by Rea Winters
"Hello?"
A short wall of brick topped with a few columns of foggy thick glass acted as a divider between the side of the loft she stood on and what appeared to be a bedroom. Crossing the threshold, she ventured into the latter and found a collection of photos taped to the glass in a roughly round collage. Photos of dogs, cats, birds, bugs, and different landscapes from around the world. Dreams of all the places she'd wished to go when she was younger suddenly fluttered to mind, bringing pangs of an old pain with them.
"Do you like them?"
Rosie startled.
"Sorry, didn't mean to scare you. I thought you heard me come in."
Sir Vengeance stood just past the diving wall with her hands up in surrender. She was different than before, more relaxed than the last time they met. She was dressed down in a dark thermal sweater and black jeans, both well matched on her lean muscular form. Now freed from its tight tail, her thick brown mane flowed messily and she wore an innocent grin that highlighted her prominent boyish features.
Rosie cleared her throat and blinked, ducking her gaze and pinching her palm with her nails to stop a blush in its tracks. She couldn't bring herself to be the cold professional her father had been, but she wasn't as childish as some believed. She wasn't going to lose all motor function in front of a handsome woman, not when her reason for approaching her far outweighed any superficial delight felt over her good looks.
"Thirsty?" she asked.
Rosie nodded and followed her to the kitchen. She sat on a stool by the edge of the table in front of her purse and the pie. The host set down a chilled water bottle, then sat on the adjacent stool as her guest slid the pie forward.
"This is for you. I didn't know how else to thank you for what you did before. To her."
Xara stared between her and the custard pie with yet another look of confusion and amusement on her face. Yet again, Rosie surprised her with her oddly friendly approach to their generally sinister situation.
"And I do. Like the photos, that is. I find them quite calming actually, if you can believe that," she quipped with a snort, painfully aware of how awkward and anxious she appeared.
Xara smiled, finding her as charming as she was strange.
"Did you take them, the photos?"
"I did."
"Is this your home?"
"For now."
Rosie nodded slowly, taking that to mean it was a hide out of sorts. "Is it normal to bring clients here?"
"No. Not exactly. I usually meet people like you under bridges, in tunnels, behind bars in alleys. Only there's never been anyone quite like you, so I thought I'd switch things up. Just this once. I thought a nicer setting might help you relax."
"Ah. How thoughtful."
"You don't need to thank me, by the way. For what I did. It was my pleasure and it was needed."
From the slight switch in tone and expression, Rosie quickly gathered that it was time to discuss business. She took a sip of her water and listened carefully.
"From here on out, the only thing you need to worry about is payment. It's twenty down before and another twenty after it's done. I will always contact you, not the other way around, so you should never look for me or ask for me through the Contact – that’s the person who directed you to me. Of all the rules, never seeing each other is the most important."
"Right." Rosie nodded along, her brows furrowed and lips pressed in a line as the information processed.
"The less contact between us before and especially after, the better. Now, once I have Pryce’s schedule nailed down, I can figure out the best way to take her out from there—"
"Wait. I'm sorry."
"What's wrong?" Was she backing out already? Xara hoped not as it would bring her great joy to take a final crack at the bastard.
"I think there's been a slight mix up. Perry isn't the person you need to...you know, take out."
"Then who is?"
"Me."
Xara's heart dropped for a reason she'd be hard pressed to explain.
"Perry is already killing me. In fact, I think I may already be dead in most ways. But I'm afraid one day soon, she's going to make me disappear and no one will bat an eye. Then she'll win everything with her lies and schemes and violence. I can't...I can't let that happen. I don’t want her to win. Ever since I was little, I never truly felt like I was long for this world. But if my life with Perry Pryce is what drives me to my end, I'd rather leave knowing she'll suffer, too. Knowing that I made her suffer. In prison. For the rest of her miserable existence."
When Xara's breath turned noticeably shallow, Rosie laid her palms over the former’s curled fist. Mistaking her shocked and confused squint for bother, she softly pled. "I understand if this isn't a normal request or if it's against some rule. I'll happily pay extra to be the exception. Whatever it takes to ensure that…that when you kill me, it will be her who gets punished for it.”
Xara wanted to punish her all right, just not at this expense. But Rosie Hayden had no need for Xara Mercer's opinion. She hired Sir Vengeance to do a job.
So, in an honest attempt to find the balance, the woman behind the Sir rolled her shoulders and laid a palm on top of Rosie’s, looking her in the eyes as she promised. "She will."
"Good." The Hayden girl smiled, a relieved sigh and slight chuckle shaking loose a few of the tears that had gathered in her eyes. She rummaged through her purse, then took out a kitten-themed notepad and asked Xara to repeat the payment instructions. She spoke aloud about the things she’d have to do to get the money, planning to squirrel away the allowance Perry gives her and find a way to break into the safe in her father's office. The combination had been changed by now, but as soon as she returned home, her time would be dedicated to finding it.
"As for the 'after' payment, I suppose we'll just have to get creative there."
"Wait," Xara blurted, kicking herself for winning the battle against her more pragmatic self.
"Sorry, is something wrong?"
