The Danger You Know Read online

  Table of Contents

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Adeline’s Playlist

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Epilogue

  This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, any place, events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and storylines are created from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  The Danger You Know: Copyright © 2020 by Lily White

  Proofreader: Kim BookJunkie

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced, scanned, distributed in any printed or electronic form or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  by Lily White

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  OTHER BOOKS BY LILY WHITE

  MASTERS SERIES:

  Her Master’s Courtesan

  (Book 1 of the Masters Series)

  (Available on Smashwords and lilywhitebooks.com)

  Her Master’s Teacher

  (Book 2 of the Masters Series)

  Her Master’s Christmas

  (Novella in the Masters Series)

  Her Master’s Redemption

  (Book 3 of the Masters Series)

  Her Master’s Reckoning

  (Book 4 of the Masters Series)

  STANDALONE NOVELS:

  Target This

  Hard Roads

  Asylum

  Wake to Dream

  Four Crows

  Crazy Madly Deeply

  Rules of Engagement

  Wishing Well

  The Five (Also available in Audio)

  Sin and Discipline

  Dirty Girls

  In the Garden of Discontent

  The Vanity of Roses

  The Danger You Know

  ILLUSIONS DUET

  Illusions of Evil

  (Book 1 of the Illusions Duet)

  Fear the Wicked

  (Book 2 of the Illusions Duet)

  ANTIHERO INFERNO SERIES

  Treachery Prequel

  Treachery – May 2020

  Fraud – coming soon

  Violence – coming soon

  Heresy – coming soon

  Anger – coming soon

  Greed – coming soon

  Gluttony – coming soon

  Lust – coming soon

  Limbo – coming soon

  DARK EXCLUSIVE - Available only on LilyWhiteBooks.com:

  The Director

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although the story you’re about to read is a work of fiction, the disorder the main character, Adeline, suffers from is not.

  Narcolepsy is a rare neurological condition wherein the sleep/wake cycle of those who have it is abnormal. The boundary between sleep and wakefulness is disrupted to a point where a person can dream while awake. A person without the condition gradually enters REM sleep. However, a person with the condition can go into REM sleep immediately at any time of the day.

  Those with the condition often have vivid dreams, experience hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations (dreaming while awake) just before falling asleep or immediately upon waking up. They’re conscious and aware they are dreaming.

  Other symptoms include, but are not limited to, sleep paralysis, as well the possibility of parasomnias such as sleep walking, having full conversations while sleeping, and other physical activities without awareness that it is happening.

  While narcolepsy can also include cataplexy, a condition wherein a person loses muscle tone suddenly at any given time, the two are often confused, but are not the same.

  Enjoy the story you’re about to read, but keep in mind Adeline’s experiences are neither impossible nor unrealistic, and do occur for people living with narcolepsy.

  I should know.

  I have it.

  Adeline’s Playlist

  Send Me An Angel – Real Life

  Sweet Dreams – Marilyn Manson

  Volcano – Damien Rice

  Pet – A Perfect Circle

  Cheers Darlin’ – Damien Rice

  Sour Times – Portishead

  Potions – Puscifer

  The Noose – A Perfect Circle

  Something I Can Never Have – Nine Inch Nails

  Common People – Pulp

  The Package – A Perfect Circle

  Mad World – Tears for Fears

  Gravity – A Perfect Circle

  Mr. Brightside – The Killers

  Passenger - Deftones

  Ari

  When I remember that night - the first, the last - the beginning and end of it all, I don’t recall the details of the hit. The reason for Liam Kane’s death mattered little to me.

  I was born for one task, my temperament honed in the flames of apathy, my morality in such things entirely absent.

  The only details that mattered to me were that Liam had to die, and if it happened by my hand, my life would all the better for it.

  I didn’t care if he was a demon who sold
drugs that killed hundreds of people, or a saint who worked his ass off to donate millions to charity.

  The facts meant little to me.

  All that mattered was that he had a price on his head. Two million dollars to be exact.

