CHAPTER 9
A woman’s scream rang out somewhere in the casino.
Asher froze where he stood. He’d nearly completed his search of the roulette wheel tables and several pits of slot machines in the massive game area with no sign of Naomi. That high-pitched shriek sent a surge of adrenaline—and cold dread—coursing into his veins.
Holy fuck.
Don’t let it be her.
But then another shout went up, followed by dozens more and the sudden cacophony of cheering voices, bells and sirens, and applause. Over in another section of the slots near the casino’s main throughway, a ridiculously tall machine with a digital sign flashing an equally ridiculous name had evidently just paid out a mega-jackpot totaling more than a million dollars.
Nearly everyone in the place paused to look toward the area where a crowd was swiftly gathering around the winner. Asher headed that way, too, craning to see who was at the center of the excited throng. He fully expected it to be Naomi—or her disguised likeness—as he neared the periphery of the cheering spectators.
But it wasn’t her seated in front of the machine.
As Moda management and security officers moved in to greet the night’s big winner, Asher realized it was a man. Sandy hair and a friendly, round face that lit with surprise and stammering elation as he pivoted around in his wheelchair to accept everyone’s congratulations.
“I can’t believe it!” he exclaimed, looking every bit the shocked and beaming new millionaire. “This is incredible! I won!”
Son of a bitch.
Michael Carson.
Naomi’s friend hadn’t just lucked into the biggest jackpot payout in the place. He had help. The kind of help only Naomi could provide.
Which meant she had to be close.
In one, single mental snapshot, Asher took it all in. Michael seeming on the verge of actual tears in his wheelchair. The one-point-three-million-dollar jackpot sign flashing. The casino employee rushing forward with a wide smile and a pile of papers for the winner to sign.
And there, at the periphery of the expanding crowd, an angel’s face crowned in glossy black hair. No longer garbed as a crone, Naomi had shed all of her disguise and was now observing the chaos with a bemused smile on her face as she stepped back to make room for more people who pushed in. And she kept stepping back, slowly melting away like a shadow.
Not so fast, Asher thought, staring right at her.
She glimpsed him in that same moment, her sherry-colored gaze colliding with his amber-flecked furious one.
Her mouth dropped open in sudden, silent dread.
Then she pivoted and slipped out of sight, her petite size hiding her among the tight herds of casino patrons.
Asher dove into the crowd, cutting through with single-minded purpose. In the distance, he saw her round the corner up near the glass shaft of the soaring, central private elevator. For an instant, he lost sight of her.
“Fuck,” he snarled under his breath.
Using the full speed of his Breed genetics, he flashed across the casino floor, nothing but cool air breezing through the clusters of slow-moving, mostly inebriated casino patrons on his way toward the elevator. None of the humans’ senses were keen enough to track him, but there was one pair of eyes that found him and locked on with laser intensity.
A big Breed male wearing a dark suit, a wireless earpiece, and a Moda security badge on his hip stepped out of the elevator at the same moment Asher was rushing after Naomi at preternatural speed.
Icy silver eyes narrowed beneath the thick espresso-brown slashes of the male’s brows. Asher knew him—or, rather, he used to know him. Back when they both were nameless boys, yoked and collared under Dragos’s brutal Hunter program.
There was no kinship between them, then or now. Asher hadn’t come away from the lab with many friends. Or any, for that matter. In the two decades since he and this male had escaped the program, their paths hadn’t crossed until this moment.
Seeing a fellow former assassin now, here, and obviously employed by none other than Leo Slater made the killer in Asher tense for a fight. To the death, if necessary.
They squared off in silent challenge, Asher calculating a dozen lethal ways to open his attack while the other male’s scowl deepened in suspicion.
“What are you doing here, Asher?” He leaned heavily on the moniker, scorn in every syllable. “Wouldn’t have guessed you for the gambling type.”
“I could ask you the same thing.” He glanced at the shiny brass nametag pinned to the Hunter’s jacket lapel. “Cain, is it?”
The male grunted, those shrewd eyes gleaming like the sharpened edge of a polished blade. By now four other members of Moda’s security team had joined Cain outside the elevator bank. The men, humans all of them, looked to him and Asher in question.
“Everything all right, sir?” one of them asked Cain.
He gave a terse nod. “Get out on the floor. Make sure we’re secure. I’ll be right behind you.”
As the unit fanned out to do his bidding, Cain’s gaze swept the immediate area—including the path Naomi had taken only moments ago—before his attention swung back to Asher.
“Problem, brother?”
Cain’s mouth drew tight at the growled endearment. “You’d better hope there isn’t. Or I’ll be right behind you, too, brother.”
Asher smiled a cold smile, then gave Slater’s head of security a bump of his shoulder as he brushed past him without another word.
Everything animal inside him seethed at the threat this killer posed—not so much to him, but to Naomi. And, now, even to her friend Michael.
Asher exited the casino, inhaling the night air as he headed out to the bright lights of the Strip. She wasn’t hard to trace now. Two blocks up the sidewalk, she was rushing to the curb with her arm out, trying to hail a taxi.
She yelped as he hooked one arm around her midsection and hauled her away from the street.
“Keep walking and don’t pull away from me or turn around unless you want to call more attention to us both.” With his hand at the small of her back, he steered her alongside him and began walking briskly toward the garage where he’d earlier parked the truck.
Too smart to make a scene on the street, she fell into step beside him as instructed, her body trembling under his palm. “How the hell did you find me? And what do you think you’re doing?”
