snake his way into my business, into my dreams, into my life, I just might try to do it.
Although he was right about one thing. I really, really did need to get some business, and soon. I’d rather start flipping burgers, though, or hacking trees down with my sword than accept a job from him.
Anything would be better than taking work from Jude Whittier.
Chapter Two
My sword arm is mighty.
I will not falter.
I will not fail.
Yeah, I really do have to go through those few lines sometimes, just to level out. It keeps me focused. Helps lessen the fear.
I will not falter.
I will not fail.
Nor will I show any sign of fear to this guy standing in my office. I don’t know who he is. He hasn’t given me a name and I didn’t plan on asking for it until I know if I’m doing business with him. I’m thinking I’d rather not do business with him, truth be told. I had a bad feeling about this already and we hadn’t even started talking about the job yet.
Damn it. How do I get myself into these messes? Oh, right. I’d been praying, hoping—pretty much anything except standing out on the street corner holding up signs that read: I need work! I should be more careful about what I wish for. That streak of luck that was part of heritage was probably what had landed him here. I’d needed work. Now I had work. I also had a lesson in be careful what you wish for, I suspected.
I’d been doing this a few years and I’d learned to recognize the shit jobs from the good ones. This could be very profitable.
Profit is good. I like profit. I like money. I don’t get to see enough of it.
But I was kind of concerned about the warning in my gut.
Profitable, yes. But this guy was bad, bad news. And every last instinct inside me was screaming, bad, bad, bad…get away from him, get away now now now now!
All the more reason I had to stay calm. All the more reason not to show that I was afraid. No showing any sign of fear—things like a racing heartbeat, increased respiration, sweaty palms, fidgeting. No. Forget the fidgeting. Plenty of people were the squirming sort and it had nothing to do with fear.
I fidgeted all the time, even when I wasn’t afraid.
I’m not afraid—damn it, I am aneira. I’ve got fricking noble blood and this shifter can stand there sneering at me all he wants. What do I care?
“You know, we had a bet.” Mr. Badass sat in the chair across from my battered desk, slumped in a boneless sprawl not many humans over the age of three could manage.
I didn’t think he was a wolf. Wolves were very…rigid. Anally so.
If he was a wolf, he’d be in a three piece suit, pressed within an inch of its suitly life, and he’d probably have a duo of backup lawyers to witness everything. And he wouldn’t have sat in my chair with that boneless sprawl, either. Hard to do with a stick up the ass, really. The members of the wolf pack always had a stick up their collective asses.
I had no problem working with the local wolf pack. Don’t get me wrong. Most of them are big on courtesy, and all about order and rules, and as long as I didn’t cross them, they left me alone. The problem was when the job involved some of their assholes; their assholes tried to rip off body parts and eat innards and it got messy sometimes.
But they paid well. I could use a nice-paying job.
He wasn’t a wolf, though. There was really only one logical explanation if he was local. We had two main were factions down here. Cat and wolf. But he didn’t have to be local, and I didn’t like to assume.
I’d figure it out in a minute. If I had the nose of a shapeshifter, I’d have him pegged already, but I’d get there. I was good at it, unusually so. I could see the energy hovering about them and I could usually see some echo of their animal hovering about them, a skill I knew I could trace back to my aneira roots.
We were good assassins because we could understand our marks, learn them, know them and figure out the best way to kill them.
Still, anybody who knew what to look for could peg a shifter from a mile away and this guy was