Kill Order (The Guild Book 3)
kill order
TATE JAMES
Tate James
Kill Order: The Guild #3
Copyright © Tate James 2022
All rights reserved
First published in 2022
James, Tate
Kill Order: The Guild #3
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All characters in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover design: Tamara Kokic
Editing: Heather Long (content) and Helayna Trask (line).
For the partners of bookworms.
Grab some lube, hydrate, and remember to thank Tate later.
contents
Follow Tate
Content Warning
Shadow Grove Reading Order
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Epilogue
Heist
Poison Roses
Also By Tate James
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content warning
The Guild series is a part of the Shadow Grove world which contains several interconnected series. The tone and content tends to lean toward the dark, and reader discretion is advised.
Please be mindful of your own content triggers and limits.
The characters within The Guild series are not heroes or heroines, please kindly don’t hold them to a heroic standard as they will fall short of expectations. They do bad things, and they own their actions.
If you’re here, then you’ve already read both Honey Trap and Dead Drop, so you are already well acquainted with these characters. This installment touches on dark themes for some supporting characters also.
Should you have concerns around specific triggers, please reach out for content clarity before reading.
- Tate
shadow grove reading order
SHADOW GROVE WORLD
Interconnected series
While each series in the Shadow Grove world can be read independent of the others, this is the recommended reading order for a chronological timeline. You do not need to read in this order, but it may help with overall background and cameo character appearances.
MADISON KATE
#1 Hate
#2 Liar
#3 Fake
#4 Kate
HADES
#1 7th Circle
#2 Anarchy
#3 Club 22
#4 Timber
MADISON KATE NOVELLA
#4.5 Vault
THE GUILD
#1 Honey Trap
#2 Dead Drop
#3 Kill Order
one
KAI
The sound of my gun firing in Danny’s hand made me flinch. She should have just shot me, it probably would have hurt less than watching her drive away. Far less than hearing those cutting words come out of her mouth. We’re done.
Goddamn, that hurt. So much more than I had prepared myself for. Accept it. Move on.
As if that was even possible. I would never accept her absence. Not like this, when she so clearly still loved me. No, no way. And I sure as fuck wouldn’t move on, even if she chose him.
Part of me was relieved that she hadn’t chosen him. The selfish part that constantly debated about killing Leon in his sleep… If I thought I could get away with it, I might have done it by now. I was relieved she hadn’t picked him over me, but I was totally fucking destroyed at the pain on her face as she walked away from both of us.
She showed us that of the three of us, Danny had the biggest balls. She chose to hurt herself to save both of us. Because surely she knew that we wouldn’t kill one another until one of us had won, fair and square. It’d be cheating.
Leon snapped out of the shock so much faster than I did, running over to his car even as Danny’s van paused at the front gates, waiting for them to open.
“What are you doing?” I shouted after him as he threw open the driver’s door. “She shot out your tire, you idiot. You can’t chase her down on rims.”
He just leaned inside and popped the trunk. “Fuck me, you really are all muscle, no brains, aren’t you?” he muttered, circling to the trunk and lifting out a gun case. Setting it on the ground, he went back and opened the false bottom to reveal the spare tire.
Shit. Of course, he could replace the tire. Maybe I was an idiot.
Not willing to be left behind, I reached in and hauled out the spare tire while Leon went to work on the flat, cranking it up with the jack to remove it. Even working together, though, it took a solid ten minutes until we were operational. It was too damn long; she could be anywhere by now.
“Can’t you drive faster?” I growled before we even turned out of the driveway. “This is painful.”
“You know what’d be painful?” Leon shot back from the driver’s seat. “Me kicking your ass out of this moving car. Shut the fuck up, dickhead. This is entirely your fault.”
“My fault?” I exclaimed in outrage. “Are you for fucking real right now? This is—” I broke off my accusation, dread and disgust flowing through me. “This is our fault, Leon. Both of ours. We fucked up, and now we need to fix it before she decides neither one of us is worth the trouble.”