  The only details that I needed to know were that he was a heavyset middle aged man standing approximately six foot, that he lived in a gated community northwest of Hollow Lake, and that he’d be home for the night after ten p.m., alone in his first floor office where nobody would bother him for some time.

  Nobody but me, at least. The man who would kill him. The interloper that couldn’t give a damn about why the bullet should be in his brain, just that it should be there.

  And it was.

  At fifteen minutes past ten, Liam took his final breath, his brain worse for the wear, a small hole at his right temple that led to a much larger one on his left.

  By all accounts, Liam had been depressed, had held the weapon himself, had gunpowder residue on his hand to prove it. His body was left slumped at his desk.

  I was nothing but a ghost, an unseen force that guided his hand. And I would have remained just that if his daughter hadn’t come to check on him shortly after I closed the window.

  It was stupid for me to turn back when I heard her voice. I knew better. I never get involved. She was a detail I didn’t need to know.

  But still, the scream that left her throat stopped me in place, the agony pouring out of her when she called her father’s name caused me to spin to look at her.

  Breath leaked out of me, a white gust against the cold night air.

  I wasn’t sure what I recognized in her that trapped me in the shadows to watch her for the first time, but that moment was the beginning of a mistake - the end of a life lived without concern for another person.

  It was the first night I saw her, and the last I had the ability to walk without guilt for what I’d done.

  Adeline Kane was sixteen years old when I first found her, a vision with raven black hair and skin so pale she would glow beneath moonlight. She had crystal blue eyes and red lips that defied every shade a lipstick could provide. And she had the bone structure of an angel, not the round cherubic type, but the ones fallen from Heaven and designed solely to punish a man’s soul.

  I didn’t want to know she was an artist who preferred tragedy to romance.

  It shouldn’t have mattered that she felt most comfortable when she was alone.

  It wasn’t in me to care that she’d lost her mother only months before I killed her father and that she was the heir to the small fortune they left behind.

  All that concerned me in the years I watched her was that she’d fractured the night her father died, that I’d left her at a moment when her life would spiral out of control. That I felt responsible for the girl becoming a woman. And that she pulled at something inside me I had never known before.

  I was ten years older than her.

  A trained killer.

  A skilled assassin.

  But I became one more thing on the night I first saw her:

  A stalker.

  A constant shadow.

  And the man that would protect her from the world.

  . . .

  November 8, 2014

  The last place I want to end up on a Saturday night beneath a full moon and shrouded in the first flurries of snow is outside a nightclub.

  I can’t stand these types of places. Always with the garish lights, thumping music and pungent scent of youthful hormones mixed beneath a layer of alcohol and cigarettes. I’ve avoided the cramped quarters and brush of sweaty bodies for many years.

  Only she can bring me to a place like this, The Black Orchid, a club that caters to those with a penchant for the macabre.

  I have to admit, it isn’t your typical nightclub. The interior is designed to mimic a dungeon, the exterior a facade of fake stone like the walls of a castle. Every person standing in line is dressed in black on black, some pretending they’re vampires, others too stupid to know that fantasy is always more convenient than reality.

  Yet, here I am, standing near a small tree planted in the center of a sidewalk, my shoulder leaning against the iron cage that circles it, my eyes set on a newly of-age woman who’s already had too much to drink tonight and is bouncing in place waiting to get inside.

  Her idiot for a boyfriend stands next to her, a flavor of the week and nothing more. His skinny jeans and floppy hair annoying the living piss out of me. It is what it is. Adeline has no taste in men, but I won’t have to hate this one for too long.

  Her boyfriends never last more than a few weeks or months because Adeline isn’t the type to commit.

  Her habits and choices have driven me insane for the past two years.

  I’ve watched her lose her virginity in the back of a car, have witnessed her run from one guy to another. I’ve been the silent specter that counts the boys and men she’s stumbled through without concern for her reputation.

  Thirteen, not that I’m counting, and if you judge her for it, I’ll gut you and laugh while you scream.

  It isn’t that she’s desperate for the attention, she just falls into it, and like most anything with a dick, they take advantage.

