Knot Your Victim (PAPERBACK, LGBT)

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ONE

Jezebel

MY FIRST THOUGHT after sitting down next to my target at the posh hotel bar was that it would be a whole lot easier to murder this asshole if he didn’t smell so damned good.

“Hi,” I said, sipping my glass of Coca Cola disguised as something alcoholic. “Is it okay if I sit here?”

Seriously, this was one of the many, many downsides of being an omega. There was no freaking universe where my gut reaction to Mr. Sex Trafficker should have been, ‘Holy crap… this six-and-a-half-foot-tall alpha in his slick designer suit smells like home.’

I didn’t mean that in some kind of woo-woo emotional way, either. The cloud of cedar-and-campfire pheromones surrounding my latest mark literally took my mind back to the Ontario forests of my childhood, where I’d spent camping trips with my mother and brothers before everything in my life went so terribly wrong.

The alpha glanced at me, then did a double-take as his nostrils flared, taking in my sweet caramel latte scent. In an instant, his regard sharpened until he was looking at me properly.

“Go right ahead,” he said. “Can I get you another drink?”

I smiled my sweetest good-girl smile, taking in the subtle dilation of his pupils in the bar’s warm lighting. “Sure, that would be great. Rum and Coke, please. My name’s Kit, by the way.”

It was for tonight, at least. Jezebel was way too memorable for a job like this.

“Nice to meet you. My friends call me Knox.” Mr. Sex Trafficker dragged his gaze away from me with what appeared to be some difficulty, flagging down the bartender. “A Rum and Coke for the lady. Put it on my tab.”

I berated myself silently when I found I was staring at him as avidly as he’d been staring at me a moment ago. As far as I was concerned, this guy was a walking corpse—nothing more. He might have soulful, deep-set brown eyes and tawny golden skin, with a sharp, well-defined jaw and expressive lips, but he was still going to be worm-food before the night was done.

I pasted on a wider smile. Death was the only fitting punishment for his crimes.

If you asked a random person on the street whether omega assassins existed, they’d probably respond with a nervous laugh and say of course not. Omegas were soft. Physically weak. Frightened of their own shadows. They didn’t kill people for money.

And, okay—to be fair, I was pretty crap at the ‘for money’ part. Yes, there was usually some kind of payment involved, simply because transforming from a dirty street rat to someone who wouldn’t get thrown out of a nice hotel bar like this one wasn’t cheap. Fake IDs weren’t free. Nice dresses and makeup and pretty shoes weren’t free.

But after all the trappings were paid for, I wasn’t exactly pulling in the big bucks. For me, killing alpha assholes—and getting away with it—was a passion project rather than a business.

I finished my non-alcoholic drink and accepted the Rum and Coke with murmured thanks, grasping it with satin-gloved fingers. Fingers that wouldn’t leave prints.

“So, what brings you to Chicago?” I asked, playing dumb. I knew perfectly well that Matthew Knockley—Knox to his friends—was a Chi-town native who’d inherited a sprawling trade logistics empire from his old-money family. As far as what he got up to on the side…

“Oh, I was born here,” he said, his arresting gaze once more focused on me. “As for why I’m in this hotel… I’m afraid it’s for an incredibly boring business convention.”

“Oh?” I asked, feigning interest in information I already knew about. “What kind of business convention?”

He gave a short, self-deprecating laugh. “The tedious kind. Imports and exports.”

“’Imports and exports’? Seriously? Or, is that some kind of code for being in the mafia?” I joked, because I was constitutionally incapable of not pushing boundaries.

“I’m not so sure the mafia would have me.” He gestured at himself, indicating the clear influence of his mother—who according to the dossier provided by my client, had been Black. Combined with his very un-Italian last name, he was probably right about his prospects with that particular branch of organized crime.

“Unfortunately,” he went on, “I’m stuck with the tiresome parts of business, like paying taxes and not being able to murder your competitors.”

Ah. Irony.

That was irony, wasn’t it?

“Hmm… too bad,” I told him. “That must complicate things terribly for you.”

His eyes sparkled with hidden humor. “Oh, you’ve no idea.”

Actually, I had a pretty good idea.

He glanced up at the ornate clock hanging on one wall of the bar area, and frowned. “Look… it’s getting late—”

I sat up straight on the barstool, preparing to come up with some excuse for continuing our conversation. He wasn’t finished, though.

“—and I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but… would you like to come up to my room for a nightcap?”

Oh.

I blinked.

That had certainly been a lot easier than I’d expected.

“Only if you promise to tell me more about import and export taxation,” I said, striking a vixen-ish pose and fluttering my eyelashes at him.

