Love at Gunpoint (PandoraHearts)

Chapter 1

"This is who you want me to kill?"

Twenty-four-year-old Gilbert Nightray peered hard at the detailed file he'd been given, squinting as if he couldn't possibly believe what he was seeing. He had been hired countless times before and succeeded in eliminating his target every time, but sometimes he still wondered what the hell he was doing. An assassin, for God's sake—not something he had ever counted on becoming. But he needed the money.

He wasn't being selfish. That was the honest truth. On the inside, Gilbert was actually a pretty decent guy—although perhaps you can't really say that about an assassin. But Gilbert's family was steadily running out of money. They were paying for his younger brother Vincent's college, and college was more expensive than it ought to be these days. And in this time of expensive colleges, Vincent's was still considered expensive as hell.

At one time, the Nightray family had been considerably wealthy. Gilbert still remembered when they never spoke about money—when they never had to. He'd had a ton of money to his name, and so did Vincent, so the two of them could escape from their family as much as they wanted. In fact, they could pretend they had nothing to do with the Nightrays in the first place.

Gilbert's family wasn't exactly the best family to be born into. Most of the time, his parents didn't give a crap what he and Vincent did. They'd taught them to fend for themselves as much as possible at a very young age. It wasn't as if Mr. and Mrs. Nightray were cruel to their sons, but it was dreadfully obvious they preferred staying away from them. Even if there were definitely people who had it worse, Gilbert and Vincent had, no doubt, been damaged by their parents' dismissive attitudes.

So in truth, Gilbert felt being an assassin was the only option he had. He was too caring for his own good, and he knew it. He felt as though making money for his family was his job, no matter if he was the only person who made an effort in the first place or if he had to do something horrible in order to do it. Gilbert never pushed Vincent to get a job, and he certainly couldn't push his parents, nor did he want to.

And so Gilbert had taken up his cute little habit of being hired as an assassin. It made his family money; that was all that mattered. He had to remind himself of that over and over again so that he wouldn't freak out or quit. He had never wanted to murder, but this was the only choice he had—which technically meant he had no choice.

Usually, Gilbert wasn't overly fond of those who hired him. He found anyone who could hire someone to kill someone else without remorse despicable, although that was probably a very twisted logic, considering he was the person that was hired. He'd dealt with some pretty messed-up people in the past.

Well, all of them were messed-up, but some more than others.

But Justin Pyre wasn't a super-special psycho like some of the other people Gilbert had worked with. He was just a very greedy, thirty-two-year-old man. Justin was the owner of Timmy's, a world-famous company that produced children's toys. (Gilbert had yet to figure out why a man named Justin called his company Timmy's, but that was a minor detail.) Justin was filthy rich from selling all those toys, but a new children's toy company was rising to fame, and it seemed that very soon it would override Timmy's.

This young company was called Cherry Blossom. Even Gilbert had heard of it, despite the fact that he couldn't be less interested in the children's toy-producing industry. The file Gilbert was holding was of the owner of Cherry Blossom—his next victim.

Apparently, with this young company came its young company owner. The owner of Cherry Blossom was a fifteen-year-old boy named Oz Vessalius. According to Justin—who'd done extensive research on Oz due to his...grudge, for lack of a better word—Oz had plenty of help from adults who had experience. Oz was very intelligent for a teenager, though. Enough so that he could mostly run his company by himself. Gilbert had some trouble believing all of this, but...