Love Like Blood: (Royal Blood #5) (3 page)

One-eight-seven.

Glancing up and down the hall and seeing I was alone, I unlocked the roller door and heaved it up. The noise echoed through the empty space around me, loud and harsh. Inside, I flicked on the light and Shangri-La was revealed.

Storage crates, lockboxes, and plastic containers lined each wall, meticulously organized, just as I had left them three months prior. It was untouched and still good to go.

Anything I could ever need for my line of work was in this room. Cash in multiple currencies, forged identity papers, weapons and ammunition, fake license plates and registration… Everything I needed to fool the system into believing that I was someone else.

Grabbing the box of black duffle bags from the back corner, I began filling them with as much as I could knowing I might not be able to come back here.

Making three trips, I carried the bags out to the car and stashed them in the boot. I’d parked at the rear and just outside the field of vision of the security cameras. While the opportunity presented itself, I changed the license plates.

On my way back to the motel, I stopped at Primark and bought both myself and The Hangman two changes of clothing with cash—cash was untraceable. Around the corner, I bought two prepaid mobiles with a fake ID.

This was the part they never told you about in assassin school. The legwork far outweighed the moment. The moment being the hit. Hours and days of planning for a single shot that if you missed, would undo everything you’d worked for. Planning was far more important than the moment you pulled the trigger.

I wasn’t quite sure what I was planning for, but whatever it was, it was bound to be an eye-opener.

When I finally returned to the motel, The Hangman was still asleep, naked in his blanket.

So, there was a shred of truth to his ramblings after all.

S
he was a gun for hire
. Her father’s puppet.

She dealt with facts, orders, and logistics.

Tangible facts would get her to trust me, not blind faith. In the business of killing, faith that you’d hit your target wasn’t going to get the job done. You hit it or you didn’t. There was no room for error. A miss was a death sentence.

That was Lorelei now. The artist was gone, and in her place was a calculated killer. Lethal. If you were marked for extermination, you never laid eyes on her face because you were already dead.

Just like X had been, so was she. A nameless ghost, a specter of death.

Staring up at the ceiling, the yellow glow from the curtains, staining the room with its putrid light, told me I’d been asleep for a long time. It was day, maybe afternoon, but I wasn’t sure. The only thing I knew was that my entire body ached, and Lorelei wasn’t here. I was alone.

Rolling over, I winced as my joints came back to life, flaring hot. There was a Primark bag on the table, and I narrowed my eyes. I wasn’t used to wearing budget clothing. I wasn’t used to budget anything. Even in the days after Lorelei’s death, I still had quite a substantial fortune that I was able to take with me. Intelligence, by way of Gregory ‘Greggor’ Lansford, had ripped apart anything that had been left, including property and investments I’d made under my real name.

I’d been emotionally poor but never financially poor. Then again, I’d never been below the radar like this before.

Knowing she’d been quite busy while I slept, I slipped out of bed and grabbed the bag. Pulling out the clothes, I had to give her a little credit. She’d gotten the size and coloring right. Dark denim jeans, boxer briefs, socks, plain fitted T-shirts in black and gray, a leather jacket, a synthetic woolen jumper… Not bad at all. Snapping the tags off a pair of boxers, I dragged them on. Perfect fit.

As I got dressed, my ribs ached, and my joints were stiff, but at least I was warm. I’d lost track of what day it was somewhere around the time X and I had been double-crossed by my own guns for hire—the night I’d been captured by Royal Blood—and the moment Lorelei brought me back out into the light.

It was winter. Cold, snowing,
delightfully balmy
and somewhere around December. Christmas.

Shuffling across the room, I glanced out the window. Lorelei was just outside, hunched over the engine of a car I hadn’t seen before. It looked like she’d lifted the sedan from some poor unsuspecting person and was filing off the engine number.

I knew we wouldn’t be staying here for long, but I had no idea where we were going to go. What Lorelei wanted was unknown to me, and maybe even to her.

Moving away from the window, I opened the door and peered outside. She glanced up at the sound, and our gazes crossed. Straightening up, she slammed the bonnet closed.

Dusting off her hands, she placed the file she’d been using to wipe the VIN from the engine back into the black bag at her feet. Then she picked it up and walked toward me.

Stepping back as she entered the motel room, I closed out the winter air and turned to watch her movements.

Opening the little bar fridge, she took out a plastic bag that had a Tesco logo printed on the side and set it on the table next to the duffle. Then she began methodically pulling things out, setting each item neatly against each other like she was piecing together a puzzle. As she assembled her inventory, I watched her with interest and wondered which course of action she’d decided on.

