The Assassin’s Alibi

A Dark MM Hitman Romance
by Rafe Calder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Standalone
Tropes: Hitman × Mob Lawyer, One-Night Stand to Lovers, Framed Together, Forced Proximity, Only One Bed, Enemies to Lovers, Grumpy × Sunshine, Size Difference, Touch Starved, Praise and Control, Light Bondage, Switch, Touch Him and Die, He Falls First, Morally Grey Heroes

Someone put us in the same bar. Nobody put us in the same bed.

I fix problems for the Marlow family. I don’t ask what the rooms are for, and I never keep the names.

So when a client stands me up at a hotel bar, I set terms for the stranger two stools down. No names. No kissing. Gone by one.

He’s enormous. He says about four words an hour. He asks before he touches me, and then he takes me apart. I leave at a quarter past one with his teeth marks under my collar.

By morning a crime boss is dead on the other side of the city. By Sunday night my employer has slid a photograph across his desk.

Mikhail Orlov. Contract killer. My one-night stand.

There’s a contract with my signature on it that says I hired him. There’s a picture of the two of us at that bar. And at eleven-forty, the minute the shot was fired, he was inside me and I was looking at the clock.

He’s the only proof I didn’t do it. I’m the only proof he didn’t.

Now two crime families want us in the same hole. My accounts are frozen, my own people shot at me through a restaurant window, and I’m hiding on a cliff in a glass house with one chair, one mattress, and a man nobody has ever asked what he wants.

We can’t tell anyone where we were that night.

We can’t seem to stop ending up there again.

The Assassin’s Alibi is a dark, high-heat MM romantic suspense with a silent hitman and the mob lawyer who never shuts up, a one-night stand that turns into an alibi, forced proximity, only one bed, terms negotiated out loud, a dark blue silk tie, on-page violence, a lot of on-page spice, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA. Dual first-person POV. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A contract killer who says four words an hour and asks before every touch
✅ A fixer in a thousand-dollar suit who sets three rules for a one-night stand, then breaks every one
✅ “No names. No kissing. Gone by one.”
✅ A glass house on a cliff with one chair, one mattress, and a man learning to want a table
✅ A frame-up taken apart with a valet stub, a hotel lock log, and two hours and forty-eight minutes of a closed door
✅ A vote on everything, including who gets to be the bait
✅ “Good.” One syllable, a dark blue tie, and a kitchen counter
✅ Both of them on their knees, and both of them learning to ask
✅ Touch him and die, he falls first, no cheating, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including rough sex, praise, edging, wrists restrained with a necktie, rimming, and both leads topping and bottoming; all on-page sex is consensual and negotiated), on-page violence (a shootout, deaths by gunshot, a man shot in the leg, a strangulation, a burn injury), the on-page killing of the antagonist by a lead character, a past contract killing by drowning recounted in detail (the victim was an innocent man; it is not excused), an implied off-page execution, organized crime, police corruption, a framing for murder, witness intimidation and coerced settlements in a lead’s past (recounted and reckoned with), financial coercion involving a character’s parents’ home, a threat of arson, alcohol, and strong language. No sexual violence, no dub-con, no cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Ezra

My nine-thirty is twenty minutes late, which in my line of work means one of three things: cold feet, a better lawyer, or a shallow grave.

I give it until the ice in my glass goes round at the edges. The Aldane’s lobby bar is built for waiting. Low amber light, leather the color of a good cigar, a pianist who’s been told to play nothing anyone could hum. The referral came through the family office with no name attached, only a time, a place, and the word discreet, and when the Marlows say discreet I don’t ask follow-up questions. I show up early. I take the stool with the wall behind it. I bill for the hour whether or not anyone comes.

Nobody comes.

What I have instead is the man two stools down.

He was here when I walked in at ten past nine, and he has spent forty minutes not looking at me with a discipline I find personally insulting. He’s big in the way that makes furniture look like a suggestion. Shoulders straining a gray henley somebody should have talked him out of in this building. Dark blond hair cut short by a person who charges twelve dollars. Scarred knuckles wrapped around a glass of something clear he isn’t drinking. No watch, no ring, no phone on the bar. He picked a seat against the same wall I did, and he has checked the lobby doors in the mirror nine times.

I count things. Professional habit.

The tenth time, the mirror catches me instead, and he doesn’t look away.

