by Naomi West
“What’s that?”
His words make my heart skip a beat. For some reason the idea of him making a promise to me just sounds so damn good.
“No matter what happens, we’re not gonna let Iairos’s tomb stay buried. We’ll lay him to rest however you see best fits.”
My throat constricts a tiny bit. I feel like I can barely speak. I take a minute. “Ok,” is just about all I can manage. “Just because it matters to me?”
“Sure. But also that story affected me. Made me think of my own sister.”
“Her name is Mara, right?” I ask. I remember because I’d heard him say it on the phone to Dare. If he notices that I’d been eavesdropping, he doesn’t say anything about it.
“Yeah. Mara Laurel.”
“You don’t have the same last name?”
“Nope,” he says. “We don’t have the same father. She’s a lot younger than I am. About 13 years difference.”
“She’s 18?” I ask, doing the math.
He looks at me in amazement. “How the hell did you know how old I am?”
“I warned you. I’m a very smart woman.”
He grins. “I have no doubts about that professor.”
“So, the Iairos story reminds you of your sister?” I ask him. It’s such a sad story that I hope they don’t have very much in common.
“Not really, just more the idea of doing something really hard to protect someone you love. And then it not really having the intended effect.”
“You did that for her?”
“Yeah,” he says, absently handing over the glass of water when I reach out for it. “That’s how I got mixed up in the mob in the first place. I used to work for this guy named Greco. He took me in as a protégée. He protected me and gave me money. He also protected my mother and sister from Mara’s dad. A real bad guy. I never knew what happened to Rick Laurel. Just that Greco disappeared him. One day, poof. He was just gone.”
“And then you were indebted to Greco,” I guess.
He nods. “That’s how it works. There are no simple transactions. Once they get you, they get you for life. And I was really good at what I did. So he did pretty much everything he could to keep me there. Including starting to threaten Mom and Mara. Who I’d only gotten mixed up in that mess to protect in the first place.”
He pauses and takes a deep breath. Like he’s about to plunge into an ice cold pool. “That’s how I met Dare. And his wife Alessia. Greco sent me to murder her. But she clocked me over the head with a lamp and knocked some sense into me.” He chuckles a little bit and absently rubs his hand over his eye and jaw, as if he’s re-feeling an old injury. “When I came to, there with her, Dare had already taken out Greco. He was trying to free Alessia. But really he freed me. I was suddenly, for no reason that had to do with me, freed from that hell of a life.”
There’s something in his voice. Something when he talks about Alessia that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s almost… worship? I take it on the chin with a clinical sort of observation. I make a note to get more information on that when I can. For now, there’s more pressing questions in my brain. Ones that can’t be ignored.
“How old were you?” I ask.
“Seventeen when I first started. Twenty or so when I got out.”
“So young,” I whisper. My heart cracking into about a hundred little pieces. “So young to have been a hit man.”
He stills and turns to look at me. “How did you know that? I mean, I know you’re smart, but how did you figure that one out? Don’t tell me ‘murderer’ is written all over me.” He tries for a laugh but it lacks any music. He’s uncomfortable, deeply.
I decide to come clean. “I heard you talking to Dare on the phone outside our room last night. Just the end of the conversation. I knew that you were sending him to get your Mom and Mara. Although I didn’t know ‘Mara’ was your sister.” I pause. “And I heard you refer to ‘another hit man’. So, I figured that’s what you were.”
He rolls away from me. Looks up at the ceiling, his face carefully blank. “You slept with me again after that. After you knew what I’ve done.”
“Kennedy,” I say, gathering my thoughts for a moment. “I’ve been around death, in one way or another my entire life. Studying it in every way possible as an archaeologist. Even as an amateur when I was just a kid. And then when my mother died. When my father might as well have died after that. It took years for him to grow back even a small section of whatever it was that had been chopped out of him when she died.” I pause for a moment.
“I don’t like thinking about that period of time in our lives. He was a good father, always took care of me. My needs. He fed my mind with intellectual pursuits, he provided for me. He showed love in the ways he knew how. But there was a part of him that was just not alive anymore. That’s the clearest death I’ve ever really seen. Clearer even, than my mother’s. And I was in the room when she died.” I roll over to study him as I talk, and he’s captivated. I can’t explain why, but I suddenly have a need for him to understand my perspective. Where I’m coming from. So I plunge on. I’ve already done the hard part, after all.
“I’ve seen New Orleans funerals. And the funerals for kings and presidents. I’ve been to two thirds of the countries in the world and I’m not quite thirty yet. I’ve seen enough of the world to know that death, and the bringing of it, is deeply part of the human experience.”
His eyes are practically burning me. The way he’s looking at me. Unfathomably. He’s looking at me like he’s trying to make out my features from the bottom of the ocean.