She assembled ammunition, mobile phones, two handguns, a bundle of twenty-pound notes from the duffle, and two prepackaged sandwiches from the plastic bag before gesturing at me to come forward.

Sitting opposite, I ran my gaze over each item.

Handing me a sandwich, she gestured for me to eat. Ripping open the package, I wolfed it down. I didn’t know when I’d eaten last, and the hollow feeling in my stomach had become an almost normal part of my existence.

“Tomorrow, we will move,” she said, ignoring my messy eating.

Picking up one of the handguns, she checked the mechanism and the safety, then flipped it over in her hand. Grasping the muzzle, she held the weapon out to me butt first.

“You trust me with a gun?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You’ve had plenty of opportunities to leave,” she said blandly.

I took that to mean she trusted me for the moment, but I wasn’t fool enough to think that it meant implicitly. She could disarm me with little to no effort if she chose to.

Taking the gun, I sat it on the table in front of me and resumed eating.

She picked up one of the mobile phones and placed it next to the gun. “It can’t call out. Not until I say so.”

Obviously. I was a little boy again, a runner waiting for orders from my employer. Lorelei was in charge of me now.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

She scowled, her gaze falling to the tabletop.

“You don’t know, do you?”

Snatching up the empty packet in front of me, she stood and crossed the room, throwing it into the bin.

“What’s it going to be, Lorelei?” I asked, watching her ordered movements. Movements that would soon become chaotic as her conditioning continued to deteriorate. “Royal Blood or Lafayette?”

She turned her cold gaze onto mine and narrowed her eyes. “You think you have all the answers?” she asked harshly. “Then what should we do, Hangman? What path should I take?”

It was a trick. Another test. It had to be.

Stuffing the last piece of my sandwich into my mouth, I chewed slowly, dwelling on our options. Whichever direction she chose, I would follow—there was no doubt about that.

Door number one was Royal Blood. I knew how that story ended.

Door number two was Lafayette. The final page on that one was a little more hazy.

Whichever way we went, it was my job to keep her together.

Swallowing, I decided to tell her the truth. “It’s not my choice. Only you can make that decision.”

“What a cop out,” she spat.

“No, not at all. I’m here for one reason, Lorelei, and that is to be your constant.” I sighed, turning my gaze back onto the gun she’d given me. “I’d really like to take you away from all of this, like I was supposed to the day you were taken from me, but I know that’s not what you need.”

“And what do I need? Love?” She shook her head, still refusing to believe that someone could care about her.

“No, not love. That will come back to us, or it won’t. What you need are answers, and the sooner you understand that, the sooner you’ll be at peace with your future.”

Her lip curled. “The Hangman philosophical? I never thought a man like you could wax poetic about complete and utter bullshit.”

“It’s logical,” I retorted, knowing that the remark would hit an open wound in her psyche.

Lorelei strode across the room, fisted her hand into my jumper, and shoved me off the chair. Pain shot through my tender ribs as I stumbled to my feet, and it seared through the broken skin on my back the moment I hit the wall behind me.

“You think you know me?” she hissed. “You think you know what’s going on in my mind, Hangman? You know
shit
.”

“Vaughn,” I said, staring her right in the eye.

Her head tilted to the side, and her dark brown locks tumbled around her shoulders. “
What?
”

“My name is Vaughn.” I knew her game. She called me Hangman to distance herself from me. I wouldn’t allow her to keep me away, no matter how painful it was for her.

Her fingers loosened from the material of my jumper, and she let me go.

“I’m not your enemy, Lorelei,” I murmured. “I’m not going to fuck you over, but I am going to call bullshit when I see it. I know what you are, you’ve been reminding me of it since the moment we left Bristol, but you’re forgetting who I am.”

She regarded me with a closed expression. Most likely weighing up my usefulness.

“Who you are?” she asked quietly.

“Capable, connected, and just as determined as you are. I’m not some weak pussy,” I said. “I can put a bullet in a man’s head without blinking and not give a shit about it afterward. Do not forget who I am. They tell stories about The Hangman, and they’re all true. Every last sordid tale.”

She stood and let my declaration sink in for a moment. When she seemed satisfied, she turned and began packing the duffle bag.

Outside, the sun had all but disappeared. In winter, it was hard to tell what time of day it was since night came quickly. It could be five p.m., or it could be midnight.

I still felt like I could sleep for days, so I returned to the bed and leaned my back against the headboard as Lorelei organized her belongings. If she wanted me to do something, I was sure she’d command it of me sooner or later.