Gray eyes. Flat, patient, and very awake.

Well. The evening isn’t a total loss.

At ten to ten I stop pretending my client is merely late. I pick up my drink and my coat and close the distance, because I have never once waited for a verdict when I could go and get one. Up close he smells like cold air and plain soap. He watches me take the stool beside his the way you’d watch a man walk out onto a frozen lake.

“You’ve been stood up,” I tell him.

A pause. “Have I.”

Low voice. An accent sanded almost flat, from somewhere east of anywhere I’ve been.

“Forty minutes, one drink, both eyes on the door. Either she isn’t coming or he isn’t.” I set my empty glass on the bar between us. “Mine’s a no-show too. They say misery loves company. I’ve always found it prefers a distraction.”

He looks at the glass. Then at my mouth, briefly, like he’s checking an exit. He lifts two fingers at the bartender and tips his head my way, and a fresh scotch lands in front of me without a single word being spent on it.

“That’s the longest conversation anyone’s had with me all night,” I say.

“You talk enough.”

“For two. It’s a gift.” I taste it. He bought the good one. “Here’s my read. You have a room upstairs, because nobody dressed like that comes to the Aldane for the ambience. You’ve been deciding whether I’m trouble since I sat down. And you landed on yes about half an hour ago and stayed anyway.”

Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. On another face it wouldn’t qualify as an expression.

“Eleventh floor,” he says.

My pulse does something undignified. I overrule it. A negotiation is a negotiation.

“Terms, then. No names. I don’t want yours and you aren’t getting mine.” A second finger. “No kissing. It isn’t personal, it’s policy.” A third. “And I’m gone by one. No breakfast, no phone numbers, no pretending we’ll do this again.”

He considers that with the gravity of a man reading a lease.

“Anything else?”

“Yes.” I drink half the scotch, because it’s too good to abandon, and lean in until my knee rests against the outside of his thigh. It’s like leaning on a retaining wall. “The second that door shuts, I’d like you to stop being careful with me. Can you manage that?”

He puts a fifty on the bar and stands. He has to look down to answer.

“Yes.”

He doesn’t touch me in the elevator.

He stands a deliberate foot away with his hands loose at his sides and looks at me, eleven floors of it, steady as a spirit level, until I’ve run out of clever things to do with my face.

“Most men make small talk around the fifth floor,” I say.

Nothing.

“Fine. I’ll do both sides. Nice weather. Is it? I hadn’t noticed, I’ve been busy undressing you in a mirror.”

The numbers climb. He keeps looking. By nine I’ve stopped talking, which should have told me something.

Room 1112 is at the end of the hall. Inside there’s a king bed still made, one black duffel zipped shut on the luggage rack, and curtains open on the harbor lights. No toiletries. No charger. He could have been here an hour or a week and the room would look exactly this unoccupied.

The door closes. The deadbolt turns over.

“Rough?” he asks.

One word, a real question, and he waits for the answer.

“God, yes.”

Then my spine hits the door, his forearm is across my chest, his mouth is on my throat, and I find out that being careful was costing him something. What’s underneath is not careful at all.

He’s all heat and pressure. Stubble scraping the hinge of my jaw, a thigh shoved between mine, one hand spread wide over my ribs like he’s measuring what he has to work with. He mouths down the side of my neck and I tip my head back against the wood to give him room, and he takes all of it.

He strips me like he took inventory first. Jacket off my shoulders and over the chair, not the floor, which I’ll think about later. Tie dragged loose in one pull. He gets my shirt open to the fourth button and stops to bite the place where my neck meets my shoulder, hard enough that I make a sound I would deny under oath.

“That’s fine, that’s allowed, I should have specified, anything below the mouth is entirely…”

His hand closes over my cock through my trousers and the sentence dies in committee.

“Here?” he says against my collar.

“There. Yes. Obviously there.”

He’s in no hurry. He works me through the wool until I’m fully hard and shoving into his palm, then opens my belt one-handed while I’m still fighting his shirt up over those shoulders. It takes both my arms and his cooperation, and what’s under it dries my mouth out. A thick chest dusted dark gold. A body built by work instead of mirrors. Under his left collarbone, an old scar, a pale knotted line as long as my finger.

I put my thumb on it. He goes still for half a breath.