"No. No, don't be sorry, I just…your situation is a unique one. It would actually be better if we worked closely together to ensure nothing goes wrong."
"Oh. Okay. What else should I do, then?"
"You should meet me here. Once a week, every Thursday."
"But the rule about never seeing each other—"
"Special case, special circumstances," she lied, promptly standing up and walking around to the other end of the table to face Rosie at a distance. "I need you to tell me everything you know about your fiancé. If it's gonna look to like she orchestrated your murder, I have to know her as well as you do. You understand?"
She paused, thinking it over. It made sense, she supposed, as much as any of this did.
"Okay. What time?"
She hadn't stayed longer than another ten minutes after Xara laid out the change of plans. The latter watched her trot down the street through the light drizzle from a long rusty window in the bare space on the other side of the loft.
"Shit. What the hell are you doing?" The assassin hissed at herself.
She knew better than to indulge like that and yet here she was, at last set on a path she couldn't predict. Not only was changing the rules against the rules, but what did her heart even stand gain from it in the end?
Even if Pryce was the mark as she'd thought, that still made Rosie Hayden the hook, a client. Once a contract ended, the job was done and she could never again see the person who hired her to do it. That was an essential part of how this worked. How The Order kept things in order.
She knew she couldn’t save her. And she knew it was against the rules to try. So why, against all reason, did it feel all too right to break a rule or two more just for the chance to make Rosie Hayden smile again?
08.
Thursday – Week One
As Xara relayed everything that had been gathered on Perry’s comings and goings in the past twelve months, Rosie sat at the adjacent end of the kitchen table playing with one of her cameras. It wasn't a
surprise to either party that Perry Pryce spent a lot of business trips brownnosing big wigs from other companies with high end drugs and higher end prostitutes as her main powers of persuasion. Xara was surprised the crook managed to remain clear of every sexually transmitted infection under the sun with such an extravagant pastime, but not Rosie, who knew that the depths of Perry’s extremely controlling nature extended even to herself.
“She’s deathly afraid of embarrassment. She’d have to burn down the whole hospital with every doctor and nurse inside just to feel safe from it.” They shared a good chuckle over that, though Xara noticed the sadness in her downcast eyes when she spoke about her. Even when she could openly mock her, Pryce still scared her. To curb her rising fury at that fact, Xara returned to the debrief, flipping through hologram panels from her tablet.
"Sir Vengeance?”
“Hm?”
“You know so much more than I do. I can't see why you need me here.”
Busted. It was true that she had been there for two hours already and Xara had yet to ask her a single question. That's because she wasn't needed, but the assassin couldn't admit the truth without scaring her, especially since she hardly understood it herself.
"Well, there is your actual end to discuss. Poisoning, shooting, stabbing, strangling, falling off a boat, there are hundreds of ways. Have you thought about how you want to…go?”
"Hm. Well, I definitely shouldn't be anywhere near the ocean. I can't swim."
Xara cracked an amused smile at the earnestness with which she meant that, as if it mattered.
"That would make a death at sea all the more suspicious, no?"
"You're right, it would. Still, there is sea sickness to consider...and sharks." The heiress frowned, shaking her head.
Xara chuckled. "Okay. No ocean, no boats. How do you envision your gruesome demise?"
Rosie shyly toyed with the camera and spoke more quietly than before.
"Does it need to be gruesome to be murder? If I have to suffer for it to be believable, I think I've done plenty already."
Her words gave Xara pause, instantly reminding her of old pain. Pain she thought she’d buried deep enough, that now beat against its grave, letting aged grief and hatred seep through the cracks. She yearned to reach for Rosie, to and for comfort, but resisted, diverting the kinetic energy into shuffling the surveillance photos floating before them.
"Poison it is, then. A kind that’ll be painless, but detectable. I'll plant the evidence on her before it's done."
"Would it be possible to have it delivered through a fruit?"
"A fruit? Like an apple?"
"No, nothing so quite on the nose." Rosie chuckled softly, then without much thought, reached over and brush the crumbs from the cake she’d made off the contract killer’s white t-shirt as she continued. "When I was little, my mother would bring me this fruit called 'chom chom.' It's a queer looking thing, but it tastes delicious. When I'd have to stay in hospitals for weeks on end, she’d sneak in a bag full to share with me. And while we ate, she’d tell me stories about her childhood summers in Vietnam, among other places. She’d even use the peels to sort of animate these funny little non-sensical tales about all mythical creatures she met in every country she’d ever visited. I’d like to think of those moments as I go, to relive them in a sense. I think it’s fitting.”
Xara cleared her throat to combat the pangs of discomfort in her core. "Consider it done."
The heiress’ gaze lingered on her a moment, then she tucked her chin, hiding a little grin as she returned to fiddling with the camera. Xara wondered what she was thinking, then mocked herself a moment later, cursing the surge of butterflies in her stomach. Assassins don't get butterflies, she thought grumpily.
With this declaration in mind, she rolled her shoulders and returned to shuffling the surveillance photos once more, rotating the glass sphere at the rim of the tablet to zoom in on street signs, then making a note of them on a paper pad.
