The air felt particularly dry today, as in next to zero humidity, and I could sense its unwavering chill on my skin, much as I had in the days before. Admittedly, I hadn’t been prepared for climate nor culture when I’d first relocated to Germany, and regrettably, it was taking some time for my Virginian bones and American-born viewpoints to acclimate. Berchtesgaden was a lovely village in Bavaria, its inhabitants merry and vibrant, and there was a bounty of rich history here to accompany the picturesque landscapes. Though I’d never been exactly partial to it, it was Natalia’s birthplace and I’d sworn to her long ago that we’d eventually move here, establish permanent residence, and hopefully retire here—if the cards were ever dealt in our favor.
The assignment we had scheduled next week had a substantial payout attached to it. Executed successfully and properly sanitized, it could easily put us on the verge of achieving our ultimate plans: retirement from this routine for the remainder of our lives, followed by an eternity inseparate of one another. It was something I’d deeply desired for more than a decade now, ever since we’d made the decision to follow our current career path.
After forking another slice of lukewarm Weisswurst into my mouth, I washed it down with a swig of beer while detecting the sound of the door being slid open behind me. A few seconds after, I felt the familiar squeeze of two hands on my shoulders through my down jacket’s loft. I turned my head slightly to the right, and an arrangement of petite, scar-blemished knuckles came into view, those belonging to the one and only love of my life.
Natalia’s appealing voice purred as only hers could. “Guten Morgen,” she said, sending a smile my way through closed lips.
I smiled involuntarily back at her. Natalia’s intonation always conveyed her Bavarian accent with such emphasis when we were here. It made sense, though. This was her home, and she found comfort in the familiarity of what surrounded her. When staying here, we’d always maintained a low profile and with no adversaries in sight for kilometers, she found it easy to relax and be herself, that is, as much as one could in our vocation. One can never be too conscientious, unless one foolishly favors one’s own extinction.
I faced forward, feeling a gentle kiss on my frigid cheek. “Good morning, yourself. Did you sleep well?”
Natalia smiled at me as she glided past to the edge of our balcony. She folded her arms over her white fleece bathrobe, squeezed tightly and quivered. “Scheiße, es ist kalt!” she moaned, lamenting the ambient wintriness. “Springtime in the Alps. And you’re just sitting there like it’s not even bothering you.”
“Well, it’s really not.”
“You’re not even shivering.” She turned to have a good look at the level of beer in my stein. “How long have you been out here?”
“It hasn’t been long. I woke up early and went for a run. When I got back, I fried up some sausage and checked our schedule. Our agenda being open for the most part, I decided to relax a little. And…hydrate.”
“Yeah…I noticed.” Natalia looked over her shoulder again and sent me a playfully malicious glance. She gestured to my beer. “How did you elect to pour it?”
Detecting her overemphasis on the word pour, I didn’t offer her an answer right off the bat. This had been an inside joke between us for years, and I knew her well enough to deduce what was coming.
My better half had resided in countries all over the globe while remaining a proud German, having been born and raised in the heart of Bavaria, not far from where we lived today. Her father had owned a bar, and she’d worked there alongside him as a fledgling waitress, outfitted in a miniature dirndl to serve food and drinks—mostly drinks.
There was a unique method in which certain beers were poured from a bottle here, one which I had proven to be rather inept at. The process involved positioning a tall beer glass overtop the bottle and flipping them gracefully upside down as one. The bottle was then lifted slowly out of the glass over a span of time while allowing the contents to transfer, resulting in a flawless pour with the perfect amount of Schaum, or head. If done correctly, it was excellence personified, and the brew’s fortunate owner was able to enjoy the reward brought about by the efforts. That being said, if done even the slightest bit incorrectly, the pour would foam over in a matter of seconds—detonating with the force of an erupting volcano into a frothy, sticky mess. Here, in the heart of Bavaria, it was considered to be nothing short of an abomination to perform in such a way.