  But she never seems to care, and for that I admire her more than I should. She’s a free spirit, a beam of light that manages to slice its way through the dark landscape of my careful life.

  Adeline isn’t the type to attach herself to anything. She’s only seeking a release during painful hours, an escape to lessen the weight of a life spent misunderstood by everyone that knows her.

  Everyone but me, that is. But then I’ve never met her, not formally, at least. Not in way that she would remember.

  Still, I know everything about her.

  I know that she’s a hellscape that can consume you before you realize what’s happening.

  I know she’s turned on by dominance and fear, and that she hates fluffy romance that’s sweet and shallow.

  I know she has fantasies that other people would consider immoral and wrong.

  I know that she never shows herself to the world because they will judge her.

  And I know there isn’t a single jackass she’s ever been with that appreciates how dirty and broken she really is.

  They can’t make her scream.

  Can’t make her come.

  Can’t do much of anything but convince her to lie beneath them pretending she’s into the moment.

  I won’t deny that last part amuses me, even if I won’t let myself do anything about it.

  The woman has issues.

  They are the same as mine.

  Tonight is her eighteenth birthday and she’s waiting outside a club that you have to be twenty-one to enter. It’s so like her, the rebellion, a personality trait that would drive most sane people crazy, but that calls to me like a whispering lover.

  I’m going to follow in behind her at some point, but for now, this spot by the tree will do.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I fish it out to see Lincoln’s name flashing at me.

  “Where are you?”

  He doesn’t bother waiting for me to say a damn thing before demanding answers I don’t want to give.

  “Taking a walk,” I answer.

  His deep laughter bursts through the phone. “Walking my ass. You’re watching her again, aren’t you?”

  “She needs to be watched.”

  He curses beneath his breath. “I won’t argue with you there. What’s the little psychopath doing now?”

  “Waiting outside Black Orchid.”

  Lincoln goes silent for a second. “She’s not old enough.”

  “She never is,” I answer, amusement dripping from my voice. “But she has a fake ID.”

  “I thought you took that from her.”

  Three times to be exact but she keeps getting new ones. Eventually, I’ll have to kill the assholes giving them to her. I say as much and he groans.

  “She’s out of control.�
��

  “She’s hurting,” I argue, not that it should matter.

  “She’s just a kid, Ari. You’re sick in the head to keep following her.”

  He’s not wrong.

  “She’s also going inside. It’s been great catching up with you. The pep talk was helpful. But I need to go.”

  His laughter cuts off when I slam my thumb on the screen to end the call.

  Asshole.

  Lincoln Major is another killer like me, a pain in my ass since we kindled a friendship when I first started in this business. He’s the only person I trust to watch Adeline for me while I take jobs, and he knows she is a serious pain in the ass.

  Much like the majority of patrons now inching their way into Black Orchid, I’m dressed in head to toe black, my hair as dark as my clothing, my eyes a hard, steel grey. I’m older than most of them by seven years, but I left my hair disheveled and my face unshaved for a few days so I can pull off the appearance of youth.

  I knew Adeline’s birthday was coming up and I would be forced to blend in to this type of place.

  Rather than getting in line like the rest of the plebeian hopefuls, I approach the door, pay the bouncer more than he makes in two weeks, and I’m walking inside to scan my gaze over the multiple dance floors, stages and cages, looking for one seriously fucking aggravating girl I can’t get out of my head.

  My trigger finger twitches when I find her at the bar, the stick of a lollipop poking out from between her full lips while the idiot she brought with her has his hands on her ass and his face buried in her neck.

  I have to restrain myself from marching over there and breaking every part of his body that touches her. Every single one of them.

  Not that she enjoys it. He thinks so. But I know better.

  The smile she’s giving him now is as fake as the stud glimmering in his ear. Cubic zirconia because he can’t afford diamonds. He has exactly two hundred, seventy-three dollars and twenty two cents to his name. Not that I’ve kept tabs on his accounts ever since she started dating him.