When she’d completed her task, she sat on the bed next to me, her position mirroring mine.

“Tell me everything that happened after Sykes,” she commanded, her voice hushed in the still room.

Of all the things I thought she would’ve asked, that was not it. I was sure that this conversation wouldn’t have happened until much later in the piece, which meant I had underestimated her curiosity—and her penchant for logistics.

Settling in for the long haul, I began telling her everything I knew. I tried to piece it together as best I could, but back then was a haze. I’d drowned a lot of sorrows and hung a lot of souls across Europe in those days. It was only five years ago, but it felt like an entire lifetime.

“In the beginning, I dreamed about you almost every night,” I began. “I’d run and run, but I’d never get to you in time. I’d fall to my knees and hold your bloodstained face in my hands and cry. I didn’t know how to deal with your loss, so I began reenacting your fate on those who would go against me. That is why they call me The Hangman, because of how I kill, but in truth, it was because of what Sykes did to you.”

Turning to take her in, I found her gaze firmly on the wall in front of her, her reaction to my words unknown.

“Hawkes and I worked our way across the continent, forging alliances, gathering information and informants, building a network with one purpose,” I went on.

“And what was that?” she muttered.

“Revenge.” It was as simple as that.

My plan had been to build my wealth and forge powerful connections, and a part of that was using the man who’d killed my one true love to do it. If I’d been aware of Greggor’s true identity, I might’ve targeted him as well, but I thought he’d been nothing but a grieving father. A pillar of the business community, not the leader of an underground crime syndicate.

“I never made peace with your death,” I said quietly. “I bided my time, got my pieces in position, and then I used Mercy to pull the trigger. Sykes killed her entire family, so who was I to deny her payback? I had many chances to take him out over the years, and I never took any of them. I could’ve prevented her family from dying.”

“Why didn’t you?”

I shrugged. It could’ve been many things, but Sykes had been more valuable to me alive than dead. He never knew it, but it was his dealings that made The Hangman rich again. I supposed it was greed that had been the cause. Greed and the slow burn of revenge that I’d given over to Mercy Reid.

“Vaughn.”

I turned at the sound of my name on Lorelei’s lips. On the surface, it was a small thing, her using my correct title, but I knew it was a step in the right direction. I was forging a connection with her.

“The time wasn’t right, though I suppose it was never going to be perfect.”

She snorted and glanced away. “And now here we are.”

I allowed the one-sided conversation to fall into silence. She didn’t move or speak, she just sat there like a closed book.

“Tomorrow,” I began, and she glanced at me. “Where are we going?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

“You can be anyone you want to now,” I said. “Go anywhere. Do anything.”

“Who do you want me to be?” she asked, her eyes giving nothing away.

“There’s no going back, I know that.”

“And if you don’t like the person I’ve become when this is all said and done?”

I was still in love with Lorelei Lansford, the gallery curator from a wealthy British family. I was in love with the demure flower I’d run into on the street in Kensington in the heart of London. The woman who sat on the bed next to me was an assassin. She was deadly and unfeeling with the potential to become the darkest monster of them all. She’d murdered without feeling, and she would go on snuffing out whichever lives she chose fit. That was not the Lorelei I knew and fell in love with.

The only thing I had to go on was the faith that underneath all of The Watchman’s conditioning she was still in there. Or she at least had the potential to break free and become her own person again.

“I don’t know,” I replied truthfully. “We’ll figure it out if we get there.”

Sadness flickered through her eyes so briefly I almost thought I was imagining it. Climbing off the bed, she retrieved her gun from the table, checked the lock on the door, and flicked the light off. I guess we were done talking.

To my surprise, she didn’t sit in the armchair. Instead, she returned to the bed and lay down beside me, placing the gun underneath her pillow.

“Go to sleep, Vaughn,” she said. “We’ve got a long way to go tomorrow.”

Sighing heavily, I kicked off my boots and lay beside her, both of us still fully clothed.

Thinking about the things she would have to deal with in the coming days, I couldn’t comprehend how X had overcome any of it. I wondered if he’d reconciled with his past life before he realized he was falling for Mercy. Lorelei was rooted in my past, but Mercy was a part of X’s future.

Maybe we were doomed before we even began. Maybe this was a fool’s errand.

I was sick, but not it the way I used to think I was. I was sick with longing for the love that I had lost. If I was going to move forward with Lorelei, then we’d have to forge a new love and not dwell on something that no longer existed.

All that was left to do was to help Lorelei find out who she was now. This wasn’t about me, not anymore. It was about the fight for her identity. Love would come later, or it wouldn’t come at all.