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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, really. I was born and bred for one task, my temperament honed in the flames of adversity, 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 know if he was a demon who sold drugs that killed a powerful man’s daughter, 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 of on his left.

By all accounts, Liam had been depressed, had held the weapon himself, had gun powder 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. She was a detail I didn’t need to know.

But still, the cry 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 in place to look at her.

The darkness I recognized in her trapped me in the shadows to watch her for the first time.

That moment was the beginning of an obsession, and 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 saw 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 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 where her life would spiral out of control. That I felt responsible for a 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 somthing more on the night I first saw her:

A stalker.

A constant shadow.

And the man that would protect her from the world.