Then he takes my wrist and moves my hand down to the front of his jeans, and I lose all interest in his medical history.

“Oh,” I say. “That’s hardly fair.”

He’s huge. Hot through the denim and hard enough that I can feel his pulse in it. I get his fly open and wrap my fist around him skin to skin, and my fingers don’t quite meet. He’s uncut, slick at the tip already, and when I drag my thumb through it he lets a breath out through his nose like I’ve landed a punch. I decide I want that noise again as many times as the night allows.

“I want this in me,” I tell him, stroking slow, watching his pupils swallow the gray. “I wanted it in me ten minutes ago. I realize that’s an unreasonable deadline, but I have every confidence in your…”

He turns me around and walks me to the bed.

Face down. He puts me there with a palm between my shoulder blades, and the palm stays while his other hand drags my trousers and briefs to my knees and off. Cool air on my bare ass. Then his hand, warm and enormous, running from the back of my thigh up over the curve of it, a long appraising stroke that ends with his thumb pressing between my cheeks and resting right where I want him.

I say something that isn’t a word. He hasn’t even started. Behind me the duffel unzips. Foil tears, a cap clicks. Either he came prepared or he’s a man who is prepared for everything, and I’m in no position to object to either.

I twist to look over my shoulder. He’s kicked the jeans off and he’s kneeling behind me naked, rolling the condom down a cock that has no business being attached to someone this quiet, heavy thighs spread, stomach ridged, every line of him lit amber by the harbor. He catches me staring. He lets me, for a slow three-count, while he slicks his fingers.

Then he presses my face back to the bed.

The first slick finger makes me swear into the duvet.

“More?”

“Two. I’m not made of glass.”

Two, then. Thick, and patient in a way that’s its own brand of cruelty, opening me with slow turns of his wrist until he finds the spot that liquefies my spine. He finds it and he stays there.

“Fuck. Fuck, right there, you smug bastard, how are you this good at…”

Three. I rock back onto his hand like I have no pride left. I have plenty. It has all relocated. My cock is leaking onto very expensive cotton and he hasn’t touched it since the door, so I wedge a hand under my own hips to handle the matter myself.

He catches my wrist and pins it to the mattress beside my head. Then he pauses.

“No?”

It takes me a second to understand that he’s asking whether I’m saying no.

“Yes. I mean, yes to that. Hold them. Both of them.”

He collects my other wrist and locks the pair in one fist at the small of my back, and something in my chest that’s been clenched since law school lets go by a notch.

“Now,” I tell the mattress. “I’m ready. I was ready in the bar.”

His fingers slide free. The bed dips. A knee nudges mine wider, a big hand clamps onto my hip, and the blunt head of his cock presses against my hole and simply holds there, until I’m the one who pushes back.

He lets me take the first inch myself. After that it’s his.

It’s one long, slow, unstoppable slide, and it empties my lungs. He’s thick enough that the stretch burns bright all the way up, and he doesn’t stop and he doesn’t rush. He just keeps coming, until his hips are flush against my ass and I’m so full I can feel my own heartbeat around him.

“Jesus Christ. Give me a… no. Don’t give me anything. Move.”

He moves.

He does precisely what I asked for downstairs. He pulls back nearly all the way and drives in hard enough to shove me up the bed, does it again, then settles into a rhythm that’s deep and heavy and without mercy. The headboard knocks the wall. The slap of his hips against my ass is obscene in the quiet room. His grip on my hip is going to leave marks, and I want them, I want to press on them Monday morning in a meeting and remember this. Every stroke drags over that spot inside me and punches a sound out of my chest, and for a while I keep up a running commentary, because I don’t know how not to.

“Harder. I can take it, you won’t break me. God, you’re deep, you’re so fucking deep. That’s it. Don’t you dare slow down, I’ll ruin you, I know people…”

He huffs against the back of my neck. I think it’s a laugh. His weight comes down over me, chest to my spine, pressing me flat, and the angle changes, and I stop producing words and start producing noise.

He stays right there. Grinding deep, hardly withdrawing at all, two hundred-odd pounds of silent, concentrated man holding me to the mattress with my wrists trapped between us and my cock rutting helplessly against the sheets. I have never in my adult life been so completely relieved of responsibility. I’m going to come like this. Untouched, face in a hotel pillow, fucked stupid by someone whose name I refused to learn.