He didn’t disagree, just grunted a noise and drove faster.
“If she hasn’t already decided that,” I muttered under my breath, replaying how she’d walked away from both of us in my mind. She’d rather choose no one th an be forced to pick between us. That knowledge was confronting, to say the least. It told me that all the certainty I felt with her, all that love that I knew she reciprocated… she also felt for him.
Fuck.
“She hasn’t,” Leon snapped, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the steering wheel.
I scowled. “How can you be so fucking sure? She seemed pretty determined to get the fuck away from us both.”
He flashed me an arrogant smirk. “Because she ran. Danny DeLuna doesn’t run from anything or anyone. She wants to be chased. She wants us to put her above our grievances with one another.”
He gave a dramatic pause, and I soaked his opinion in. Was he right?
Leon gave a frustrated sigh and swept a hand over his face, not even braking slightly as he took the tight corners. “Work it out, man, she just wants us to choose her. It’s really not that hard to figure out.”
And yet, he’d seen it where I couldn’t. I’d taken her actions and her words at face value. She said things were over and… I believed her. It gutted me, made me feel like my heart had been ripped from my chest, but I’d believed her.
Not Leon, though. He read between the lines and saw what she truly wanted. Fuck, what she needed. The signs were all there, how she’d accused us both of using her as a replacement for Charlotte. Layla. Whatever the fuck her name was. She was basically screaming at us to prove that it was her—and only her—that we wanted. That she was more important than our vendettas and revenge plots.
And she was. One hundred percent, she was.
“So that’s it, then?” I asked after a long silence. “You just wanna be buddies now?” I couldn’t hide the disgust in my voice. The idea of voluntarily sharing the woman I loved with anyone—let alone a Guild Circle member—made me feel sick. It was bad enough while I waited for her to kick him to the curb, but… were we talking about long term? No fucking way.
Leon shot me a glare of pure venom. “You killed Layla.”
I winced. “You killed Mauricio.”
He grunted. “Who the fuck is Mauricio?”
Of course, this motherfucker didn’t even know who he’d killed. I bet he couldn’t even count how many lives he’d taken. I almost launched into more insults, but… he also had a point. I did kill Layla. Charlotte. Whatever. I’d loved her and still killed her. Didn’t that make me worse than him?
Christ. I never thought I’d see the day when my actions were more reprehensible than that of a Circle member.
Swallowing hard, I changed the subject. “How do you know where you’re going? She could have gone that way.” I pointed to the cross street we’d just blown past. Leon wasn’t even hesitating with each turn, like he already knew where she was.
He gave me an unimpressed glance, then unclipped his phone from the holder on the far side of the steering wheel where I couldn’t see it. “You didn’t think I was just looking at that van earlier, did you?”
On the screen, a red tracking dot blinked its way across a map, and my brows shot up. “You put a tracker on the van?”
Leon clicked his tongue. “Wrong. I put a tracker on Stanley… the fucking plant. She loves that damn thing. She won’t leave it behind no matter where she goes. Not now, while she’s feeling vulnerable.”
I huffed, because that was actually really smart. I wished I’d thought of it. He may not have known Stanley was a plant until today, but he recognized how attached Danny was to the leafy bastard.
“The tracker’s stopped moving,” I told him, frowning at the screen. “GPS says we’re twelve minutes away.”
“Fuck that,” Leon growled. “Just give me directions, we’ll catch up.”
As much as I hated the guy, I wasn’t going to argue. We wanted the same thing, so we needed to work together. For now, at least. So I barked out directions as we drove, rapidly gaining on the blinking red dot.
As we approached, as the van came into view, I could swear my whole fucking world stopped turning. Leon skidded to a halt beside the wreckage of the rusty van, and we both leapt out in panic. He had a gun in his hand already, ever the professional, and I was unarmed. Danny had my gun.
Fuck. Where is she?!
“Danny!” I shouted, frantic. “Siren! Where are you?” I dropped to my knees beside the wrecked van, peering through the broken window. It was empty.