“Killing is something people do. Plain and simple. For a host of different reasons. Some better than others,” I continue. “I’m not saying that I’d be able to make my peace with it if you were still an active hit man. I-I think I’d have a really hard time with that. But the way you spoke of it, like it’s a thing of the past. Well, I guess that’s why you became a skip tracer for Esposito. Your training as a hit man probably transfers in a lot of ways, and this way you don’t have to have so much blood on your hands.”
He scrubs a hand over his face and I can’t read his expression for the life of me. He looks lost. And tired. And confused. He looks back at me and if it wouldn’t have completely broken the spell, I would have flicked the light on to better see his face. But as it is, all I can do is look back at him. There’s an energy between us. Something thick and pulsing. I can’t tell if I’ve crossed a line.
He reaches out his hand as if he’s going to brush my cheek. But then he pulls his hand back and in one smooth motion, has rolled out of bed. He rips his pants off the chair he’d tossed them over.
“Where are you going?”
He’s pulling his shirt on as well.
“I’m gonna do one more sweep of the deck.” He turns back to me, silver in the moonlight. Like an ancient statue. His eyes are weighted with the realities of his world. “You should try and get a little more sleep. It was a big day.”
And then he’s gone, the cabin door clicking locked behind him. I collapse back on the pillow and turn my head to watch the moon over the water. For the first time since all of this began, I feel alone.
Chapter Twelve
Kennedy
I know she’s smart. But Jesus. I stare out at the inky black ocean, white at the tips where the cruise ship slices right through it. How did she do that? How did she cut me so cleanly?
She just pressed lemon to wounds I didn’t even know I had anymore. I lean out over the rail of the ship and let the wind catch me full in the face. I made my peace with my past a long time ago. Moved on and did what I had to do to live. To live without the souls of a hundred men on my back. Call me callous. Call me a monster. Tell me I’m going to hell. It’s nothing I haven’t said to myself a thousand times.
But she didn’t say any of those things to me. She didn’t shrink back in horror. She barely even looked upset, except when I told her how old I was when all of it started. But no, she didn’t tell me that
I was a monster. Or ignore that whole part of me, the way Alessia does.
Alessia’s face, dark and golden, flashes in front of my eyes and a sharp pang hits me in the stomach. It’s true, although I’d never really realized it before. Alessia once told me that we had to move on from my past. Act like my past life was a different life. One that belonged to a different person. And in my current life, I wasn’t that guy anymore. One who could kill the way I did. Her solution was to pretend like it had never even happened. Just because I wasn’t doing it anymore. I never realized how fucking shitty that felt until just this moment.
How much it made me feel like my past self was someone, or something, that needed to be completely forgotten, wiped from the world like a stain. Or a disease. Or a curse. All words that I, at some point or another, have used to describe myself.
But Row had called me human. Said it was part of the human experience.
She couldn’t know how that would feel to me. Good and awful. Like having a knife pulled back out of my body. I can almost feel that old wound bleeding again.
Row.
Waiting back in our cabin. In our bed. My stomach flips when I think of her. I don’t know what she’s going to do or say next and the uncertainty throws me off. She’s been throwing me off since I saw her with my own eyes. Studious, serious, and in complete wonderment of the artifacts she was studying.
In some ways, she treats me the same way. And honestly, it’s driving me insane. Stirring me up. Making me feel like I have a chest full of feathers. Whatever that means.
Alessia's face dissolves in the water in front of me and I realize I have trouble calling it up again. A face more familiar than my own. But I don't see her. In some small way, I feel slightly betrayed. Or if not betrayed just saddened. Weirdly invisible. Alessia was always the only one who could see me, really see me. She was the one who convinced Dare to give me a chance. She was the one who nurtured our friendship. She hand delivered me a best friend. Told me I had a future.
I think about Row's reaction to me just now. The contrast of it from Alessia's reaction, I realize that Alessia, love of my life, never really saw me for who I am. Because who I am is built upon who I was. And she wanted to bury that.
The feeling hollows me out. Makes me cold, even in the balmy night air. I can't go back to the room. Not to the intensity of whatever is between Row and I. So instead, I walk the decks, get my blood going. And try to ignore the fact that a piece of me has just been left behind to drown in the ocean behind us.
# # #
The next morning I duck out early to get some breakfast for us from the buffet in the dining room. I don't think there are any threats to us here on the boat, but there's no harm in being careful. The less we're seen together the better.
But as I'm walking back down the hallway to our cabin, I nearly bobble the two plates of food I’m balancing. Row has just stepped out of the cabin and is looking side to side, trying to figure out which direction to head. And I’m struck absolutely dumb at the sight of her.