“Close,” I manage. “I’m so close, don’t stop, if you stop I’ll have you disbarred from something…”

That’s when he pulls out.

I say something filthy and sincere. He ignores it.

“Turn over.”

Not a question, that one. But he lets go of my wrists and waits, and it’s only when I’ve rolled onto my back, shaking, that he hooks his arms under my knees, folds me nearly in half, and sinks back in to the root.

And I get it. Why he wanted me this way up.

He’s watching my face.

There’s sweat at his hairline. His jaw is locked, the tendons in his neck standing out, that scar gone white against his flushed chest. He looks like a man holding a door shut against a flood, and he is doing it for the sole purpose of looking at me.

He fucks me slowly now, long grinding thrusts that light me up from the inside, and those gray eyes never leave mine.

“You’re staring,” I tell him. It comes out thin.

He doesn’t deny it. He rolls his hips, a slow filthy circle with every inch of him seated inside me, and whatever I had lined up next dissolves into a moan with too many vowels.

He has listened to me talk all night. He has decided, as a personal project, to find out what it takes to make me stop.

It takes about four minutes.

“I… that’s… you can’t just…” There was a verb. I had it a second ago. His cock drags out and pushes home and takes the rest of my vocabulary with it. “Please. Please, I need…”

He takes one hand off my thigh and wraps it around me at last. Rough palm, tight fist, stroking in time with his hips.

“Look at me.”

I can’t. It’s too much, being seen like this by a stranger, so I turn my head on the pillow and find the clock on the nightstand, red digits swimming, and try to calculate how long I’ve been begging this man.

11:40.

Over an hour. I’ve folded hostile witnesses in less.

Two fingers on my jaw bring my face back around. Gentle. It’s the gentleness that undoes me. His mouth is an inch from mine, his breathing ragged for the first time tonight, and he tips toward me.

I turn my head.

He stops. He doesn’t push it. He drops his forehead against my temple instead, and the next thrust is the hardest yet, and I come so violently my shoulders leave the bed. It rips out of me in long hot pulses, over my stomach, over his knuckles, and I clench around him so tight that he finally makes a sound, a low wrecked groan right in my ear, and buries himself to the hilt and shudders.

For a while nobody speaks. I’m told I’m capable of it.

He eases out carefully, disappears into the bathroom, and returns with a hot washcloth. He cleans my stomach with the same attention he used to take me apart. I didn’t negotiate for that. I don’t have a clause for it.

“Water?”

He brings the glass and stands there until I’ve finished it.

“I have until one,” I inform the ceiling.

He looks at the clock. He looks at me. Then his hand closes around my ankle.

The second time is slower and lasts longer, and I’m not prepared to discuss it.

I’ll say this much. He lays me on my side and fits himself along my back, one arm under my head, one hand flat on my stomach, and he slides into me still loose and wet from the first round and barely moves at all. He just rocks. Deep, lazy, endless, his mouth open against the nape of my neck, his palm drifting down to hold my cock without stroking it, as though he has until morning and I’m not the one who set a curfew.

I try to hurry him. I give instructions. I make threats, then offers, then some extremely specific promises I’d never honor in daylight.

He hums against my skin and keeps the same pace.

By the end I’m reduced to please and there and a string of syllables that used to be profanity, and when I come it’s slow and devastating, wrung out of me a drop at a time into his fist. He follows me over with his teeth set in my shoulder and his arm locked across my chest, holding on like I’m the one keeping him from going under.

I let him hold on. For a few minutes. I’m a lawyer, not a monster.

At 1:15 I’m dressed, more or less. Tie in my pocket. Shirt buttoned by feel.

He’s sitting against the headboard with the sheet across his lap, watching me hunt for my left shoe. He hasn’t asked me to stay. He hasn’t asked me anything. Four hours ago I’d have called that the ideal quality in a man.

“Fifteen minutes late,” he says.

“I noticed. I’m billing you for the overage.”

That almost-expression again. I pick up my jacket from the chair where he hung it, and for one stupid second I want to cross the room and break my own rule.

I leave instead. I don’t look back. That’s policy too.

The elevator mirror is less discreet than I am. A bitten mouth I didn’t let him kiss. Hair wrecked. Above my collar, the red crescent of his teeth, already darkening. I button up to the throat and watch the floors count down and feel him with every shift of my weight.

