Assassins in Love by Kris DeLake Read Free Book Online Page B

galaxy, the legality of the profession varied. But in the sectors where Misha worked, the Assassins Guild held sway.
    He had joined at the urging of his mother, so that he could stay out of the situation she had found herself in. She had been an assassin for a particular government, and had been unable to tell anyone, including her husband, Misha’s father. When she refused to do a job so heinous that it even got through her shady ethics and then she rigged things so that no one could ever do that job, her own government hired an assassin to take her out.
    Only the assassin had decided to go one step further: he also targeted her family. Misha and his father were on a vacation cruise on a much smaller ship than this one when that assassin opened fire, killing everyone except Misha. The assassin left Misha gravely wounded but alive, then made sure the ship docked at the space station where his mother was hiding out. She found Misha and saved him, and she was the one who realized all of those deaths were a warning to her and other assassins to always do their job.
    She tracked down that assassin, but Misha killed him. Barely thirteen, he had managed—through anger and sheer adrenaline—to take down a man three times his size. That was when his mother realized she had a talent on her hands. That was when she realized that together, she and he could hire out for difficult jobs.
    She took him to a more civilized part of the galaxy, joined the Assassins Guild, and sent him to their training. He had taken to their rules—she once said—as if she had sent him to a religious school. He never returned to the area of his birth, and except for traveling through places like the NetherRealm, he never left Assassins Guild territory.
    He worked legally or not at all.
    But Rikki didn’t. Apparently she was as amoral as the man who killed Misha’s father. Apparently she didn’t care who got hurt when she performed her job.
    She finished, got paid, and then left the mess for someone else.
    And lately that someone else had been him.
    But no longer.
    Now he would stop her. If she didn’t want to join the Guild, then her career would have to end.
    One way or another.

Chapter 7
     
    After spending the night in Misha’s suite, Rikki found her room to be so small she wondered how she had managed to stay there for the first part of the trip. When the door opened, it brushed against the bed. The bed itself barely fit her, and it was uncomfortable as hell.
    Uncomfortable probably wasn’t the right word. Torturous would be better.
    It had no mattress, not really. It was some kind of pad that supposedly remembered her sleeping position and lulled her into some kind of deep sleep. She had slept well here before she had gone to Misha’s room—where she hadn’t slept, thank you very much, or slept much, as the case might be.
    She would never ever ever get that mattress out of her mind. (That night, really. The best night of her life. The morning after—not so good [well, it started out great]—but the night, the night was spectacular.)
    She sat on the edge of her horrible bed, thinking that it did her no good. The mattress (or whatever the hell it was) remembered her sleeping position when what she really wanted was a place to sit. And the bed didn’t remember her sitting position. She looked at the room’s only chair. It was some metal thing with no padding that was more uncomfortable than the bed. She certainly couldn’t work on that chair, and the room wasn’t big enough for a table.
    Hell, it wasn’t big enough for a real closet either, but that hadn’t bothered her until—
    She shook her head, trying to get that suite out of her mind. She had to concentrate.
    She ate the last bite of the most sinfully delicious pastry she had ever had, wished for real coffee, regretted that she hadn’t poured herself a cup when she had been in Misha’s suite, then ordered up a cup from the little servo unit on the wall.
    The servo unit had been