Delgano: A Dark Contemporary Interracial Romance

“Are you going to stand behind me and puppet my hands like you’re teaching me how to play pool?”

“Can I touch you?” she asked. “I pissed you off earlier. I want to avoid doing that again.”

Thus far, the playful vixen hadn’t reappeared, but they still didn’t know each other. At the moment, her life would matter very little if he discovered a reason to end it.

“Sayeda said I’m ruthless,” he said. “What do your files say about me that would make her see me that way?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Sayeda?”

“The chef.”

“You call her Sayeda?”

“It’s what she told me her name is.”

“She’s a virgin, you know.”

“Your point?”

“My point is that she’s off-limits, in every way. If you’re that hard up, I’ll offer myself in her place.”

“What did I ask you? Because I’m sure it wasn’t that.”

She scratched the space beneath her nose. “As far as your ‘files,’ let’s just say ‘they’ know a lot. They know how many you’ve killed, why you’ve killed. They know about your life, a good deal about your mother, and only a little bit about your father.”

He knew next to nothing about his father and wasn’t interested in changing that anytime soon.

“Who is this ‘they’ I keep hearing about? And is there more than one team or project or whatever you want to call it?”

“They’re called Central, which is ironic because they’re not centralized anywhere,” she explained. “And this team’s called Project Omega, which signifies the last or end of something. Based on how this team came together, the only way it would make sense for this team to be the first would be if it was a prototype. You’re…you, Trev’s former Australian Special Forces, Spettro’s a hacker, Lee’s a defector, and Barnes came from somewhere in the mountains. Literally, the motherfucker lived in the woods with bears and wolves and shit. Who, in their right mind, looks at that lineup and says, ‘Yes, now there’s a team’?”

Again, he nearly smiled.

“You didn’t mention a Barnes or a Lee before,” he said.

The right side of her mouth curved upward, which elongated the fullness of her lips. If Central had been following him for a while, they definitely had the blueprint for the type of women he often found himself staring at longer than others.

“Your files also say that you’re perceptive, quiet, fast on your feet, and a ‘highly efficient’ killer,” she added.

“There are many more like that. Why come for me?”

“I don’t know, but I have a theory. I think it’s because, to you, there’s still a right and wrong. You’re not some…glorified serial killer. You’ve retained a semblance of empathy. In Chamas, you were more of a protector than you realized. You made people who felt left behind feel safe. I mean, Pedro was only planning to go to the authorities because you slept with his sister. You had the respect of virtually everyone else. I think there’s even a limerick or something. A ‘Ballad of the Enforcer’ or something like that.”

That was how he’d known Pedro was full of shit. He’d slept with no one’s sister.

To date, he’d slept with no one.

Considering he’d gone to a private Catholic school, he’d kissed his fair share of “innocent” girls, from pecks to full-on make-out sessions at their expensive homes in southern Rio when their parents were at work. Those make-out sessions had eventually led to afterschool heavy petting with his hand underneath plaid skirts and inside uniform shirts.

However, it didn’t matter how much preparation he did. It didn’t matter if he was aroused and wanting. The minute he tried to seal the deal, he fell flat.

Eventually, he stopped trying.

Whenever sexual feelings arose, he handled them on his own. Still, he felt like a failure, especially when he’d had women tossed at him, sometimes literally, by members high up on the Chamas hierarchy. The only saving grace was that they were always older than him, so they never argued when he backed out. They’d simply seen it as him being intimidated by their beauty.

“I didn’t sleep with Eloísa,” he said. “I barely knew her.”

“Adrían, can I ask you something personal?”