Read Death of an Assassin (Saint Roch City Book 1) for Free Online Page B

away and with one twist of his head, his jaws move to snap down on
me
. He hasn’t even bitten down and my mind already concocts the feel of his teeth digging into my leg. The sensation of being pulled to the water. Drowned. Eaten.
    My arms tremble and knees turn to little more than jelly as I drop Andrew’s body, Thomas straining to hold up his dying brother as the crocodile rumbles forward.
    The gaping mouth opens, and I’m much too close to seeing the throat of a crocodile when my arm jerks back and I’m pulled against the fence. My shoulder slams against the wooden slats that tear at my skin as I topple over, and my head hits the frozen ground behind it.
    My eyes are filled with stars, and I hear an alarm clock screeching, plaintive and piercing all at the same time. As I slowly regain my senses, I realize it’s not an alarm. Not a siren. It’s Andrew Donahue, screaming as Bruce takes better hold of his leg with a bite that was meant for me. Andrew vomits blood over himself, and in the moonlight, Bruce jerks, whipping the poor kid down the beach with the glee of a child and his toy. The night cracks with the sound of splintering bones and purrs with the grumble of a satisfied reptile.
    Bruce looks like an overgrown―vastly so―house cat, playing with a caught mouse. Andrew can do little more than squeal with all of the grace of a stuck pig as the crocodile gathers him up again in its massive jaws and lumbers to the water’s edge, so easily bored with his own game. Before slipping back beneath the frigid surf, there’s a soft
whumpf
of his jaws closing a final time. Andrew is no longer screaming.
    My heart drops from my throat a hairsbreadth at a time. Only a few seconds have passed since my trip, and I crane my neck. My entire body is sore and when I lift myself up, the stars come back to my eyes, the dizziness overtaking me. Giving my blurry eyes a moment to adjust, I see Thomas crumpled beside me, his hand extended to my shoulder.
    He pulled you over the fence.
    His eyes are closed, and I see the blood seeping down his forehead, his coordination enough to sacrifice his own brother to save a stranger, but not enough to avoid the only rock on the beach―diving headfirst into it, in fact.
    From the ballroom, the doors open and people surge out. The flashlights come up—Saint Roch police issue. The pulsing lights of red and blue in the driveway of the Manchester only make my stars and blurriness that much greater.
    I wrap a hand around my knife and focus on the prone form of Thomas Donahue at my feet. The last kill I need under my belt to earn a cool eight hundred grand.
    It’s not until ten minutes later, when I’m loping down the beach―keeping fences and dunes between myself and the shore―that I realize I shouldn’t have checked Thomas’s pulse to make sure he was alive before I fled. I should’ve slit his throat. I should’ve slammed his head back against the rock as many times as it took. I should’ve made sure to finish the damn job.
    Instead, I could only wonder why some kid would save a girl he just met instead of his own flesh and blood.



don’t sleep that night, the evening flashing over my eyes brighter than the strobes of the ambulance waiting to whisk my quarry to the hospital. My quarry who I helped to save. Or at least prolong the life of. Someone willing to pay a million dollars to kill a kid is probably willing to try again.
    My body throbs at every inhalation. Not at the pain of the evening, but the facts. What I did and more importantly, what I didn’t do.
    By the time the sun is peeking over the tenement buildings of the distant East Passage, filled to the brim with every flavor of Asian you can imagine, I’m on my sixty-seventh rollover in the sheets. The soft, cool fabric is anything but, swimming in a brine of my sweat and aggravation. At this point, I’m better off burning them than trying to wash it out.
    I know I should be scared. Terrified, really. I skipped out on a