Honey Trap (The Guild, #1)

by Tate James

my gaze caught on a child sitting at the counter, wearing some expensive black and gray private school uniform. A child who was staring directly at me.

Artemis!!

Danny DeLuna was Guild royalty. She was totally untouchable… in more ways than one.

I may only be twenty-eight, but I’d been an active mercenary for the Guild since I was eight.

Why was I so fucking fascinated by her? She was a habit I thought I’d kicked a year earlier when I’d flagged a do not assign between our files in the Guild database, but here I was. One fucking phone call from her, and my curiosity—my obsession—was back worse than ever.

Drumming my fingertips on the steering wheel, I made the decision to head back to Prague. But not before tapping into several CCTV cameras around the apartment building and setting myself a facial recognition alert. If Danny left the building, one of those cameras would catch her and ping me. Yeah, I knew how that sounded. I was bordering real close on stalker territory.

My fascination with that white-haired goddess was becoming unhealthy. The best thing I could do for either of our sakes was to fly my ass back to America and pretend she didn’t exist. That’s what I told myself, anyway, as I drove back to Kraków.

I’d leave the genius-level shit to the actual geniuses. Like Leon. Fucking hell, why was I thinking about Leon again? “Dammit, Stanley,” I muttered aloud, heading to my kitchen to grab some vodka from the freezer. “This is the result of too long without good sex, you know that? My tiny, insignificant crush on Leon from like three years ago has turned into a whole thing inside my head.”

Readers were living multiple magical, fantastical lives all within their heads.

It was just so funny, because she was totally rational when she explained that she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving all her book boyfriends behind at night.”

Oof. Yes, I was stalking her a little bit. But she thought I had pretty eyes. I liked that observation way more than I should have.

That made me embarrassingly happy. Oh my god, I was being so ridiculous. Anyone would think Leon was my first crush with how girly I was getting over him. He’d barely even shown me a flicker of interest, and I may as well be doodling Mrs. Danny Marx on my notebooks. Play it cool, Danny. Don’t scare the sexy nerd away.

I stiffened, peering down at the hand, then up at the owner of it. “Leon,” the guy said with a small frown, “I thought that was you.” I stared at him a moment, unblinking, then gave his hand on my arm a pointed look. He took the hint, quickly releasing me and holding his hands up defensively. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I just wanted to grab you before you disappeared in another puff of smoke.” I smiled on the inside. “I’m not here for you, Lucas.” The younger man gave a small smile of relief, running a hand over his hair. “Well, that’s good to hear. I wanted to say thank you, though. For, you know, what you did last year.” He meant erasing any record of him ever existing. Making him into a ghost. I hadn’t done it for him—he was a stranger to me—but because I’d promised Layla. Lucas was her little brother, and before she’d died, she had asked me to help her protect him. To hide him from the Guild. I’d simply completed the task she’d set out to do herself.

GUMDROP!!!

Sabby was a fantastic dancer, but I missed seeing her. She’d been undercover on this mission way too long, but it’d certainly benefited me in getting an invitation tonight.

Kai gave a low chuckle, but it was far from amused. Then his huge hand wrapped around my throat, and my back slammed into the door as he applied pressure. “I think I just changed my mind about letting you go.”

“You’re going to want to stay really still,” he told me in a breathless voice, a slightly unhinged smile on his lips. Then, before I could object—as if I would—he dragged the gun lower and pushed the tip of the barrel inside my pussy. I gasped and wasn’t even faking it. That I hadn’t expected. “Kai—” “Don’t move,” he snapped, his breath rough as he pushed the gun deeper.

Wow. Was I seriously daydreaming about my crush while playing dead in an unknown prison somewhere? Yes. Yes, I was. Dissociation was a strength I never intended to lose.

Like Hades, the female gang boss in Shadow Grove, her little sister Persephone—who wasn’t anywhere near as innocent as she acted—or Hermes, who was fast on track to become history’s most notorious thief.

Then again, Belle had always been the Princess who resonated most with me… nothing wrong with a little Stockholm syndrome, was there?

Dammit. Dickhead men shouldn’t be allowed to wash women’s hair. It was an unfair advantage.

If I killed them all, I would never get Danny back. And somehow, for some reason, she’d become my sole focus. My only priority. I was quite prepared to burn the whole world to ash just to get her safely returned to me… and I really had no clue when my casual obsession had turned into such full blown possession.

Eventually I grew bored and turned on the huge flat screen TV mounted on the wall facing the bed. It wasn’t connected to any local stations, so I got no clues to our location, but it did have some streaming apps. Small win. I searched out the teen vampire drama I’d been watching the last time I’d watched TV and flicked through to the episode I’d been up to. The heroine of the show had a love triangle situation going with two sexy brothers, and I had my money on the bad boy to win her heart in the end. Then again, love triangles always seemed to result in the boring, good guy as the hero. Snore.

Girl same. I’m a Damon girl 💯

“You need to know, no matter how long it takes for you to forgive my actions, you’re mine.”

“If I ever catch another man laying his hands on you, I’ll kill them without question. Are we clear?”

Kai’s grip on my wrists pressed harder, and his free hand moved back to my throat. I loved it there. His right hand was my new favorite necklace.

“Lift your hips, beautiful.”