Suicide Mission (Guarded Secrets #1)

31: "She was my first love, you know."

"The adoption made it hard to find you," he explained. "I was told you died in the hospital and stopped looking. When I heard you were alive I went looking and there was no longer a record of you, but I have my ways of getting people to talk and most times it's not pleasant for them. It took a while to find someone knew what happened to you after being admitted to the hospital, but everyone has their price and some can even wipe away the guilt that they know they are sending someone to their death."

Death; another shiver resonated through me at the word. That's what my life had become because of him, one long line of death. He had either injured people to find me or killed to discover me. Someone had given him my information, and that meant he knew the Rickers, he could find them and kill them just to watch me suffer.

"It's amazing what people will do for money. It's also astonishing that James Ricker happened to be going home the night of the crash. I normally stick around to make sure the job gets done, but I couldn't have witnesses and had to have my men leave without double checking. I don't get paid to kill people I wasn't requested for after all," he added as if that would make his line of work the slightest bit better. "From the police report I learned that he pulled you and your brother from the accident. Your brother died in surgery, and you lived."

"It wasn't worth living," I whispered, but it had given him exactly what he wanted. He wanted to know what would hurt me the worse, and my families were the way to do it. I would die for my family, I would protect them as they protected me, and I would do it again and again no matter what.

"You have two new brothers, I heard that Leslie had always wanted a daughter." My eyes grew wide and my mouth dropped in shock as he reiterated information about my family as if he knew them personally. "How's middle school for your brother? It's so hard being bullied, but with a sister like you, so protective and angry at the world, you put that kid in line and he doesn't take it from them as a normal kid his age would. And Alex, he's so worried about you that I'm not sure he has a life outside of caring for you. It's almost as if he sees it as his job to protect you from everything else. He protected you from James when you made that little escape to the cemetery, the memorial for your family was touching I hear by the way. Sorry I couldn't make it, I had other matters to attend to. Other families to break up," he said with a smile.

My hands clinched into tight fists as I tried to fight the emotions racing through me: fear, anger, shock, and everything in between. He knew so much about my adoptive family, and me. He had been watching me, but he hadn't killed me, just tortured me with the possibilities of what he could have done and what he did.

"What made you kill my family? Why us? What did we do to you? What did I do to you?"

"You? This has nothing to do with you. The only reason you're here now is because you came here on your own. I would have eventually gotten rid of you, that's true, but it wasn't high on my priority list. I have other families to break up and other people to get rid of," he said with a heavy breath. "Otherwise I don't get paid, and I enjoy being paid big money for such little work."

"Little work?" I asked, letting the venom drip from my words. My anger was hitting dangerous heights the more I heard him talk about his work. He took such great pleasure in killing, tearing apart families and all just to get paid. I could feel my anger rising the more I thought about it. There was no reason someone should take such pride in a life of murder, and he wasn't ever going to stop. The anger was starting to gain more power of me as I started to shake. The thoughts of those families, any family that could become a target of him, having their loved ones ripped from their lives and following the same path I did, it was too much bear. I had to stop him, even if it killed me.