Mark Stone - The Judas Line

He didn’t elude Julian, though, who was so impressed by the man’s skills that he made an offer the aging murderer couldn’t refuse: teach wet-work skills to the young Family members. In return he would be well paid. Also, he could kill whenever he wanted, as long it was on his own time and didn’t lead back to the Family.

For ten years that arrangement had worked quite well.

From my vantage point on my back, staring up at Sarge’s angry face as he yelled at me, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth like silt at the bottom of a river, I thought that he just might break his promise about permanently harming Family.

“Olivier, you are about as useless as a sack of smashed assholes, you got me, boy?” Sarge yelled. “Now get up off your flabby ass and at least try not to embarrass yourself when fighting your cousin!”

The aforementioned cousin was not Burke, who routinely kicked my ass up one side and down the other with great frequency and enthusiasm in these little practice bouts. No, this cousin was someone who could actually give Burke a run for the sadistic money-Cousin Annabeth.

While my Family is terribly misogynistic, there are those women who showed such promise in the red side of the business that instead of being used as honey traps or breeders, they were allowed to work as true Dagger Men.

I considered Annabeth as I groaned my way vertical under Sarge’s disappointed gaze. An inch shorter than myself, tall for a woman, her shoulders were strong enough to carry all my troubles with room for a couple of hundred pounds. Her slim hands were calloused to hammer hardness and her muscles slithered under her bronze skin in all their chiseled perfection. Underneath a cap of short black hair, her dark eyes blazed out of a heart-shaped face, smoldering with subtle contempt at my contemptible fighting skills.

“Good throw, Anna,” I croaked, forcing air into tired lungs.

“Stuff it, Olivier,” she answered in a surprisingly smooth and dangerous voice, like velvet over steel.

Sarge’s craggy, hard face came nose to nose with mine. “You kick her butt, boy. If you can’t then you aren’t worth pissing on.” Hate, bitter soul-hate like a cancer, shone out of his eyes. I guessed it was the thing that drove him to kill and kill again. None of those kills would never, ever be enough, even if the blood of his victims eventually drowned him. “She’s a woman,” he whispered fiercely. “A whore !”

I suppressed the rush of contempt for him that suddenly surged through me, although it must have shown because his face shut down with an almost audible slam and he turned away, trembling slightly.

“Ready, Olivier?” Annabeth’s smooth voice came from behind, carrying a wealth of smugness.

“Stuff it, Annabeth,” I said, spinning, fist flying out to catch her on the chin and dropping her to land sprawling on the practice mat.

Needles of hot water attacked my scalp as I positioned myself beneath the showerhead, shedding sweat and grime in rivulets down my torso and legs.

Two hours of sparring, an hour of weapons-both hand and pistol-followed by meditation to calm the nerves, to keep them on an even keel though the most stressful situations.

Hands harder than flint touched my back, ran up the ridged lines of my shoulder blades and caressed my neck. I turned and met Annabeth’s hot mouth, our tongues dueling with the same fervor we’d demonstrated on the mat. My hands found her butt, lifting her in the air with a grunt and I slid into her, her warm wetness inviting, welcoming.

I fell back to the cold tiles of the shower as we tore at each other in our mutual torrent of lust. Thrusting, clawing, we bit and ripped, our young bodies suffused with enough hormones to allow us to survive the rush. The old, I reckoned foolishly in my naivete, only had memories to console their twilight years.

Afterwards we soaped each other’s backs in the quiet post-coital lassitude. “You sure Sarge and Burke didn’t see you come in?” I asked.

“Burke left for the hotel and Sarge disappeared to wherever that creepy American creeps off to.

“Good. I want to keep you all to myself.”

When she laughed it gave my ears an orgasm. “No way I could bed Burke-he’s too cruel, a vicious bastard. And Sarge doesn’t screw, he kills. That’s how he gets his rocks off.”

All true. Just thinking about Sarge having sex seemed like a violation of all natural laws. With Sarge and Burke in the wind, we had the whole villa to ourselves.

“What do you have planned for the day?” she asked later as we toweled each other off.

“Off to see Julian,” I answered through the tangle of my longish hair.

“What’s he got planned?”

“I have no clue.” It had been a year since Julian had ‘torn me a new one,’ as the Americans like to say, over that business with the Lab. The aftermath of the Lab’s destruction had lowered the reservoir by three feet and raised more than a few eyebrows. It had even made the national news in the States. Julian had to scramble to find experts who would testify that it had been an ‘unforeseen seismic event’ of low magnitude that ‘nonetheless had unfortunate consequences to the local bedrock.’ A somewhat outrageous claim, but a generous pile of cash will convince people to believe or say anything. If our Family had a motto, that would be it.

Good thing for me the Crystal Drive proved to be every bit as useful as I said it would be. Unwilling to take advantage of global production of that new tech, Julian instead had sunk considerable sums of money into creating computers and networks that far outstripped anything even the superpowers could invent. That alone saved my life, just as I knew it would.

Annabeth ran her short nails up and down my chest, bringing new life to my nether parts. “Well,” she purred. “You keep your hide intact. I have uses for it.”

Just before I closed her lips with mine, I said, “Good, it’s all yours.”

If anything, Boris looked even more dangerous than the last time I’d stood in Julian’s office. Still big, still chiseled out of the same gutrock as all the other extreme hard-asses necessity and money had created to do the jobs no one else could do.

“Looking good, Boris.” I tipped the big man a nod.

A soft grunt and barely perceptible tilt of his head was the only answers he deigned provide.

“Glad you could come, son,” Julian said, back to me, facing the window/monitor.

“You called, I came,” was my reply.

“Indeed.” A tilt of his perfectly coiffed head to the desk. “Sir?”

“Yes, Julian. Do it.” The Voice sounded almost bored, but I could tell there was an vein of anticipation running through those glossy tones.

Boris came into view carrying a portable safe, one that looked like a tiny beige suitcase, and set it flat on the desk, hinge side toward me. Julian reached out with one well-manicured finger and punched what I supposed was a keypad I couldn’t see. A hiss of cold air puffed out from within as the safe opened, ruffling the carefully arranged stacks of papers. He pulled out a small, worn leather purse or pouch, the kind people used centuries ago. It chinked softly as he placed it on the desk.

“Open it,” he said.

“What?”

His scowl transformed his handsome face into something bestial. “Don’t be dense, Olivier. Open the damn pouch.

Shrugging, I took a step forward and picked it up.

It was heavier than I thought.

“What is it?”

The Voice answered, “Your final test, Olivier. The test to see if you are worthy to be the next head of the Family. Open it and see if you can use the Family Silver.”

Uh-oh. The Silver had been legend in the Family for millennia. An artifact of such might and baleful power that only a Family member could even touch it. It was said that if one outside the Family were to handle it, a gruesome death would ensue.