I sat up, my body protesting as the night spent on stone made itself known. “Clean?” I echoed.
    What…he wasn’t going to beat me? Punish me to make it clear how very unacceptable this was?
    He chuckled. “Yes. All will be forgotten. But don’t make me wait. You won’t like the consequences if I have to send Dahm to hunt you down. He’s already on your scent trail.”
    Liar. I kept that locked behind my teeth. If Dahm were on my trail, he’d be here already. But the threat was enough to have me up and moving.
    I thought of the botanist, thought of the decision I’d made.
    Then I thought of what Gold had promised. Would he lie? Yes. If it suited his purposes, but why would he suggest such a reward?
    “Why now?” I asked softly. “Who is the target?”
    “Come in and we’ll discuss it.”
    There was something in his voice that made me tense.
    I recognized it.
    Very little got my keeper worked up. Very little. This job though, it had him on edge. Was it possible he meant it?
    I turned to look at the entrance to the cave, debating.
    “Silence…foolish, foolish girl. I know where you are now,” he murmured.
    I closed my eyes. An amateur’s mistake. I’d just made one. He couldn’t control my thoughts, no. But if he tapped into the bioseal, he could access them—and he’d just done that, enough to see what I could see.
    “I’ll come in,” I said flatly. “But pull in your dogs, Gold.”
    “That’s a good girl.”
    Garner wasn’t happy with me.
    He was waiting outside the club, playing his brother’s ever-vigilant watchdog, his cadre of men spaced out around him on the multileveled street.
    Two of them were already shadowing me, and my skin was crawling because at some point soon, I expected them to take me down. I’d messed up a job. The punishment would be in pain or flesh.
    I preferred pain and I even hoped for the bastards behind me to make a move. I was ready for it. Ready, prepared, a blade tucked discreetly in one hand. When they moved on me, I’d kill at least one.
    I always did.
    That was one of the reasons Garner hated me.
    To date, he’d lost nine men to me.
    He’d broken every rib in my body, eight fingers—and several of them twice or three times over—my left knee, my right cheekbone, both bones in my left forearm, and he’d dislocated my right shoulder. Twice. Of course, he always had help. I’d killed his men on my own. Perhaps that was why he looked at me with ugly hate in his eyes.
    As I came into his line of sight, I let a smile curve my lips, despite the fact that I could all but feel the heavy breaths of Dahm coming down my neck.
    “Dahm.”
    Those breaths stilled.
    “You should invest in some breath tonics. I hear