The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3 Read Online Free Page B

forgotten how.”
    Kyle let it all go then, enjoying the touch of the man he was already growing old with.

Chapter 3
    Room 202
    S he liked the idea of being a lesbian assassin and wondered if there were others like her, how they would go about finding one other, if they did. Maybe there was some sort of Facebook page for her kind, some site that required coded phrases and passwords to enter, but once inside she would not be alone in her singular mission, her only drive. It had been very lonely, and while she allowed her imagination its moments, she knew she did not belong in the company of killers. She’d had no choice in the matter, and was not really an assassin. Assassins were sent by others, were they not? They did the bidding of paymasters, while the assassin herself might have no stake in the matter at all. It was just a job, a high-risk paycheck. There was no comparison to be made. Hers was a mission of justice, of setting right a world that had been tilted wickedly out of balance thirty years ago when she was just a ten year old child hiding in a closet.
    She had heard the men break into their home in Los Feliz, an affluent section of Los Angeles with its own boulevard snaking along past the Greek Theatre, east toward Glendale. She and her parents were supposed to be on a flight to London, part vacation, part present for her tenth birthday, but she had fallen seriously ill with a flu (there it was again, the guilt; it had been her fault somehow, another reason she must make amends and end these lives) and they had postponed the trip. Had they gone, had she not complained or registered a fever, her parents would be alive and her life would have had a completely different trajectory than the one leading her here, to this strange lodge outside a town she’d never been to or planned to see again.
    Her childhood bedroom was on the second floor down the hall from her parents’ room. She hadn’t been able to sleep, tossing and turning, sweating with her fever, and when she heard the glass shatter she thought at first she had imagined or dreamt it. That’s what fevers do to you. She sat up in bed and listened, hearing what to her was the distinct sound of someone in the house. She hurried out of bed in her nightgown and tip-toed quickly down the hall. Her father had always been a heavy sleeper, and her mother had the habit of using ear plugs to soften the sound of her husband’s snores. Emily—that was her name then—went to her father and shook him awake.
    “Daddy! Daddy!” she said, rocking him furiously. “There’s somebody downstairs!”
    Carl Lapinsky pulled himself from a deep sleep as quickly as he could, like a man swimming furiously up toward the surface. The alarm in his daughter’s voice told him there was no time to waste, and he put his fingers to his lips to tell her to be silent. He’d heard her perfectly well, even blanketed by sleep, and he leaned up on one elbow to listen to the silence outside the room.
    There it was, the sound of hushed voices. Carl cursed himself for not turning on the alarm. He’d seen a news report just the other day about the folly of having an alarm system you didn’t turn on when you were home. Men especially thought they didn’t need an alarm to protect a house they were in. Now, in the darkness with the sound of intruders coming up the stairs, Carl knew he would never make that mistake again.
    His wife Barbara had woken up, disturbed by the commotion in her bed, and was taking out her earplugs when Carl told his daughter to get into the closet and stay there. She did as her father told her, rushing to the closet and hunching down below her mother’s dresses, leaving the door open just a crack.
    It was Carl Lapinsky’s second mistake, and a fatal one. He owned a gun, but kept it in the closet, where he had just sent his daughter to hide. He cursed himself for not thinking clearly, and wondered if he had time to rush to the closet and get the gun he kept in a box