He laughed. I hated the fact that it was a really nice laugh.

“No promises.”

I laughed as well, trying to make it sound as natural and seductive as possible. Grabbing my little black clutch with its incredibly important contents, I let him usher me toward the elevators with a hand hovering a few inches away from my lower back. The fact that the almost-contact didn’t make my skin crawl was freaking me out a bit, if I were being honest.

I’m locked in an enclosed metal box with a predator, I thought as the doors shut us both inside. Why don’t I feel like I’m in danger?

Mr. Sex Trafficker kept up an easy flow of conversation as the elevator went up… and up.

“Wow,” I said, as the counter went all the way to the top floor and gave a cheerful ding. “Penthouse suite?”

He shrugged. His key card slid smoothly through the slot in the nearest door, and the lock clicked. “After you.”

I’d never been in a penthouse suite before, needless to say. Making a concerted effort not to gape openly at the elegant décor and clean, airy surroundings that were so utterly different to what I was used to, I whistled in appreciation.

“Not bad,” I said, and then promptly zeroed in on the most useful thing in the room. “Ooh, a mini-bar! What can I get you?”

He loosened his tie and tossed his suit jacket over the back of a velvet-upholstered chair. “A bourbon on the rocks would be good. And help yourself to whatever.”

This was perfect. For one thing, it saved me from having to faff around with convincing him to get us room service.

“One bourbon on the rocks, coming up,” I replied, keeping a peripheral eye on him to make sure he wasn’t watching as I snuck a couple of pills out of my clutch and dropped them into his drink.

Acepromazine in the dosage I’d scored was an industrial-strength horse tranquilizer that wasn’t too difficult to get from a veterinarian—if you had horses. Which I obviously didn’t. But you could get just about anything on the street if you knew the right people… which I obviously did.

The thing about acepromazine was that it packed a kick, but it also cleared out of the bloodstream really fast. And, even more importantly, it wasn’t approved for human use. Therefore, it wasn’t something that was tested for in a typical tox screening after, for instance, a suspicious death.

It also dissolved really nicely in liquid, which was handy.
“Here you go.” I handed the cut-crystal tumbler to him, then turned around again to focus on making myself a Midori sour. When it was ready, I lifted it toward him in a toast. “To boring business conventions, and the things that make them less boring.”

“I’ll drink to that,” he said, and suited action to word.
I hid my grim smile and lifted my own glass, taking the tiniest of sips.

* * *

The first time I’d killed a man, it had been an act of desperation carried out with a dozen of my fellow omega prisoners, when the driver of the semi that had been smuggling us south from Canada into America had stopped for fuel. He’d made the mistake of opening the trailer door to make sure none of us had frozen to death, and we’d jumped him without any sort of a plan beyond survival.

I’d been thirteen at the time.

The second time I’d killed a man, it had been… not an accident, exactly. But not planned, by any stretch. I’d walked in on some middle-aged asshole about to rape my closest friend, grabbed the nearest heavy object, and used it to cave in the fucker’s skull.

Then, in a fit of combined panic and PTSD, I’d fled, leaving that friend alone with a dead body that had clearly been murdered. Needless to say, we weren’t friends anymore. At least, I was pretty sure we weren’t, since that had been more than a year ago, and I’d disappeared from his life without a trace rather than face the shame of having abandoned him to the tender mercies of the police.

God… I really hoped he hadn’t ended up in jail.

I’d been too afraid to try and find out.

The problem was, once the panic and dissociation had worn off, I’d enjoyed the feeling of having removed a dangerous predator from the world. I’d enjoyed it way too much, in fact.

Living on the streets, you tended to hear about stuff. Bad stuff. Even so, it had been pure insanity the first time I’d decided to remove a problem in a way that was, um… premeditated.

The asshole in question had been grooming little kids at a local karate class and taking nude photos of them being abused. So, I’d killed him. And I hadn’t gotten caught.

A couple of months later, I’d taken out a drug dealer who was whoring out his omega girlfriends—shooting them up with heat stimulants and then auctioning them to the highest bidders.

Word began to spread. People started coming to me directly with their problems. And if those problems felt like something I could fix without getting my stupid ass killed … I fixed them. Permanently.

Matthew Knockley was my sixth target, not counting those early, heat-of-the-moment kills. He was also, by far, the biggest.

When a terrified omega boy called Adrian had tracked me down and handed me Matthew Knockley’s dossier, my gut had urged me to run the other way and not look back. Not only was this asshole the leader of a respected pack with a secret sideline in human trafficking; he was fucking rich. Not to mention powerful and well-connected. If he died under mysterious circumstances, the police would give a shit about it. Lots of people would give a shit about it.

