Chance Assassin was an introduction not only to Frank and Vincent's relationship, but also to their world of assassinations. Les Recidivists is a very different book than Chance Assassin, and not just because of the alternating character points of view. It's a gateway to the rest of the series: insight into other aspects of the job and other characters, but mostly a look at what two years of retirement will do to people who get off on bloodshed (kinda obvious spoiler: it hasn't gone well for them.)
A lot can happen in two years, or in Frank and Vincent's case, a lot of nothing. They're bored with it. And frustrated. The events of Chance Assassin may have nearly killed them, but it was a lot easier than surviving civilian life. Or married life.
Without further ado, here's an excerpt from the first chapter of Les Recidivists. I hope you all enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of the book once it's out.
Sortie. Exit. Neon green salvation mounted just
above the fire door, a height that had never seemed so far out of reach even
for short little me. It brightly lied about the possibility of surviving
through the night.
There
was no escape. Not for me. And certainly not for Frank.
I
could see the panic on his face from halfway across the room. He was
outnumbered, up against the wall with only an empty champagne flute as a
weapon. He looked pleadingly toward me. If I only had my gun I
could make quick work of them, doing my best Jackson Pollock and painting the
walls with their brains. But no. I wasn’t allowed to
bring a gun to Casey’s art opening.
Social
events were torturous after retiring from a life of crime, but since moving to
France I’d discovered a little get out of jail free card. All I had to do
was practice my je ne comprends pas, and throw my French husband to the
wolves.
Frank
managed to flee the crowd of art critics only to be cornered by Alan Barker,
art dealer extraordinaire and master of ceremonies for this evening’s
soiree. And the main reason I wasn’t allowed to come in armed. Now him,
I really wanted to shoot.
Alan
was about a thousand years old, but looked at least twice that. He
perpetually dressed in gray three-piece tweed suits, as if anyone could forget
that he was English, and was small in stature, shorter than me even when he was
wearing lifts in his loafers. His height, or lack thereof, was one of his
only redeeming qualities.
He
was the biggest homosexual stereotype I’d ever met, the very definition of an
English dandy, and so catty that the last time he came to visit Frank and me at
home, our dogs chased him up a tree. Then again, he did hate me, and the
dogs were so protective that they wouldn’t even let Frank get away with fucking
me too hard. We had to take our extracurricular activities to our
apartment in the city whenever we wanted to play rough.
Alan
had known Frank longer than anyone still living, and had been in love with him
ever since. He had a taste for dark haired boys with accents. Frank
was fifteen when they met, his English anything but the Queen’s, and had
he been world-wise enough to pick up on the old man’s flirtations, he might’ve
had his first gay experience out of sheer convenience.
Fortunately
for Alan’s sake, Frank preferred beauty over age so I had no need to defend my
territory. Alan also seemed to prefer the younger set, and
although he had sobbed melodramatically at our wedding because Frank was
officially off the market, his sights were now focused almost entirely on
Casey.
Casey
was the man of the hour at tonight’s extravaganza, and as far as I’d noticed,
one of only two other Americans in the room besides me. Frank had
introduced Casey and Alan years ago to save the kid from a life of artistic
poverty, considering that Casey would give away his art to anyone who showed
the least appreciation for it, and Alan knew plenty of rich people who showed
appreciation with their checkbooks.
Alan
had started selling Casey’s work to society’s elite before he was even out of
college; not only because he wanted to get in his pants, but because Casey
could do things with a paintbrush that warranted the price tags that Alan was
famous for.
Even
though Alan was old enough to be his grandfather, and Casey was only borderline
bisexual, it didn’t stop them from flirting with each other whenever they
met. I had a feeling that if Alan died tomorrow, God permit, his
will would have Casey Evans written all over it.
The
work on display tonight was mostly on loan out of private collections, mine and
Frank’s and a few from Alan himself. The star attraction, one Alan had
snatched up in light of the scandal surrounding its former owner’s death, was
one of the few paintings actually for sale: the most famous shipwreck in
history, complete with floating frozen corpses so realistic Casey must’ve
prodded Frank for details. A smiling yellow rubber ducky bobbing amongst
the bodies gave the painting Casey’s signature weirdness.
