Jaden had done it all and then some.
“I hurt, Jaden.” No surprise, even Jaden’s fingers felt a bit raw from her climb up. But then Jaden refused to use anything to facilitate the trek either.
“Kris. Originally, I told you that life with me would be hard, but if you wanted to stay, that you had to learn as much as possible about what I know. There is a reason for that. My life is one of physical trials and tribulations, Kris. I kill people without remorse and live to laugh another day. Anyone in my life, by default, has to be just as strong as I am. I can’t afford to have any weak links in the chains of my world. I would give my life for you.” She paused to look Kris in the eye and see that she understood before she would continue. “And you know it. But I refuse to let people hurt others, and that means that I am always at risk. If you’re too weak to take what I throw at you right here and now, there’s no way you could endure what someone who truly wants to hurt you could dish out. You know where the door is if you want to cry uncle.”
The words were harsh, but Kris had to truly understand how imperative it was to either accept what life was for her now, or the girl would have to make her own way in the world.
Kris was strong enough now to defend herself against any normal adversary. It was the abnormal ones that Jaden worried about and the reason she kept her fledgling close to the nest.
Kris only rolled over in her bag and wept slightly, even though there was an attempt to muffle the sounds. But Jaden’s years of espionage had honed every sense well, and she heard the tiny sobs emerge from her charge’s throat before their subsequent burial. She knew Kris’s shoulders and hands had to be in major pain, but the only way to make her stronger was to work her.
Better now when she was with someone that loved her, than at the hands of someone who would use her pain as a weapon against her. It wasn’t that Jaden didn’t feel the ache, but she had learned to ignore almost every discomfort, from gunshot wounds to broken bones, and still fight to live another day, moment, or even second. That was the point of the whole exercise, and one day Kris would thank her.
Better this way than the way she was forged into a killer. Nearly any torture was preferable to that.
Jaden had learned throughout the years that if she loved people, they tended to die, and this young woman was not going to be the latest ghost in line of many that kept her from sleeping at night. Especially not after she watched the girl grow up into a woman before her very eyes.
The next morning, Jaden and Kris stretched their achy muscles to begin the descent back to flat earth before it was time to jog back to the waiting Jeep. She was primed and ready for anything. Kris was still a bit puckish in attitude. Jaden tried to normally be sensitive and empathetic to what the girl had gone through, but she had to make her understand the world wasn’t a pretty place. There were worse things than could be imagined, even those beyond what Kris had seen, and plenty of people who didn’t have any scruples about who they killed. Or how.
“I’m sorry for being a brat, Jaden.” It was the first words to come from Kris’s mouth the entire morning.
“It’s okay, Kris. You have the luxury of being a brat because I give it to you. When I was in your shoes, I didn’t have that option. I had to take whatever was given to me. I fought for every scrap I ate. I fought for small things that you would take for granted. Hell, at that point all I wanted was the right to wear clothes or own a pair of shoes without fighting for them first. For that reason, I would never begrudge you the right to complain.
“Do you know that every night after I finally earned sleep that I wished for only that right? To be able to say no. No, I don’t want to muck animal stalls at dawn so that I can eat a single egg for breakfast? That I could say no to someone who wanted to use me as a tiny punching bag?”
“No, I didn’t, Jaden.” The expression Kris made scrunched her lips sideways then back again. “But then again you’ve never told me the whole story, even after all these years.”
“There is a reason for that. Even now when I wake up I feel thanks just for the fact that I can sleep where I am comfortable.”
“But you sleep on the floor!”
“Yes, I do. But now it’s because I choose to. As long as I am in this business, I will continue to do so. I can’t afford to become weak in any way.”
“But why would that make you weak?”
“Weakness is nothing more than being complacent. Or becoming too comfortable with the status quo. Don’t forget that.”
“Will you tell me now?” Kris stopped, as if she was afraid to ask for more. But the silence only lasted a moment before the girl forced the courage to query again. “What happened to you, I mean?”
“Yes.” But Jaden didn’t know where to start or even where to end the story of what happened to her that fateful day so long ago, even when it felt like yesterday. Her throat closed up, and she knew that it was going to take a bit longer to relax enough to even speak about it.
