Marvin

Marvin Assassin's to Order (book 1) JP Sayle & Lisa Oliver Copyright Marvin (Assassins to Order #1) Copyright © JP Sayle and Lisa Oliver, 2023 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Cover Design by Tina Lowen: Designs by Lowen First Edition February 2023 All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, Lisa Oliver. [email protected] No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the internet or any other means, electronic or print, without permission from Lisa Oliver. Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000. Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted material. Your support of the author’s rights and livelihood is appreciated. Marvin is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. All trademarks are owned by the relevant companies and are used for reference purposes in this book only. Contents Dedication Thalassa Family Tree Prologue 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 Epilogue About the Author Lisa Oliver About the Author JP Sayle Other Books By Lisa/Lee Oliver Other Books by JP Sayle Dedication D edication—Lisa Oliver Your life is made up of two dates and a dash – make the most of your dash. (Adapted from a poem by Linda Ellis). Hug the ones you love. Dedication – JP Sayle Life is a journey that takes us on many twists and turns but every one of them can lead us to the joys of life. Thalassa Family Tree Assassin’s to Order is a spinoff from Tangled Tentacles Series. Here is the Thalassa Family Tree to keep you straight with who everyone is if you haven’t read any of the Tangled Tentacles series… Alexi (alpha kraken) and mated to Danik a bear. They have twins, Zale and Marin, krakens. Victor (alpha kraken) and mated to Azim a vampire don’t have any children. Todd, (omega kraken) mated to Ki and Lucas dragons have four children, all girls. Abigail is a dragon while Bell, Daisy and Calli are all baby krakens. Markov (alpha kraken) mated to Cassius a hammerhead shark. They have Riley age six a hybrid lion (Cassius’s to a previous relationship) Selena a shark. Samuel and Marina who are krakens. Kelvin (alpha kraken) mated to Magnus a Leopard don’t have any children yet, but… never say never… Prologue Ajani It wasn’t any one thing that woke him from the half sleep he’d grown accustomed to. His senses were always on alert as Ajani stared out from the confines of his cage. Scanning the dark, dank cellar, which was cold enough in winter to cause icicles to form down the walls, he used his senses. The door was locked and bolted, as were the cages they were in, but it was the chemical restraints that stopped them from being able to leave. They were chemically locked in their human form by the men in white coats, who didn’t speak to them. Daily they were subjected to new torments, but not once did the men, when they’d finished their day’s work, acknowledge them. It was work; they were experiments and referred to by a number, but Ajani remembered the two who had named him. It might be a faded memory, but they were there in the back of his mind, where he kept them away from the parts of him he no longer recognized. His young brain had tried to fathom what life had once been like before the cage, but it was so long ago, sometimes Ajani convinced himself that time wasn’t real. When the pain got too much, and the testing took him into a dark place, only then did he recall what his life had been like. His parents teaching him to swing through the trees. The feel of the wind on his face. The scents and feel of the tree’s branch in his hands. Damp earth and that of the air as he moved with grace in a place where he’d once been safe from needles and tests. His young heart yearned for those things. He sniffed and scanned the other cages to make sure no one witnessed his moment of weakness. Those caged with him, along with their captors, did not tolerate it. Each one was a competitor vying for escape from purgatory, only escape wasn’t an option. “Don’t cry,” a familiar voice whispered in the darkness. His heart skipped a beat as he once more checked the darkness, seeing nothing, not even the figure attached to the voice. How? He sniffed the air, wiping his eyes. All his senses enhanced by whatever they’d given him, worked to figure out where the owner of the voice was. It was always the same: the voice appeared to belong to an imaginary figure. Only Ajani knew that wasn’t the case. “Where are you,” Ajani whispered, his body tensing at the merest of noises before a hairy finger slid through the cage bars and touched the side of his lower leg where he’d been kicked hard enough it had instantly gone black. Not allowed to shift to heal. The pain was his punishment for getting caught out.