Downstairs the kid at the valet stand is polite enough not to study my collar or my hair. He stamps my ticket, 1:22 a.m., and I shove the stub in my jacket pocket and drive home with the windows down, sore in a way I’ll feel for days and smiling like an idiot at every red light.

My phone goes off at six.

It’s the family line. A voice I know, flat with no sleep. “Dominic Rusk is dead. Somebody shot him in his office over Pier 9 last night. Mr. Marlow wants everyone reachable.”

I lie in the gray light with a stranger’s handprint on my hip and think: there goes the truce. I think about freight contracts and redevelopment bonds and which of my clients will need to be somewhere else by noon.

I don’t think about room 1112 at all.

Sunday night, Julian Marlow pours my drink himself. That’s how I know it’s bad.

His study smells of cedar and old paper. Celeste is on her way out as I’m shown in, a folder under her arm, her heels soundless on the rug. She touches my sleeve in passing.

“You look tired, Ezra. Get some rest when this is over.”

The door clicks shut behind her. Julian hands me the glass and sits on the edge of his desk, cardigan over a shirt and tie, silver at the temples. He looks like a man who endows libraries. He does endow libraries.

“Twenty years, Dominic and I,” he says. “Twenty years of disliking each other, and never once a bullet. There was too much money in the peace.” He turns his own glass a quarter inch on the blotter. “Adrian buries his father on Wednesday. He wants someone to bury beside him. If I can’t hand him a name before then, he’ll choose one, and it will be mine.”

“What do we have?”

“A professional. Freelance. Our people and theirs agree on the workmanship, which is the first thing we’ve agreed on in a decade.” His voice stays mild. It always does. “The night foreman heard the shot at eleven-forty. He checked his watch. He thought a container had dropped.”

Eleven-forty.

I know exactly where I was at eleven-forty on Friday, which is more than I can usually say, and it’s nobody’s business in this room.

“You want him found.”

“He’s found. He sent word an hour ago, through a go-between. He’ll meet with a lawyer. Tonight, alone.” Julian looks at me a beat longer than the sentence needs. “He asked for you.”

“By name?”

“By name. I decided to be flattered on your behalf.”

Something cold walks down my back. I put it down to the scotch and no sleep. I’ve had six years of practice at putting things down to something else.

“Why would a man who just killed Dominic Rusk want to sit across from the Marlow family’s attorney?”

“Perhaps he wants paying. Perhaps he’s under the impression we hired him.”

“Did we?”

“Ezra.” Fond, a little disappointed, the way you’d correct a bright student. It isn’t an answer. I notice that, and I let it go, because letting it go is what I’m for.

“What do I offer him?”

“Whatever gets him into a car. Passage out. Money. My protection. You’ll know what he wants to hear, you always do.” He stands and smooths his cardigan. “There’s a cannery on the south quay. People will be waiting. Have him there before dawn, and then go home.”

“And once he’s at the cannery?”

“By then you’ll have gone home.” He smiles. It’s a kind smile. I have watched it end careers.

I’ve walked people into rooms for this family before. Witnesses, accountants, a city inspector with a conscience. I’ve never asked what the rooms were for. I draft the paper afterward and tell myself that paper is the civilized part.

Julian picks a thread off his cuff. “How are your parents? Still in the house?”

“Still in the house.”

“Good. It’s a good house.”

He holds the note on it. We both know that. Neither of us has ever said so out loud, which is the entire art of working for Julian Marlow.

He takes a photograph from the desk drawer and slides it across the leather, face down.

“So you know him when you see him.”

I turn it over.

Long lens. Grainy. A man crossing a wet street in some city colder than this one, collar up, head turned a few degrees toward the camera, as if he’s felt it on him.

Gray eyes. Dark blond hair. Shoulders that make the doorway behind him look like a suggestion.

“Mikhail Orlov,” Julian says.

No names. That was my rule.

Julian Marlow has just broken it for me, and under my shirt, under six years of careful tailoring, the man’s fingerprints are still bruised into my hip.

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Not on the Table — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

One year to the night after the Aldane, Mikhail oils the oak table a sixth time, stands seven chairs against the wall, and pays fifty dollars for an amendment. A dark blue tie, one chair at the head, every light in the house on, and a hitman who finally asks for exactly what he wants. Then it’s Ezra’s turn.

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