Long story short, I’d developed a particular notoriety for the latter version of the pour. And because of this, I always elected to pour my beer using the forever-rebuked Westerner method, applying a standard decant over a slightly tilted glass.
“I poured it the only way I know how,” I said. “The American way, of course.” I returned her glance with an enhanced copy of my own. “Thanks for bringing that up again.”
Natalia giggled while her body shivered in response to the brisk air. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. You’re so adorable when you try to be German. It’s cute and endearing…and oddly enough…even a little erotic, in an anomalous way.”
“Erotic, huh?”
“Mm-hmm.” She nodded and turned away shyly.
“In an…anomalous way?”
She sniggered inaudibly. “Yeah, Q. Anomalous. Like our life in general.” Natalia turned and moved in closer to me while she ogled my plate. “You know…you’re not eating a complete breakfast.”
“How’s that?”
She angled her head back and sniffed the air. “You can’t smell that?”
“Smell what?”
“Q, we live overtop a bakery. Yet your plate is always so dreadfully devoid of starches.”
I took a whiff, now able to smell the aroma she was referring to. It could only be one thing—fresh homemade pretzels. If offered a choice for her last meal prior to execution, there was little doubt in my mind she’d ask for them. “Pretzels, bread, and doughy foods are your vices, not mine. And this wheat beer gives me enough bloat as it is.” I regarded her quivering, which seemed to be getting worse. “Are you getting sick? You look colder than usual this morning.”
Natalia nodded, her delicate hair flopping in the breeze. “I feel fine. But you’re right, I’m freezing…likely due to the lack of garment I’m wearing under this bathrobe.”
I smiled inside, but I might have let it show on the outside as well. “Your choice of morning attire intrigues me. Or should I say, the absence of it.”
“You’ve never been one to complain, have you, Quinn?” She turned and inched closer with a smirk, sliding her palm over my shoulder and digging her fingernails along my jacket as she moved past. “Are you still planning on taking me shopping in München later today?”
“I haven’t arranged any other plans for us, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Good,” Natalia said. “There are a few things I want to pick up before we head to the States next week.” She paused before continuing, her tone finding a more serious note. “We’re still on, right? For the gun play?”
Natalia had always referred to our assignments as gun play, and I’d never really understood why. Like most of the other nuances that kept her mysterious and exceptional to me, I’d never delved deeper than the surface. Face value had always been sufficient for me whenever it came to her.
I nodded affirmation. “I haven’t heard otherwise. But I’m guessing we won’t know for certain until we get there. As usual.”
“Yeah. I know how that works,” Natalia said. “Okay, I’ve had enough of this wretched polar air. I’m going to take a shower or perhaps a steam bath. You can join if you like. There’s an open invitation for you.”
I turned in my chair in time to watch her flirtatiously shuffle her bathrobe-covered body back inside, turning her head only enough to eyeball me before she slid closed the glass door.
She stood inside for a moment, giving me plenty of time to act on my primal instincts, while providing me with a lascivious mental photograph of what lay underneath h
er robe. After a few minutes, she shuffled off into the shadows.
It was all I could do not to follow her. Natalia was a looker—her beauty incomparable to that of any woman I had ever crossed paths with. Her frame was a divine effigy, and admittedly, I’d been ostensibly addicted to her since the moment I’d fallen for her.
Ten years ago, I would have tackled her before her hand made contact with the door handle, and followed up by making ferocious love to her. That being then, and this being now, our marriage had reached a point where the spontaneity wasn’t as prevalent as it had been. Intimacy and passion still existed, but it had taken on a new face, morphing into something more secure and symbiotic. While it’s kept me warm and has made me the happiest I’ve ever been, it was still difficult to describe.