But… Adrian’s story hit me squarely in the unresolved childhood trauma.

His sister had been taken. She was only eleven years old. And she wasn’t the first.

I knew what kind of life awaited underage omegas sold into the sex trade. I’d almost been one of them, if not for a careless truck driver and a deserted fuel plaza in the middle of the night.

So, I’d taken the job. And now, here I was.

“Sorry,” Mr. Sex Trafficker slurred, rubbing at his face with uncoordinated movements. “I feel… really tired all of the sudden.”

The tumbler—mostly empty except for a bit of ice, slipped from his grasp and hit the luxurious carpet with barely a sound.

I smiled, thin and tight. “Then you should sleep,” I told him. “Here, let me help you get on the bed.”

I grabbed his arm and urged him onto unsteady feet, helping him stagger the few steps to the ridiculous king-sized bed. He flopped back, boneless.

“Mmm,” he nearly purred. “You smell like…”

“Caramel latte?” I offered dryly.

“Heaven,” he finished.

I rolled my eyes and did a quick inventory. Satin gloves? Still on. Hair? Lacquered into an impenetrable chignon that wouldn’t shed any incriminating strands of DNA in the room. I dumped my barely-touched Midori sour down the bathroom sink drain, rinsing and drying the glass thoroughly before returning it to the mini bar.

When I returned to the bed with a few squares of clean toilet paper, Matthew Knockley was snoring deeply, his breathing too loud and too slow.

That much acepromazine might kill him on its own, but I wasn’t the type to leave things like this to chance. Opening my clutch purse, I pulled out the empty 10cc syringe hidden there and sat at the foot of the bed.

I removed one designer shoe from my victim’s left foot, followed by his sock. Finding a vein between a person’s toes was always a total pain in the ass, but this trick only worked if it got directly into the victim’s bloodstream. Patiently, I delivered ten syringes’ worth of air into Mr. Sex Trafficker’s circulatory system, taking care to go in through the same needle hole each time.

When I was done, I wiped the blood from the needle, capped it, and returned it to my clutch. I’d toss it in a dumpster somewhere far from here, where it would disappear among all the other drug paraphernalia. Then I pressed the wad of toilet paper hard to the injection site to staunch the tiny amount of blood seeping there.

The area would still bruise, but so far, no medical examiner had gone looking for toe bruising after what seemed like nothing more sinister than a garden-variety heart attack.

Being a successful business owner in the competitive world of trade logistics was probably a stressful career, right? That kind of shit catches up to a person eventually.

Knockley made an awful choking noise and jerked on the bed. Apparently, the air embolism had reached his lungs or his heart. I checked that his foot had stopped bleeding and wrestled his sock and shoe back on. I’d just flushed the blood-spotted toilet paper and was reaching for my clutch on the bedside table when a knock sounded at the door.

I froze.

“Oi, Knox!” called a voice with a faint Irish lilt, muffled by the thick door. “We just got some juicy gossip about the Mexico deal. You gotta hear this!”

I whirled around, my stupid brain seizing up. Should I try to hide? Open the door, dart past them, and make a run for it?

But I was too slow. The lock clicked. Whoever it was, they had a key card, and like an idiot, I hadn’t thought to engage the security latch once my target was down for the count. I was still standing there like a surprised statue when the door swung open to reveal two alphas—one with flaming red hair and a beard, the other an absolute mountain of a man with a black buzzcut and heavy five o’clock shadow.

“Sorry, I know it’s late, old man—” Red Hair began, only to cut himself off abruptly as he took in his friend having a violent seizure on the bed, and me standing there like the world’s guiltiest hotel hookup. “What the fuck?”

“Knox!” shouted the giant, rushing forward.

I raised a hand, as though to fend him off.

“Call an ambulance!” I cried, thinking fast. “I… he just collapsed out of the blue! I think he might be having a heart attack!”

It was at that moment when the scents of whiskey and oakwood combined with baking bread and orange peel slammed into me like a freight train, swirling together with Knockley’s woodsy campfire aroma and my own sweet coffee and caramel. The suggestion of belonging that had struck me earlier multiplied a hundredfold, blotting out every single thought in my head as a switch as old as time itself flipped in the depths of my hindbrain.

Everyone in the room went as still as though we’d been fossilized in amber.

Coffee laced with whiskey and sweetness, holiday bread toasted over an open flame as the sounds and scents of the forest wove around the four of us.

‘Home… home… home…’ echoed through my consciousness, tolling like a bell.

Oh, my god.

A scent match. It was a scent match.

I was scent-matched to alpha slave traffickers… and I’d just murdered their pack leader.

End of excerpt