J A X O N

I sat in the back of the car, eyeing Delphinium resentfully; she'd gotten the front seat before I could.

She glanced back at me with a smile spreading across her face. "Having fun back there, Jaxon?" I crossed my arms and looked out the window.

The scenery passed us in blurs of color as we traveled deeper into the city. The buildings got taller, crowds got bigger and the streets became more blocked with traffic. So many yellow taxis had passed us by that I'd lost count.

"Johnson said that it was on Fourth Avenue," Delphinium said to no one in particular. "We're getting close."

Earlier, Jake had gathered Delphinium and I for another job. When we'd been interrogating Johnson in his home, he'd told us about the Club's new lieutenant, Claudia Smith, and how she ran a tattoo shop on the side. Jake figured that she'd be his best bet for finding Hundsen's location so we were headed there now.

According to the plan, I was going to go in there, invisible, and search her desk for any sign of correspondence with Hundsen, anything that would give away where he was hiding. Hundsen clearly trusted her enough to make her his new lieutenant, so it was likely that he'd even tell her his current location. The letters had to come from somewhere.

"I wonder what she's like," I mused out loud, "This Claudia woman."

"If she's anything like Orozco was, then we might be in for a wild night."

"I'll be in for a wild night," I corrected her. "You two have it good, just waiting for me to come back out with the information. I'll be in there, risking my life, having close encounters with death-"

"Oh please," the assassin remarked, "I'm here to protect you from anything bad happening. If Claudia does anything threatening towards you, I'll step in."

"If you're the one protecting me, I'll need to watch my back," I teased her, pretending like she wouldn't be able to handle it.

"Keep it up, and you really will."

I rolled my eyes and scoffed. "We all know that I don't need to be protected anyway. I can handle it by myself."

"We saved your ass from the Club," Jake reminded me with his usual cold arrogance.

"That was an abnormality," I told him, "A one-time occurrence."

"And the hotel in Boston?" He was referring to a time before we were both taken by Hunt and the ONNT.

"What happened then?" Delphinium asked curiously, wanting to hear the rest of the story.

"We don't need to relive all my past failures," I pointed out.

"There's not enough time for all of them," Jake cut in. I narrowed my eyes at the back of his head.

"I like to keep myself humble."

Delphinium chuckled. "Yeah, right." I frowned. I was very humble.

But then she said, "Wait, where are we? This isn't near Claudia's shop."

As I looked out the window, I saw that we'd turned down a dark street that looked a bit less put-together than the ones we'd been on. Since the sky darkened overhead, the street lights were turned on, casting an eerie yellow haze over the place. The street became narrower, making it feel like the buildings were closing in on either side.

"We're paying a visit to an old friend," was the only information Jake gave us. He stopped the car and got out, leaving us scrambling to follow him down the dirty sidewalk.

We kept going down the same road until we approached a break between buildings, where the darkness was manifested. Leaning against the wall were two men looking like they were conducting very suspicious activity. When the smaller of the two caught a glance of us approaching, he grabbed a bag out of the other's grasp and sped away.

When the remaining man looked away from the escaping one, he pressed himself against the wall. "Evans, is that you?"

"Remember me?"

"I'm sorry, I know I owe you money, but I can't-"

Jake stopped the man's flow of hurried words with an icicle through his chest. The fast-talking mouth fell open, his eyes bugged out and then he fell to the side, dead.

Delphinium and I stared down at the dead body, having no words to describe what we'd just seen. I wasn't sure why I wasn't used to Jake doing this sort of thing by now.

Jake eyed the both of us impatiently. "What are you waiting for? Help me carry the body to the car."

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I glanced around furtively as I dropped the dead body on the floor of the tattoo shop. Out of the front windows, it was now pitch black; but I knew that somewhere out there, Jake and Delphinium were watching my every move.

Releasing my power over the corpse, it became visible again and I let out a short breath. Instantly, my body felt like a weight had been taken off of me. It was second nature to make myself unseen but to hold another large object under the veil of invisibility for such a long time wasn't something I was accustomed to.

When the body had been planted in a place that the Club's lieutenant would easily see it, I went, still invisible, to the back of the shop. Hiding behind the countertop, I waited for Claudia to emerge from her office. I knew that she hadn't heard me come in, and she most certainly hadn't seen me.

Jake's idea had been to plant the body in her shop so that when she saw one of her own men dead on the ground, she'd immediately write to Hundsen. Of course, he hadn't told us this until we already had a dead body in our car, as he tended to do.