Though it sounded like a cliché in saying so, it remained true; I’d never met anyone like Natalia in my life before. My eyes had locked on to her, and I’d been drawn to her since day one. She was beautiful—stunning, actually, from the natural highlights in her thick, espresso brown hair, to her Mediterranean skin, which seemed to absorb sunlight, preserving an olive hue year-round. Her charm was unparalleled, and she possessed an enigmatic smile capable of conveying any emotion at her beckoning. She was intelligent as well as perceptive, and with an IQ somewhere in the one sixties, she was verifiably one of the smartest people I’d ever known.
Her beauty and aptitude aside, Natalia was just as lovely and bright as she was deadly. A killer by trade and by virtue, her predatorial instincts and near superhuman resilience practically flowed through her blood. And in my opinion, both as her coconspirator and her husband, she was more lethal and effective than any assassin alive today of the same caliber.
The degrees of violence Natalia was capable of had even managed to astonish me at times. I’d seen her send a half-dozen expertly trained counterassassins to their graves, using nothing more than her index fingers and an incandescent smile. That was a slight exaggeration, of course. But in using it to reference the volume of effort she expended, it would be categorically accurate.
Natalia had never been completely forthcoming about the intimate details of her life prior to the two of us coming together, and I’d never pushed her to tell me about them. Still, she’d offer up tidbits every so often during times when she’d felt secure enough to share. From the blanks randomly filled in over the years, I’d learned that her childhood wasn’t all peaches and cream and sunshine and rainbows. It had begun here in Berchtesgaden, but hadn’t remained that way. Some rather bad things had happened to her and her family, and consequently, she’d been removed from them.
She’d lived a normal life once. Her mother was a Belgian-born German transplant who had owned a flower shop here in town. Natalia’s father had met her mother while stationed at the US Army Garrison in Garmisch during his final tour. He’d courted her, they had dated for a while and married not long after, then purchased a bar and a bed-and-breakfast somewhere not far from the Dachgeschoss, or top-level flat, in which we lived today. Natalia was brought into the world a year later, where she was raised in a jovial, nourishing, traditional Bavarian home for many of her childhood years.
Her parents both had successful businesses, but were horrible with managing their money. They had procured currency to pay off debts by borrowing more money elsewhere, accruing substantially more debt in the process, along with added interest. To top it off, Natalia’s father had tumbled into a serious gambling liability with the Russian mob and ended up getting in way over his head…an appendage they kindly removed in trade for his insolence. Bratva hit men, being the hardcore pricks they tended to be, along with a partiality for never leaving behind witnesses, had carnally violated and murdered her mother as well, doing so in a rather ostentatious manner. From the way Natalia had explained it to me, I imagine it resembled something along the lines of Joan of Arc’s execution.
As further means of recouping their losses, they’d removed Natalia from her home and took her in as an underling. They had never hurt her, though—never so much as laid a finger on her. She’d always been adamant about that detail. In fact, one of the Bratva Avtoritets, or bosses, a man named Koslovich, had taken quite a liking to her soon after her arrival, citing how much he enjoyed her spirit and admired what he’d referred to as her ‘killer’ instinct.
At his order, Natalia had been treated as a member of the family instead of the recompense for which she’d originally been appropriated. Koslovich had even assigned her a guardian—a Ukrainian mercenary previously employed by the KGB, and who’d had a previous level of involvement with the elite Vympel group of Spetsnaz.
Natalia only recalled his first name: Dmitry. And it was Dmitry who had trained her and taught her much of her tradecraft. She spoke of him infrequently at best, and when she chose to mention her memories about him, she did so only in fragments. I did know that in order to escape her bonds with the mafia, Dmitry had been one of several men Natalia had been forced to kill, and though she’d known it had been necessary, she’d never been proud of having to do so.
Natalia was my polar opposite in so many ways, both then and now. My early development into our trade had begun as a lowly E-3 sniper retained by MARSOC, the US Marine Corps Special Ops Command.
