He Called Me His Weapon, So I Died and Came Back Free novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Whip and the Window
Corvin whips his assassin in front of his crew, Emmett Hanratty offers her a way out, and she kills a man at the Hartwell gala and runs, only to be shot from a roof nobody in the crew was ever posted on.
Corvin Stalworth met me at the warehouse door with a paper cup of hot tea, the way he did after every job.
I had let a cleaning woman walk out of my last one alive.
She had opened the wrong door at the wrong time, and I had put one finger to my lips and let her go.
Corvin called that a leak.
"Hands on the post, Sparrow," he said.
He had called me that for nine years, because I was small and quiet and always came back to him.
I put my hands on the post.
The first stroke opened my shirt and the skin under it.
I made no sound. He hated that, so the second one came harder.
Corvin's second in command stood by the loading door with his arms folded, staring at the floor.
His name was Emmett Hanratty, and he was the only man in that building who had ever brought me food without being told to.
He didn't look up until it was over.
Corvin coiled the whip and wiped his hands on a cloth.
"You'll heal by tomorrow," he said, in his soft voice. "Tomorrow you work."
Two men walked me up the back stairs to the room above his office.
It had a bed, a bucket and a lock on the outside.
I had lived there between jobs since I was eighteen, when Corvin bought my father's debt and then bought me.
The door shut. The bolt slid across.
An hour later it slid back, and Emmett came in with a bowl of soup and a tin of salve.
"Sit," he said. "Shirt off. I'll be quick."
His hands were careful on my back.
"You shouldn't have done it for a stranger," he said.
"She had a kid's backpack in her hand."
"I know." He kept his voice very low. "Tonight is the Hartwell gala. A man named Dermot Wainwright, on the balcony at ten. Corvin wants the service roof across the courtyard."
"And after?"
"After, don't come back here."
I turned my head to look at him.
"The blue sedan on Pell Street," Emmett said. "The key is under the mat. I'll hold this door as long as I can. Nobody will ever know it was me."
"Why would you?"
"Because I'm done watching," he said.
It was the right answer. It was too smooth, and I noticed that.
Emmett had known about the cleaning woman before I told anyone, and I hadn't asked him how.
I put that away to think about later. I had never had a later.
At nine-thirty I was on the service roof of the Hartwell Hotel with a rifle across my knees and my back burning under a clean shirt.
Below me, the ballroom spilled light onto the courtyard.
On the far balcony, a tall man in a tuxedo with a white rose on his lapel stepped out and lit a cigarette.
He was laughing at something over his shoulder.
I tapped my thumb twice against the inside of my left wrist, the way I did before every shot.
I hummed three notes of a tune I couldn't place. I had hummed it since before I could remember.
I breathed out and fired.
The man folded against the balcony rail, and the rose came loose and fell.
I knew nothing about him except his name.
I had killed him for a man who had whipped me that afternoon, and I had done it because the lock was on the outside.
I stood up on the roof, and I decided.
I was not going back to that room.
I left the rifle where it lay and took the fire escape down the back of the hotel, two flights at a time.
Pell Street was four blocks away, and the blue sedan was at the end of it.
On the third landing, the alley below me filled with men in dark coats.
They were Corvin's. They had been sent to bring me home before the police came.
"There she is," one of them called up.
I went over the rail onto the fire escape's side ladder and kept climbing down.
They would reach me before I reached the street.
I had one more door, and it was the loading dock at the harbor end of the alley.
I ran for the edge of the dock, because I could swim.
Something hit me between the shoulder blades, hard, and for a moment I thought it was a fist.
Then the air went out of me.
I looked down and saw the front of my shirt go dark.
The shot had not come from the alley. It had come from above and behind, from the north roof of the hotel.
Corvin's men had never once been posted on the north roof.
My knees gave out, and the dock rail met my hip, and I went over into the black water.
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