“Got a body over here!” Leon shouted, and my stomach dropped to the pits of hell. I scrambled to my feet, staggering over to where he was standing.
The relief that rushed through me when I saw the unfamiliar body on the gravel was enough to knock me to my knees. “Thank fuck,” I exhaled. “Thank fuck.”
Leon made a disgusted noise. “Have a little faith, Malachi. It’d take more than a car crash to kill DeLuna. She’s one of the best, even at her worst.”
It made me sick that he knew her so well. So much better than I did. But it also made me all the more determined to get her back and learn these things. So I swiped a hand over my face and pushed back to my feet.
“Now what? I don’t suppose you put a tracker on her as well?” It was wishful thinking, which Leon confirmed with a tight grimace and jerk of his head. Shit. But then suddenly I remembered—
“Stanley!” I rushed around to the back of the van, where one of the buckled doors lay open.
He was still in there, still held by one of the safety straps, but his dirt was scattered all over the inside of the van, and several stalks were snapped and hanging limp. His stupid fucking Christmas bow was still attached to one of those broken fronds, and I almost sobbed at the pathetic sight of it.
Acting on instinct, I climbed into the van and unhitched the one remaining strap to free the injured euphorbia. Stanley was no lightweight plant, though, even missing as much dirt as he was, so I called for Leon to help.
Together, we manhandled the plant out of the wrecked van, even as a fire lit up in the engine. We dragged the damaged Devil’s Backbone back to the Aston Martin, then watched the fire spread through the van with morbid fascination. We’d gotten there just in time.
“What the fuck do we do now?” I asked again, at a loss for ideas myself. I hated that Leon was taking the lead, but I was flailing. This wasn’t my area of expertise, it was his. So for Danny’s sake, I’d let him call the shots.
Leon didn’t respond for a minute, pacing around the crash scene with an impassive expression. Then, finally, he returned to where I waited helplessly beside Stanley.
“We need to go back to the house,” he announced. “We need to grab the data drives and then go our separate ways.”
My jaw dropped. “Fucking excuse me? You’re giving up?” I roared the accusation, grabbing his shirt in my fist and shaking the weak-ass motherfucker. “How dare you claim to love her when you’re so ready to walk away when—”
He struck me in the trachea, making me choke and stagger backwards. My hands clutched my throat, but I knew the feeling of suffocation would be short-lived, no matter how startling it was in the moment.
“Simmer down, sweetheart,” he mocked me with a sneer. “I’m not walking away from shit. Best you accept that fact now. Are you getting in? Or am I leaving you here with the plant?”
I dragged a long breath in, reinflating my lungs and glaring daggers at the psychotic bastard who was fighting for my woman. “Fine,” I croaked. “Load Stanley into the trunk. If he dies, so do we.”
Leon shrugged and popped the Aston Martin’s trunk. No way was Stanley actually going to fit, but with his heavy pot secured, it was as good as we could manage. I just crossed my fingers and hoped none of his other stalks would snap on the drive back to our rented house.
“Why are we retreating?” I growled when we were on the road once more.
Leon just shot me a flat glare. “Do you know where to find her now? Without a tracking device? No? I didn’t think so.” He paused a moment, his nostrils flaring as he stared at the road ahead. “She was ambushed. The van was rammed off the road by a stronger vehicle. Hummer is my guess. There were at least four other vehicles here, too, and probably ten to fifteen operatives. Whoever took her, this was well planned. They’ll have covered their tracks.”
I drew a deep breath, my throat aching and not just from Leon’s strike. “Why? She didn’t have the data sticks on her. Why take her?” Why not just kill her, if that was the objective?
Leon didn’t answer for the longest time. Then he gave me a dark, murderous look. “That’s what I intend to find out. Someone made a huge mistake, taking her from me, and they’re about to pay for it.”
I swallowed instinctively. I’d killed my fair share of people in the past, mostly mercenaries, but this motherfucker terrified me. For the first time since he’d turned up in my life, I was glad to be on the same side as him… because a whole lot of people were about to die. Painfully.