Hunter's Rise Read Free Page A

now. No doubt she was telling lots and lots of lies, and causing her lawyer many, many headaches while her husband’s lawyers rubbed their hands together.
     
    The husband… bent over, she paused in the middle of unzipping her boots. She hoped the man hadn’t really lovedhis wife too much. Whether he’d loved her or not, though, this must be one hell of a sucker punch. He might have been wishing Sylvia
had
taken the contract.
     
    But there was just no way.
     
    There were, Sylvia knew, more than a few killers-for-hire who would have taken the job. They killed for the thrill of it, for the hell of it, for the fun of it or for the money.
     
    She didn’t operate that way— she killed because it was what she did. She was good at it. But she was selective. Very selective. Abusive husbands, yes. She’d actually killed her first abusive
wife
a few years ago. That had been a head-spinning job, for certain. Abusive spouses were fair game. Abusive parents? Absolutely. Any type of abuser,
if
she knew the abuse was real.
     
    Killing an abuser was one thing that did satisfy her. Others… it was just a job. Drug-dealers and other criminals fell in a gray area for her, but if they were involved in areas that could affect kids… well, they were playing a dangerous game. No reason kids should have to suffer the risks.
     
    She didn’t get involved in political messes, not unless there was another issue involved. Human politics, human concern, she didn’t give a damn.
     
    She didn’t kill just to kill.
     
    Just like she didn’t kill to feed.
     
    A vampire had to have standards.
     
    A killer-for-hire had to have standards.
     
    Sylvia was both, and she’d spend a very long time on this earth— she didn’t want to live with any more mistakes than she had to. She kept her standards pretty high, and when somebody crossed her own personal lines, it was at their own risk. That was a lesson Faith Dwyer had learned earlier.
     
    She couldn’t say she hadn’t been warned, either. Because Sylvia had warned her, when the woman had first contacted her.
Be careful. Don’t take risks. Don’t tell anybody else about this… and do NOT lie to me. About anything.
     
    Those were the ground rules Sylvia had laid out when she’d made the phone call after the first few e-mails had been exchanged.
     
    Faith hadn’t taken the warning seriously.
     
    Pity.
     
    That relaxing glass of wine beckoned, but she knew that if she had the wine, she’d want to do nothing else work-related before she settled down to rest. And she needed to take care of business matters first, and start making plans to move on. She’d been putting it off for weeks, and it was time.
     
    If she didn’t get things in motion now, she’d get caught up in another job and then put it off again, and again… she excelled at procrastination.
     
    So instead of going for that glass of wine, she settled at her desk to check her e-mail. There were a number of them. Most were from a familiar site— an underground Craigslist for killers sort of thing. She skimmed through them, deleting most without reading more than a few lines. She was, after all, very picky. She wasn’t killing some moron’s “cunt” of a girlfriend, and she wasn’t killing this woman’s husband because he cheated on her.
     
    But one e-mail made her go still.
     
    One had images flashing through her mind…
     
    A boy. And images of the boy brought other images to mind… images of a man.
     
    Alan Pulaski
—
     
    That name. Gripping the edge of her desk, she closed her eyes and let the memories dancing in the back of her mind come to her. After a woman’s lived more than a few decades, the memory can get chaotic… and Sylvia was over a hundred years old.
     
    Missing—
     
    A missing child. Toby… innocent eyes, sweet smile… there. His face. She had never been able to forget that boy’s face. Locking on the memory, she pulled it to the front of her mind and then she looked back at the