Bait: A dark erotic thriller (Hunter & Prey Book 2) by Kira Barker

revenge was the one thing that kept me going—or at least the one thing I liked to admit that was driving me out of bed at odd hours of the night. Brigitte considered my words, but she didn’t look half as scandalized as she probably should have. Alarmed, yes, but it seemed more like concern for me rather than the morally right reaction to hearing a plan like that.
    “And you think I can help you,” she surmised.
    “Let’s put it this way. You have the means to get me wherever he goes and give me a good reason to be there.”
    “Taking over from me would be just for show?”
    I hesitated for a moment, but shook my head. “Honestly, I miss being in the city. I miss my old job but I’m sure that I can’t do it anymore. Even if I manage to resolve this current mess, I now have more baggage than a whore can have and still function. But I think I would do a good job managing the girls. If that’s still an option for you.”
    Brigitte was silent for a long moment, sipping her coffee as she contemplated my words.
    “I can’t let you endanger any of them,” she pointed out.
    “And I won’t. Believe me, I wouldn’t even be here if I thought I’d seriously endanger you.”
    “Didn’t exactly sound like that before.”
    I gave a dismissive grunt at that. “It took him less than half an hour after I entered the Peninsula to pay for the room and send a personally signed bouquet of flowers. If he just wanted me dead, my brains would already be splattered across that suite. I’m sure that he has both the means and connections to hire a sniper or a team of thugs. No, this between us is personal. There is a small chance that if he can’t get to me directly, he’d try to go through you, but I think he would have done so already if he thought that move was a prudent one.” I paused for a moment, forcing myself to assess the situation as objectively as possible. “It might have been a possibility if I’d gone along with Agent Smith’s plan where she’d try to sequester me in the Ivory Tower, but my game plan is to make myself accessible. So accessible that one day he will snap and come after me. Looking back, I’m not even sure he tried to come after me when I left. He knew he’d just have to dangle a lure and I’d eventually come out of hiding. Now that I’m back, he’ll take his time to make me pay for the insolence of running away. He will do that in the most blatant, direct way; he doesn’t need to go through anyone else because he knows that he already has all the tools he needs to get to me.”
    She considered a little longer, but eventually inclined her head. “I’ll help you. But you know that I don’t half-ass anything. You want to pretend to take over? Fine with me. But you will put in the real work. And after this is all said and done, we’ll see if you’ll take the job for real.”
    “Sounds fine with me,” I said, offering her my hand. Brigitte gave me a humorless smile as she shook it.
    “When do we begin?”
    I couldn’t hold back a snort. “As soon as I get this terrible hue out of my hair and manage to make my skin look like it’s not a bad approximation of peeling leather anymore.”
    “I know just the guy,” Brigitte remarked, fishing for her phone book—the bona fide paper book that could easily be burned and was foolproof in this electronic day and age. “And very soon, you’ll know him, too.”
    With that, she pushed the book toward me. I felt a light flutter in my chest as I opened it, starting to peruse the many, many contacts. While I’d never seriously considered taking over for her until she’d mentioned it last summer, I had dreamed of getting a glimpse of what was written on these pages—and now she was handing me the keys to the kingdom. Part of me wished that it would have come at a better stage in my life, but one thing I’d always been good at—to make the best of what life dealt me. And that was exactly what I was going to do now.

Chapter 4

    Monday morning