It
was the first painting of his that I’d ever seen, hanging on the expensive wall
of the late Lawrence Wright. His death was on the record as
murder-suicide, killed by his coke-head mistress aboard the Wright family’s
fifty foot yacht. But in reality it was murder-murder, a hit performed
to perfection by yours truly. It went without saying that the truth was
kept from Casey. And everyone else for that matter.
That
had been the beginning of the end for my life of crime, and here we were two
years later, rubbing elbows with the very people we used to kill. Alan
had in fact hired Frank once, to bump off some abusive boyfriend.
If only he’d hire him again, to spare us the boredom. And spare us
Antoinette Bergeton.
Frank
winced as Madam Bergeton approached him. She was one of Alan’s closest
friends, which meant that they looked down on nearly everyone else, and then
talked about each other behind one another’s backs. But unlike Alan she
had no taste, and had to rely on him for everything from picking lovers to
picking nail polish.
Antoinette
had squinty eyes she could barely open under the six pounds of mascara and teal
eye shadow she must’ve applied with a paint roller, and lips that were puckered
on a permanent basis as if she were storing lemons in the deep recesses of her
jowls. She smelled like a bull that got loose in a perfume shop, and had
pointy high heeled shoes that threatened to burst out the sides at any moment
from the pressure of being three sizes too small.
She
cemented Frank’s arm against her corpulent bosom. I wondered what she’d
think if she knew how easily he could snap her sternum in that position.
Judging by Alan’s smirk, it was quite obvious what he had on his mind, and he
seemed to approve of whatever method of murder would soon befall the rotund
Frenchwoman.
Alan
was amused by everything that had the potential of ending up in a police
report. Merely mentioning the word scandal caused him to squeal
like he’d sat on something sharp but pleasurable, and he’d clap his hands
together over and over, then lean in close for the details. If he leaned
in any closer to my husband, I’d be snapping his sternum.
Frank
managed to pry his arm away when a waiter appeared to distract her with hors
d’oeuvres, but he didn’t leave. As much as he hated mingling with
strangers, much less acquaintances, he would eagerly watch them all
day. His favorite part of being a gun for hire had been learning
everything about his victims through hours of surveillance, and he could always
pretend that the light at the end of the irritation tunnel was from a flash of
gunfire.
As
for me, I cared less about the stalking portion of our former profession, and
more about getting my hands dirty. And right now, my hands were spick and
span, blood free for two full years. Just the thought of it was enough to
make me want to stab the nearest passing artist with my champagne flute.
Except that particular artist happened to be Casey.
He
beamed at me, innocently unaware of my momentarily homicidal thoughts, a
thousand watt light bulb in a socket of color. Casey was wearing a blue
V-necked tunic that was in fact a knee-length dress, a pair of
dark jeans so tight they threatened the welfare of his future children, and
blue plaid Doc Marten boots laced up to his shins with bright yellow bootlaces.
This
was a subdued Casey, his normal overly colorful nature muted by the death of
his estranged father. The only evidence of this recent loss was a black
arm band he wore in mourning, though he had asked Frank to embroider a
bright red heart on the center in honor of his dad’s coronary. Frank was
a great seamstress.
“Hey,
Vin,” he said as he came closer, slipping his arm around my shoulders and
pulling me into the type of playful hug a butch older brother would use to show
affection to his misty-eyed little sister. I nearly lost my footing, a
side effect of too much champagne that I shouldn’t have been drinking
anyway. Or maybe this was my standard lack of balance; another so far so
permanent by-product of the brain injury that single headedly ended my criminal
career.
We’d
been to several specialists, and they all said it was more or less normal,
being that my brain had bounced like a rubber ball against my fractured
skull. But while the fainting eventually went away, and medication helped
prevent seizures, I still got sudden migraines that were bad enough to bring me
to my knees. Along with even a minuscule amount of stress, drinking
alcohol was one of the major triggers.
“Sorry,”
Casey said, taking my drink from me just as Frank would’ve done. “I
thought alcohol gave you a headache.”
“It’s
a special occasion,” I reminded him. “Yours.” It was also a social
occasion, which always drove me to drinking regardless of the potentially
painful consequences.
“Oh,
yeah,” he said sheepishly, looking around the room as if he’d just noticed that
the work on display had been plain white canvas before he’d gotten his talented
hands on it.