I’ve never been one to brag, but I was pretty damn good at my job. In fact, as things turned out, I wound up ranked among the best—having been christened with the call signs ‘death adder’ and ‘overkill’ in the course of my tours in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan, during the nonstop, much-acclaimed American war on terrorism. My fellow grunts labeled me a natural-born killer of men, but my skills, though considered by many to be elite and cream of the crop, had been disregarded—their spotlight shrouded by what had become my most profound character flaw.
While lying prone in my final firing position, I had a tendency to go above and beyond. Meaning, I didn’t just delete the intended target as ordered. I’d been inclined instead to acquire and destroy everything and everyone, everywhere in the vicinity, and anything else that got in the way while I was at it. I’d been disinclined to show or offer remorse for my actions, my justification being that all targets terminated and made dead had, in fact, all been enemies and, as such, deserving of their fate.
My superiors had been less than inclined to agree with me.
I supposed one could surmise that I had a lot in common with manufactured goods. I was a product of my environment. I had been orphaned when I was young, and I’d been alone for much of my life, having to fight my own battles for as long as I cared to recount. No one, failing myself, had ever come to my defense. I didn’t remember my real parents, and didn’t care to recall the halfway houses or the countless foster families I’d been handed off to on temporary loan, either. As such, I’d never had a family to back me up or a place to call home, at least until I’d found Natalia. Living an isolated existence for the majority of my life, devoid of interactions and normalcy, served to coarsen my heart over time, and I’d been content to let it remain that way. I figured maybe I’d been lucky enough to be born without a conscience, and it wasn’t until meeting my better half that I learned what a conscience even was.
My history of inequities and going full overkill had become the foundation for a court-martial and a guest appearance before a US Navy JAG Corps, followed by a less-than-honorable discharge from the Marines. My deeds hadn’t gone unnoticed and, for reasons known only to them, served to cultivate my subsequent recruitment into the Special Operations Group of the Central Intelligence Agency, though I never quite fit in there. My fellow agents were all ex-military like I was, but were far too disciplined and polished. I felt like a sledgehammer tossed into a pile of pins, needles, and fine brushes. After several successful and a few unsuccessful wet operations, some of which had been particularly bloody, I was offered a chance at becoming a non-official cover operative, and I jumped in headfirst.
In that capacity, I traveled the world, making deals and securing assets, some of whom Na
talia and I utilize to this day. I made a couple of friends and a good deal of enemies, argued with overzealous ambassadors, and got into several fistfights with a few pompous CIA chiefs of station. It was a role that taught me a lot about myself and what I was capable of, but it was also one doomed for failure, and had probably been from the word go.
A few years following my conscription, my access was delimited, and I was ultimately excommunicated. An official burn notice, signed by the director himself, sealed the deal, citing my overall lack of controllability as justification for the action. It hadn’t been clear to me if I’d been deemed a legitimate enemy by the intelligence consortia, or if I’d simply been shit-canned, but I felt it best to part ways and distance myself from the agency.
Natalia’s skills had been instilled in her by a man who’d been a tenured professional—an expert in foreign intelligence, espionage, and clandestine assassination with impunity. She’d been accepted, molded, and hardened by one of the most elite trained killers in the world to become one of the same. Yet she’d always been able to exercise levels of scrutiny and fairness that I’d never cared to. Natalia was calculating, deliberate, and all business, but would never allow the killing of innocents. In fact, she hadn’t once hesitated to call off an operation when it meant eliminating a target she believed didn’t need killing or didn’t deserve to be killed.
I’d always been equipped to move forward as planned—ready, willing, and able to do whatever was needed to achieve the objective, regardless of the outcome. But my wife was wired differently. Natalia had told me on several occasions, if we had followed through to the consummation of some of our more questionable ops, she wouldn’t have been able to live with herself.
Sometimes, I wished I knew what she meant by that, but maybe I wasn’t meant to. Maybe that was why we were together, or at least, one of the reasons we found each other. Because we offset each other and helped one another find a semblance of balance. Who knew? I was convinced that she and I both lucked out. We were made for one another, and we were made to do the things we do. And now, we just did them together as a team—as husband and wife.
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