Charmed (Death Escorts #2)(3)
Author: Cambria Hebert

The closets where he kept his bodies.

Some people collect coins, artifacts, or tools. G.R. collects bodies.

The doors were open, making me think he was displaying his collection to me for a certain reason. Shock value maybe? Though he must know that seeing a bunch of bodies wasn’t something that would shock me. These bodies were all groomed and hanging in perfect rows. I was used to seeing bodies in… less than perfect condition.

Maybe it was to make me think that the very body I inhabited at this moment might end up back with the others and I would be nothing but the red mist that makes up my soul.

I scanned the bodies, my eyes looking for one that probably should have been familiar, but after so many years I wondered if it would be. I had done this occasionally through the years, but just like today, I didn’t see it. I wondered what had become of my original body, the one I was born in. The one I died in. I couldn’t imagine G.R. got rid of it; I mean, he was practically a body hoarder, yet in all my years of working as an escort, of rotating bodies, I hadn’t seen it.

And I wasn’t about to ask. Because asking would let him know I wondered; it would give him even more power over me… something he didn’t need more of.

“I have a new Target for you,” G.R. announced, effectively ending my thinking.

“A Target?” I asked, surprised, wondering if I somehow missed the punishment I was supposed to get.

“That is your job, is it not?” he mused, staring at me through narrowed eyes. His cheekbones jutted out and his wide forehead was further widened by the way he combed his dark hair back and away from his face. He wasn’t a big man, but I guess when the merest touch could kill, muscles didn’t really matter.

“I thought we were here to discuss the status of my job,” I replied, looking right at him. I was careful to keep my posture bordering on lazy to give off the impression I could care less about whatever he dished out.

“Active,” he said, irritation flashing through his eyes. “That’s the status of your job. Like it or not, you’re one of the best escorts I have.”

I flashed a smile. I wasn’t one of the best. I was the best. We both knew it. I guess that was the reason my punishment was lacking.

“Here,” he said, holding out a file. I got up and took the folder, opening it up and staring down at the picture clipped to the front of the page. It was a young woman, in her twenties—long dark hair, brown eyes, and full lips. She was gorgeous, which could be considered a bonus. She had the bone structure of fine breeding and about four names, which spoke of old money.

She’d be dead by the end of the week.

I scanned the information, looking for her address, looking for the place I’d be flying off to next. Hopefully it was somewhere warm, with miles of beaches. Or perhaps the dessert where it seemed the sun always shined. I didn’t really care as long as it wasn’t here. Alaska sucked. I hoped I never came here again.

My eyes found the zip code and I stiffened. “Is this right?” I asked, turning to look at G.R.

“Have I ever given you faulty information?”

Here. The woman was here, in this godforsaken, cold, and dark town.

Something niggled at the back of my brain. I looked at her name again. Rosalyn Elizabeth Kennedy Sinclair. Her last name… I’d heard it before. I glanced down at the short paragraph on known information about the Target.

Daughter of Senator Jack Sinclair.

The file slapped my thigh when I jerked and spun around to look at G.R. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I don’t joke about business.”

“She’s the daughter of Jack Sinclair, the Alaskan senator. He’s practically a celebrity around here,” I said, thinking of all the times I watched the news or some show on TV. The press here loved him. They practically camped out on his lawn, just hoping for a glimpse of him.

“Yes. He is. His daughter is worth thirty million dollars.”

“Money. So this Target is all about money,” I said. I don’t know why this irritated me, but it did. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d killed for money. It wouldn’t be the last. In fact, I killed for money more than I killed for abilities because finding people with some sort of ability wasn’t as easy as finding one with money.

“You have something against money, Charming?”

“No. But you have to know this girl has got to have security practically feeding her breakfast. Not to mention she probably has fifteen financial advisors and lawyers that will make actually getting to her money impossible.”

“So are you saying you can’t do this job? That you refuse?”

Ahhhh. And here it was.

Understanding dawned like the sun of a new day.

He was dolling out my punishment in the form of a job. He assigned me a Target that would practically guarantee failure. Failure would get me Recalled, would get my soul pulled out of my body and sent into an empty vast space of nothingness for all eternity. A place where I could hear the tortured wails of those lost around me, a place where I could think but feel nothing but pain, and a place where I would know no peace ever.

And if I refused this job?

Same thing. So here was an interesting dilemma. I could refuse and get Recalled. I could fail and get Recalled. Or I could pull off the most impossible kill in the history of escorting and I could make Mr. Death himself finally realize who he was attempting to mess with.

Really, there was no dilemma at all.

“You know this job is going to take longer. To infiltrate the camp of this woman, of this family… it isn’t something I can do overnight.”

G.R.’s eyes gleamed. “Yes, I’m aware. I’ll give you six months.”

I kept my face smooth, my posture relaxed as his timeline sucker punched me in the gut. Six months? That was insane. A job of this magnitude would take a year. I underestimated just how angry I had made him.

My eyes slid to the bowl of light-colored stones that sat on the corner of his desk. The stones that he always left in exchange for a life that he took. Once a stone was placed, the death—the end of a life—was sealed. There was no getting out of it.

Except for once.

Turns out if you can manage to break the stone, then you break the claim of the Grim Reaper. One of the new Escorts figured it out. It got him Recalled. It got me into this predicament.

“I want more than my usual cut,” I said. Punishment or not, if I pulled this off I wanted what I earned. “Ten million.”