I quickly snapped back to the present situation when the office door suddenly opened and Claudia walked out. When I saw her, I realized the entire mental picture I'd previously had of her was wrong. She was a small, shapely woman with intricate tattoos on her arms. Jake had told me about how Hundsen had an unnamed wife and there could have been a chance it was Claudia, but there was no ring on her left hand. Of course, it was possible she could have just been not wearing one to avoid spreading the news of their relationship.

Claudia saw the dead body after taking a few steps into the main area and immediately stopped in her tracks. The shock was apparent on her face, not since she'd never seen a dead body before but because it was one of her own men in her shop. Standing in place for a few moments, staring down at it, the lieutenant seemed to be debating what to do. She glanced out the front window to see if anyone was passing by. No one was.

With that, she wrapped her arms under the gang member's and began to pull his large body toward the back of the shop. The sight of her tiny form struggling to lug such a massive man behind her was almost laughable. I just hoped that she wouldn't hide it anywhere near where I was hiding. I'd already had to sit next to the body in the car, albeit, while it was in a body bag.

Temporarily letting the corpse drop to the ground, she opened a side door that appeared to be a closet. It took her a solid ten minutes to stuff the heavy man inside of it and shut the door. I thoughtfully wondered if she had an inspection for her shop coming up soon and what she'd do with the body if that happened.

Claudia then made a beeline for the office she'd just come out of and I stalked closely after her, rounding chairs and tables with tattoo equipment on them. I made sure that I didn't trip on any cords or even make a single sound. One small noise could alert her that I was here and ruin the plan.

As her office door was closing behind her, I slipped through the crack and made it in. Claudia didn't even sit down at her desk before she began writing the letter; she simply stood, scribbling away. I kept silently stepping until I was almost behind her, preparing to read over her shoulder.

Finally, as she finished the letter to her leader, she slipped it into an envelope and flipped it over. I leaned in dangerously close as she wrote the address on the back. Halfway through, she stopped writing. I worried that she could hear my heart pounding in my chest. Her dark hair touched my arm as she moved her head to look from side to side. Clearly, she sensed that she wasn't alone in the room.

I watched her closely, preparing to move if she started towards me. But she bent back over the paper and finished the address:

56 Peace Prospect Dr. Merritt Park, NY. 72892

I made sure to sear the words into my mind. This is what I'd come for and I'd hate to disappoint Jake by not remembering every detail.

This time, when Claudia moved backwards, I was ready. She went straight for the closed door and opened it. I followed and prepared to go out the front door when she wasn't looking.

However, that's not how things happened. My heart stopped for a moment when I saw what she was doing. Claudia turned the two locks and flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. She then stood by the door, looking out the front windows while appearing to be deep in thought.

Panic rose in my chest. I needed another way out; being stuck in this shop for the night was not something I was interested in doing.

Being sure that my feet didn't make any sound, I hurried to the back of the place. There was a hallway that I went down, hoping there would be a back exit. On one side, there was a pair of restrooms and on the other was a room that seemed to be for storage. Johnson had mentioned that Claudia sold drugs through this shop; that room could have been part of her other business.

I was beginning to feel desperate; there was no back door I could escape out of. Wanting to see all my possible options, I snuck into the bathroom and looked around. On the top of the opposite wall was a large grate, probably for ventilation from outside. When I stuck my hand in front of it, I could feel cool night air fanning in.

Taking off the backpack I always wore, I pulled out a screwdriver and undid the screws holding the grate to the wall. In only a few short moments, it was off. I hid the metal piece behind the toilet and pulled myself through the hole. I landed on the ground ungracefully, but I hardly cared about the dull pain.

I stayed invisible as I picked myself up and jogged away from the tattoo shop. The address repeated itself in my memory as I searched for Jake and Delphinium on the dark streets.

Finally, I spotted the two of them near where we'd parked the car, just standing around and waiting for me to arrive. Materializing in front of the two of them suddenly, I opened my arms out wide, wanting to make a grand entrance.

"You were taking forever, we thought something had happened to you in there," Delphinium said, the relief apparent on her elegantly-featured face. "I was ready to raid the shop."

I shook my head, my smile widening. "What did I tell you? I did it perfectly without a problem."

"What's the address?" Jake asked, regarding me with those intense eyes. Apparently, he wanted to cut through the small talk about my victory.

When I told him, his lips pulled upwards in a devious smirk that would have made me nervous if I was Hundsen. I had the sudden urge to take a few steps away from him when he was looking like that. "Then that's where we go next."