Rosie hopped off her stool and went over to the racks and chests full of clothes and costumes on the other side of the room. Beside them were studio lights and another small table cluttered with camera equipment.
"Is this really a photography studio or is it just a front?"
Xara smirked. "Someone's been watching action movies."
"Guilty."
"Snapping pictures of regular things is a real hobby of mine, but most of the time, all the hardware you see is used for work. The clothes are props I bought at a flea market to make this place feel more like it's something else, just...just because, I guess.”
“I can understand that. The walls of my bedroom used to be covered with maps of the world, solar systems, and stars. I wanted to be everywhere. Anywhere, really. Be a new person every night.”
Xara looked over her shoulder at Rosie, who was admiring the dresses, boas, and zany hats, and gave in to the urge to join her on that side of the room.
"I could take pictures of you, if you want."
"Me?"
"Or whoever you want to be." She gestured to the costumes.
Rosie grinned. "I'd like that. A lot. Can we really?"
"I don't see why not."
There were several reasons why not. They were called rules and she was well aware of them, specifically the ones warning against creating attachments to a mark. It was easy enough to avoid when the hooks were the victims and the marks were the scumbags who hurt them, but that wasn’t the case here. So, how much harm could it really do to put the voice of reason on mute for a while and just enjoy herself? Before she could make any more delightful offers, Rosie’s phone chirped, which meant her driver had begun to worry after her.
"I should go now."
After some hesitation, Xara nodded and led her to the door.
This time, when she walked out onto the street, she looked up at the window, saw Xara watching her and waved.
Giving in to gluttony of the heart, Xara waved back.
09.
Thursday – Week Two
Rosie stood in the small industrial bathroom in front of the mirror, drawing on her face with lip liner while her new friend summarized the progress in planning her demise.
Xara had the poison picked out, just needed to wait for it to be delivered and strategize how best to plant the evidence on Perry before giving it to her.
It felt strange thinking of Sir Vengeance as a friend given the morbid context of their union, but the heiress decided it was better to indulge in the illusion of having something close to the real thing for this temporary time, rather than spend what remained of her days weighing the moral implications of enjoying a killer’s company. Her heart was heavy enough outside of this brick and wood haven. She didn't need it becoming another source of inner conflict.
The first source, admittedly, were her second thoughts about going through with the plan. Not for Perry’s sake, but because she'd been tossing and turning the past couple weeks, plagued by thoughts of what she would miss. Favorite foods, the songs that soothed her, and the warm presence of the woman who would soon be her undoing. In such a short time, Sir Vengeance had earned top billing on her list of most missed yet she was the one thing Rosie was sure to lose whether she lived or died. After all, the assassin was only in her life because she wouldn’t have one much longer.
In this context, she decided to think of these days with her as little cobblestones of unencumbered joy on her path to the only true peace she could imagine - joining her mother in the afterlife.
“Are your eyes still covered?” she called out.
“No.”
“Come now, you promised.”
Sir Vengeance let out a throaty chuckle. “Just kidding.”
Rosie rolled her shoulders, raised her head high and sauntered out of the bathroom like a pageant queen. She came to a halt on the line between the bedroom and the rest of the loft and struck a dramatic pose.
“Okay. Open!”
∞ ∞ ∞
Rosie insiste
d on her costume choice being a surprise, so Xara had to sit blindfolded on the stool in the center of the photoshoot set up while she got ready. When she wanted to dress up before having her photos taken, the assassin had envisioned her stepping out in one of those medieval dresses with the bosom heaving corsets, draped in the finest plastic jewelry the local costume shop had to offer.
But when she uncovered her eyes, she was shocked and impressed to discover that the little lady truly delivered on the surprise.
"Ta-da!" The lady jumped up and spread her arms wide. "What do you think?"
She wore a shiny green onesie, topping off the suit with a headpiece of sunflower petals encasing her face and some drawn-on brown freckles dotting her cheeks.
Xara felt a duty to make sure the excited gleam in her eyes didn’t fade. So, she spoke the truth. "I think you're the most beautiful sunflower I've ever seen."
The sincerity of the compliment sent a strong flutter through Rosie’s core, which she promptly distracted herself from with a campy royal catwalk to the middle of the room. Xara laughed, shaking her head as she adjusted the lights around them, then grabbed her camera.
“Why a sunflower?”
Posed as if preparing to recite Shakespeare to a human skull, Rosie cleared her throat and spoke with a dramatic affectation while Xara moved around snapping pictures at different angles.
“It twas the fall of my tenth birthday. I was cast in Haggard Academy’s production of Poppy the Seed as Sunflower #3. My mother helped me memorize all five of my lines for a month. Then, one stormy night, twelve hours before the play was set to begin, I was committed to the hospital for a week of observation. I missed my chance that day to be the best Sunflower #3 I could be.”
“You don’t remember your lines, do you?”
“Not a single one. But I would’ve been magnificent.” She smirked and darted an amused glare Xara’s way, then broke the pose and took off the headpiece, staring at it lovingly.
“My mother planned to have us put on a little play of our own once I recovered from the transplant, made me a costume herself and everything. But she never got the chance to see me wear it. Once she was gone, I didn’t feel the need to anyway.”