Her wavy, cherry red hair cascades over her shoulders down over top of her breasts. Her pale, slightly flushed skin glows, even in the artificial light of the hallway. And she wears a simple cotton dress I bought it for her in the shop last night, laid it out so she would see it. It has a festive flowery pattern and falls to her feet, hugging and clinging all the way down.
Fuck breakfast.
I have way more important things to do.
I'm on her before she has turned all the way back around, kicking open the cabin door behind her and using my sheer physical presence to force her back inside.
For a second she shrieks and goes stiff but then her body is pliant as her hands loop easily around my waist.
“Oh good. It’s you," she says, laying her cheek on my chest. "I was wondering where you'd gone."
"To get you something to eat," I say, holding up the plates.
I'm rewarded when her eyes light up. "Thank God. I’m starving."
“Me too,” I say, looking her up and down. She could make a monk’s mouth water right about now.
I set the plates on the dresser and nudge her back on the bed, pushing up her dress so that it pools around her hips. Her panties are gone with a flip of my wrist and then there's nothing between me and the warm, wet heaven of this woman I just found.
An hour later, she polishes off the last of the food I brought for her while she gazes out the small, round window of our cabin. "I saw a posting board in the hallway," she says. “There was an announcement saying that we're going to land on Mykonos soon. For the day.”
I nod. "We'll let a lot of passengers off, but none on. I checked, don't worry."
"No, that's not why I mentioned it. I’m not worried. I was hoping we could get off and look around."
I still for a moment. It startles me how much I want to give that to her. I want her to have anything that she wants. Shit. I want her to have everything that she wants. It feels like gritting against sandpaper, but I shake my head, no.
"It's not safe. Not until we get to Santorini and we can get to the safe house there."
She cocks her head to one side. "Safe house?"
I nod. "I have a house in the cliffs there. It's equipped with a lot of safety measures. No one besides my family knows that I own it. The locals know me by a different name. We'll be safe there for a little while."
"So, no Mykonos?"
"There something in specific you were hoping to see?" I ask her.
"Um, the sun?" she says, saccharine sweet, her smile sarcastic.
"I'm sorry, darling, have I been smothering you?"
"Yes. Completely," she says, leaning over to snatch a grape off my plate. "But the multiple orgasms take the sting off of it."
I lean back in the chair, bringing the first two legs up into the air. I eye her in an intentionally predatory way. She stares levelly back at me. "You know I’m not acting like this simply because Esposito is after you, right?” I ask her.
She cocks her head to one side. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that this is me, Quickdraw. No matter the situation. I fuck when I want. A lot. I'm rude and bossy and kinky. And I don't share." I lean forward and catch her behind the neck, drag her in for a deep kiss. She smells like herself and the sex we just had. It makes me want to drag her back to the bed.
She pulls back from the kiss and raises a skeptical eyebrow. "You can't even share me with an island for a day of sight-seeing?"
I drop my head backwards. Under any other circumstance, I'd give her this in a second. "Come on. I'm a little possessive, but I'm not a dickhead. I want you to be able to sight-see if you want that. But it's too dangerous right now. We want to be seen as few places as possible right now, ok?"
She nods slowly. And lifts her hands to gracefully braid her hair back in one long, red rope. "Makes sense."
She's obviously disappointed. I'm relieved that I can give her a silver lining. "But most of the passengers are gonna go off and explore the island for most of the day. We'll have the ship to ourselves. Wanna go swimming?"
Her eyes light up with a hundred different colors and I feel like I've just won the Nobel prize. She flings her arms around my neck and launches herself into my lap. "But I don't have a suit!"
I chuckle, tracing a hand over her back. "I'll buy you one in the shop." I clap my mouth, so I don't say what is on the tip of my tongue. But it comes cascading out anyways. "Nobody does this."
"Does what?"
"Touches me like this."
She raises her eyebrows, and gives me a wry smile. "You seem plenty experienced in touching, Kennedy."
"No, I don't mean sexually. I mean...joyfully."
Comprehension passes through her and again I'm struck at how her scientific brain allows her to understand and not judge. Everything is just information to her. "Because people are scared of you?"
I shrug. "I think so. And even my friends. My closest friends, Dare. Alessia. They're not scared of me, but they're c
onscious of what I've done. What's on my hands. It gives them maybe just a touch of reservation around me."
She studies me now. Calmly, seriously. Her eyes passing over my face as the wheels turn in her head.
"What?" I ask, after a minute, trying hard not to squirm.
"Nothing," she says. "Just forming a hypothesis."
I’m not sure I like the sound of that. "Care to share?"
She shakes her head. "No self-respecting scientist would postulate without all the information.”
I shake my head at her and lift her off my lap, trying to tamp down my smile. I can’t let her know how charmed I am by this shit. At this rate I’m gonna be eating out of her hand any minute. “Sit tight. I’ll go get you a bathing suit.”
