Slashback by Rob Thurman Page B

the other. He mirrored my movements, which landed his neck right into the jaws of Ivar, who’d been leaping in our direction. With his head in profile, I planted the muzzle of the automatic between the Beta’s eye and the pointed tuft of ear. There was the thud of a metal blade cutting into flesh and Nik’s voice drifting over my shoulder. “Is the interview done? If not, you’ll want to forget the mops and call for a fire hose to handle the extra blood.”
    Ivar, who’d managed to stop short of tearing out the throat of the black Wolf, eased his jaws away from it and my gun. In a shimmer of fur and a ripple of flesh, he was that average man again. But this time he was naked with a bullet wound to the right of his chest. I hadn’t aimed for the heart. This was, after all, just the testing ground, not the war. “The interview is done,” Ivar agreed with a begrudging lift of his upper lip. We passed, but we weren’t Wolf and we weren’t Kin. He had to respect our skill, but he didn’t have to like it or us.
    The faint breathlessness to his voice, the result of a bullet-nicked lung—a very familiar sound—would fade quickly. Probably before we left. Wolves healed fast. He waved off the other Wolves, still in lupine form and snarling with displeasure, and they limped from the office. Ivar sat back down behind his desk, unbothered by his nudity—Wolves have no sense of modesty. Why would they? They were Wolves first, people a very distant second. “One hundred thousand for the job.” His nails extended to the thick blunt ones of the Wolf and he tapped them on the desk. “We have someone whose ambition has become . . . irritating . . . to the Kin. We respect the way of the pack, the order of domination and submission. Alphas rising, falling—same as it has been since the beginning of time. But this one, she cheats. She denies the honor of the Wolf. That cannot be tolerated.”
    She. That answered any question we might have had on what the job was. There was only one “she” that the Kin would subcontract out on. Delilah. Delilah definitely did cheat and considered honor something puppies cowered behind. Not to mention stupid. Last I’d known my ex-fiend with benefits had taken over half the Kin with her all female pack. The Kin allowed females membership in the Kin, but it didn’t allow female Alphas.
    Delilah didn’t give a rat’s ass what the Kin allowed. She wanted to be head of the Kin and given enough time, she would be. Ivar and his three Wolves . . . she’d have eaten them alive literally—howling, screaming, and all—as a lesson to others who dared get in her way.
    Niko had put his katana away. “We do not get involved in politics. Assassination is a slippery slope that tends to rebound with endless blood feuds and vengeance-vows. We prefer to keep our killing clean.”
    That was Niko’s line and I stood with him on it. Although I had to admit it was a tempting offer. I wanted Delilah dead anyway. We hadn’t had friendship. We hadn’t had love. But we’d had companionship, acceptance, and unbelievably wild sex. The never knowing if she’d try to hang the head of a half Auphe on her wall as a trophy had been a price I’d been willing to pay for that. Acceptance for a half Auphe was a rare thing, even more rare among sexual partners. Bottom line: I didn’t trust Delilah, but she had liked me as I was. I didn’t get that often.
    Then she tried to kill another Wolf friend of mine, her first ploy to rise in the Kin. I didn’t have many friends. I could count them on one hand and have that all-important middle finger left over to put to good use. Trying to kill me was one thing—my eyes were open when it came to Delilah’s sociopathic ways. But trying to kill my friend; I wasn’t letting that go. I had one rule. She knew it, and she’d broken it without regret. Killing her was on my list; being paid for it would’ve just been a bonus.
    But this was between Delilah and me alone.