Casey
was energetically confident when it came to everything but his art. He
had a hard time grasping how Alan could put so many zeroes on the end of the
price tag. As a teenager he’d been known to spend months on a piece only
to suspend it from a freeway overpass that desperately needed “cheering up” or
nail it to a pole under a bridge so the homeless could have a more welcoming
living area.
That
was part of what made him so endearing, and made everyone who knew him so
protective of him. Casey was the sweetest person you could ever hope to
meet. He’d been raised by a single mother on the verge of absolute
poverty, thanks to his recently deceased deadbeat dad, so he had a great head
on his shoulders even after becoming established on the Paris art scene.
The
poverty had ended when Casey was twelve, and Frank showed up like Robin Hood,
robbing the rich of their lives and giving the money to the poor. Frank
had still been more or less providing for them financially when we’d met, even
though he never so much as mentioned them to me.
Frank
had always been very fond of secrecy. Things normal people would mention
on the first or second date took months to pry out of him, and subjects he was
sensitive about took even longer. But if there was one thing Frank was more
partial to than secrecy, it was paranoia. After his ex-partner was nearly
killed on a job, he decided it was better to keep his distance from his adopted
family than face the prospect of losing them. He broke off all contact
without so much as a goodbye, and chalked it up as a failed attempt at a normal
life.
But
it just so happens that I’m very partial to jealousy, as well as
insecurity. When I saw Casey’s painting on the Wright’s wall, and saw
Frank’s reaction to it, I naturally feared that my boyfriend had a secret
artist lover on the side who I’d have to put through a wood chipper. I
gave Frank no choice but to come clean or find a heavy duty wet/dry vac to pick
up the pieces of both relationships.
My
fears couldn’t have been more unfounded. Casey was like his brother, and
Casey’s mother Maggie was probably less attracted to Frank than he was to
her. The woman was clearly out of her mind. Who wouldn’t
want Frank? Tall, dark, and gorgeous, with bright green eyes and jet
black hair. It still got me hot just to smell him, and we’d been together
since I was sixteen.
It
didn’t help matters that he was only getting better looking with age. He
was closer to forty than thirty now, and he had the occasional gray hair
amongst the black, a fact that I’d been able to successfully hide from him due
to his habit of never looking in mirrors, until Casey came to stay with us and
let him in on the secret.
Frank
had been so embarrassed that he wouldn’t even show his face at the store to buy
hair dye, and in a shocking lack of the usual protectiveness he showed for his
“little brother,” forced Casey to make the journey to town on his own to buy a
box of black. On top of that, he refused to speak to me, until he
realized we’d have a guest for the next who-knew-how-long and would have to get
my punishment in then or forever hold his piece.
Casey
had officially been in France for two months, and although he had enough good
judgment to take the dogs for an extra long walk in the woods around our house
whenever Frank and I gave each other that look, his mom and stepdad were
more insistent of us hanging out as one big happy family while they were here
on their belated honeymoon.
After
I’d gotten hurt, all I’d wanted was stability: a family, freshly baked cookies,
and somewhere to live where my wounds wouldn’t get infected if I so much as
used a bath towel. Then I came to my senses, realizing it would never
work. Maggie and Gideon saw me as a kid instead of the prematurely
retired psycho killer I was, and that only seemed to encourage Frank to keep
acting like I was going to keel over and die any second.
I’d
hoped that once we were on our own Frank would see that I was okay, and even
though we weren’t doing what we used to do, we still had each other. He
could be my teacher again, French lessons in place of Murder 101, and
instead of spanking me for splattering him with blood, he could punish me when
I didn’t conjugate verbs correctly. It would be just like old
times. Only it wasn’t.
“You’re
thinking about sex,” Casey said knowingly, his voice lowered as if Frank could
hear us from across the room. It still took very little to embarrass
Frank, and talking to his brother about our sex life was enough to make him
hide in his dusty library until his ears stopped glowing red.
I
smiled, and was about to remind him that having sex on the brain wasn’t a
rarity for me when I saw her.
She,
of Frank’s past: his sister-in-arms
and former partner, who couldn’t walk into a room without causing damage to
something or someone. Bella.