“Saving your pretty neck for the second time,” he muttered. “Come on.”
Although he would hardly call her cooperative, she kept quiet the rest of the walk to the pickup truck. He put her in the passenger side, then went around and climbed behind the wheel.
She shot him an irritated glance as he started up the truck. “Since I see you had no trouble retrieving this heap from where I left it this morning, I guess that means you know where to drop me off.”
“I’m not dropping you off anywhere.”
“You most certainly are.” She balked, pivoting to face him. “Take me home, Asher. Right now.”
“I am. To my home.”
“What? No! Dammit, let me out of this truck right now.”
“Out of the question.” When she lunged for the door handle beside her, he reached across the seat and closed his fingers over her hand. “If I let you go, you’re going to end up dead.”
“Didn’t we already have this conversation? I told you I don’t want your so-called protection. I just want you to leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that, Naomi. Especially not after the stunt you and Michael just pulled.”
Her face blanched, but her stubborn chin went up a notch. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He scoffed. “Really? I’m betting you’ve got about one-point-three-million ideas what I’m talking about.”
She fell silent for a long moment. “Michael won that jackpot, not me. There’s no reason for anyone at the casino to suspect a thing.”
“Not unless they have a reason to study the casino security video and notice that an elderly woman hobbled into the ladies’ room a few minutes before the big win, but never came out.”
Naomi swallowed. “I felt like I was being watched. It was only you?”
“You’d better hope it was only me.” He bit off a curse, infuriated by her brazenness—by her recklessness that seemed to border on suicidal. “For fuck’s sake, Naomi. You have to know what it means to cross a man like Leo Slater. Are you deliberately trying to get yourself killed?”
“No.”
“Then why, damn it? What the fuck are you trying to accomplish?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” he growled, taking hold of her slender shoulders. He was vibrating with the force of his anger—and his worry for her. He felt his eyes burning with sparks as he glowered at her within the confines of the truck’s cab. God help him, he wanted to shake her.
He wanted to drive his fist through the dashboard and rail at her for how close she’d come to danger. Danger she couldn’t even begin to fathom, now that he knew Slater had a former Hunter on his payroll.
“Tell me why you’re so hell-bent on this casino. On this man.”
“He owes me. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“No. We’re not leaving at that.” He gripped her tighter. “You’re not a stupid female, Naomi. In fact, you’ve proven yourself to be clever as hell. Except when it comes to Slater.”
A chill swept over him as he relived the anguish and fear and helplessness of an innocent child who’d witnessed the brutality of life, the ugliness of it, much too young. There was a part of him—a part he kept buried deep down inside—who understood some of that too.
Asher searched her pained gaze, his hands still holding onto her. The connection renewed the memory he’d read from her before, but he didn’t let go, unable—or perhaps unwilling—to release her. “It was Slater who hurt your mother, wasn’t it?”
“Hurt her?” She spoke in a tight, but quiet voice. “He killed her, Asher. I can’t prove it, but I know he did. The police have called the case unsolved. Just another woman who vanished off the face of the Earth after Leo Slater got tired of beating and using her.”
“She went missing?”
“When I was eight years old. She left me alone for the weekend and . . . never came back.” Naomi swallowed, her eyes welling. “I kept waiting. I kept hoping, even after child protective services came to our apartment and took me away with them a couple of months later.”
Asher exhaled a curse that boiled up from the pits of his soul. Her anger was one thing. He could’ve handled that in stride and been fine. In the short time he’d known her, anger and combativeness were the emotions she’d worn the most. Along with stubborn, unflagging determination.
No, those emotions she kept right up front for all to see.
It was the single tear rolling down her cheek that made his heart ache.
And the next one and the next after that. Her sadness over her mother ripped him clean in half.
He had no skill when it came to giving comfort or saying the right things. He’d been bred to deny any softness, any emotion that might make him a weaker instrument when it came to dealing death. Not even his time looking after Ned had smoothed all of his rough edges.
But he wanted to give Naomi comfort. He wanted to let her know that her pain was his now. That he would not only protect her, but do whatever was necessary to ensure Leo Slater never had the chance to hurt her or anyone else again.
Wordlessly, he moved his hands from her shoulders to the sides of her beautiful face, cradling her gently in his palms. She didn’t resist him. Her gaze stayed locked on his as he smoothed his thumbs over the tears that now coursed down her face in steady streams.
And when he drew her toward him, her lips fell open on a quiet exhalation, a sound that was far from a sob. Asher brushed his mouth over hers, shocked at the current that roared through him at that first tender contact. He wasn’t prepared for how sharply he craved her.
He wasn’t prepared for how deeply this female was impacting his life. He didn’t have room for the trouble she was bringing into his solitary world. And he sure as hell wasn’t prepared to deal with all of the feelings she’d been stoking inside him from the moment their eyes first met.
He drew away from her on a low groan and a murmured apology that he didn’t actually mean.
“Buckle up,” he ordered her gruffly. “It’s not safe for you in this city. And we’ve wasted too much time already.”
She sank back against the seat in silence and drew the seatbelt across her body. When she was secured, Asher threw the truck into gear and sped out of the garage with renewed determination.
He would protect Naomi, with his arm and his life. As slim as his honor was, he couldn’t live with himself if he allowed anything to happen to her.
And now, on top of that obligation, he would call in the debt Leo Slater owed her if it was the last thing he ever did.
As soon as he’d ensured Naomi was out of Slater’s reach, that son of a bitch would be going down.