The Tin Man (Inner Circle #1) - Kailin Gow Page 0,2

“What happened to your father?” she said after a moment.

Pressing my lips together, I turned away and closed my eyes, hoping to blink the tears away. “He died in that explosion,” I said as I turned to face her once more.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Summer said. Then she cocked her head to the side, her eyes suddenly inquisitive. “You said your name was Dante Black?”

“Yes,” I said, letting my hopes, once again, rise. “Yes. Dante Black.”

“And you said the explosion happened at Black Biotech?”

“Yes,” I said, coming to the side of her bed. I desperately wanted to reach out to take a hold of her hand… to touch her in any way. “Exactly.”

“Black,” she said simply. “Is there a connection… you and this company?”

Another stab in the heart. Another hope dashed. Another moment of thinking I could have her again, only to realize she was lost.

It was torture. It was constant torture, and I knew that I would have to move on with my life at some point.

Just not now. Now, I still need to cling to every ounce of hope.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “My father founded Black Biotech.”

I looked at her, thinking of everything that had brought us together.

A hit.

The Inner Circle.

My father.

He was the one who had initiated me into the Circle so many years earlier.

He was the one who had trained me and who had shown me that a cold, hard heart was a safe one.

But when I received the assignment – the hit on Summer – it was my father who understood the love that I had for her.

He was the one who had come through in the end and had given his life so that I could go on with mine.

Hmph…

But what a shitty life it now was without Summer.

Chapter 1

Dante Black/Parker James

Age 21

London, England

My name was Dante Black, but now I went by Parker James. Three or almost four years have gone by since I last saw Summer Jones bandaged up in bed in San Diego. The pain of her forgetting who I was and her love for me was too much to relive every time I saw her and even spied on her that I finally focused on what I had promised my father: to take down the very people who wanted me and Summer dead.

I’d been spending a lot of time trying to warm my way into the good graces of the woman in charge of the storage building on Eastern Way by the waterfront. I needed to get access to the computer room deep in the belly of the building.

But I also needed a backup plan in case she never let down her guard.

Breaking into the storage building wouldn’t be a big deal. The security, while impressive at first glance, was abysmal when I looked further into it.

Their motion detectors worked in a rather random fashion, going off for no reason, and remaining mute when a motion should have been detected.

Much of it was surely due to a lack of maintenance. A few of the detectors were hanging by a wire. Others were focused on the building itself instead of its approach. And others were so covered with dirt and grime, it was impossible for them to detect anything.

Then there were the numerous surveillance cameras. Turned out that one in three were duds… fakes meant to scare people off.

It was even easier than I had planned to squeeze between two distant cameras while the dud just stared blankly into space.

As a precaution to all this, however, I’d made a few radical changes to myself. Whether it was this mission, or any other, I had to ensure my identity remained a secret.

After all, I was officially dead. In the crumbled ruins of Black Biotech, they didn’t find my body, believed to be crushed to dust during the explosion.

They had found neither my father, nor me.

The perfect cover. Death.

My short-cropped jet black hair was dyed silver with a few streaks of pewter, and I had let it grow out until it fell fashionably just above my shoulders.

Every day I put in dark blue contacts to hide my green eyes and I would occasionally put on a pair of reading glasses to add to the change.

Over the last three years since the explosion, I’d also bulked up. With training and a protein rich diet, I’d added a good thirty pounds of muscle to my frame, and some of that weight had rounded off my usually angular face, giving me a youthful, boyish appearance.

It