They were silent for a long time, and Kris seemed to understand her need to take her time. They were halfway back to the airport when she began talking again.
“It started twenty years ago…”
* * * *
July 1992
Her last memory was of her father was at her birthday party just the month before. Dad had just given her a new bike and a Michael Jackson CD. She had a picture of him laughing when she couldn’t blow out the trick candles.
Just a few days later, he was sent away, yet again for some secret government operation.
Serena’s dad was in the military and spoke several languages, including a few Chinese dialects. The only information he would tell her or her mom was that he was given orders to translate for a series of meetings between delegates from a few different countries and he would be gone for a month or so.
The meeting was a secret from all but the highest chains of command, and her father opted to leave them at the base housing in Texas while he was away, even though it was summer and Dad could have taken her and Mom with him.
But the clandestine gathering was leaked somehow, and one local terror cell decided to take advantage. Everyone in attendance was kidnapped and ransomed back to their respective countries. All but her father. Since he was the lowest in rank he was used to make a gruesome message. Pay up, or this is what will happen to your leaders.
Her mother wasn’t told the truth due to the classified status of his mission, but she refused to stop seeking it. The determination was only deepened by the closed casket service that they were forced to have for the remains. Her mother asked questions of the government, and when that didn’t work her mom questioned other officers in her father’s command. The fellow officers were sympathetic, but sympathy only extended so far, and the men were unable or unwilling to provide even the most meager of details.
After a myriad of dead and loose ends, Serena’s mother seemed to lose all patience with the slow pipeline of information. She would never forget the words that started it all. “Serena, we are going to find out the truth of what happened to your father, come hell or high water. And no one is going to stand in our way.”
Not a month after her father died, she and her mom were on a flight out. Not to China at first, but a roundabout trip that took them both to Inner Mongolia, and a secret trip over the border hidden under rancid smelling rags.
Her mother was sure that if she looked hard enough that she would finally find the truth. Or that the truth would find them.
Her mom was right, and one sunny afternoon, someone approached their small rented flat in Tianjin. Mom shushed her with a determined look and little else.
Serena quieted, more so in response to the look than the hiss from her mom’s lips. It was then that she finally heard the cadence of footsteps that seemed layered one upon another until the sound was that of a bass drum keeping time. Her mother paled to an ashen shade, and she thrust Serena into a tiny closet and pleaded with her not to make a sound.
When the men kick
ed the shoddy door open instead of knocking, Serena knew neither of them would survive the night.
She bit her lip as she heard her mother first give entreaties for her life, then barter with her body and finally beg for merciful death. Her mother never even mentioned Serena’s presence, and the men never asked her whereabouts either.
Serena hated the pleas just as much as she hated the men who barged into her home. She could hear the men joke with each other as they decided what they would do with her mom. One said he wanted her ass, while another laughed and said his comrade could have that if he got to have her mom’s cunt at the same time.
But her Chinese was poor, and she was unsure of all that they said, but she did understand that they said they had never had dark meat, whatever that meant. The crude men tortured her mother with several brutal rapes before she heard a single gunshot reverberate cruelly into the air.
Serena clapped her hands over her lips as she peered through the slats in the closet door. She saw the men distracted in jovialities as they laughed about the atrocities visited onto her mother. There was one pair of pants that had been tossed carelessly aside by the owner’s haste to indulge in abuse, and she spied the fat butt of a gun protruding from one pocket.
It was one of the hardest things in her young life, but she kept silent even as she screamed within. The door was thin, and opening the scrap construct barely even disturbed the air around her. Although she was sure that she would give herself away, Serena crept from the closet along the floor. She had no idea what she was going to do, but she planted one knee in front of the other anyway. The flooring beneath her was raw, untreated, and the combination ensured that she felt every splinter and grain of dust beneath her palms along the way.
The pain of her fresh loss motivated her to keep moving until she reached the discarded fabric. The gun was claimed with hands so shaken that she could barely hoist the barrel upright. Even with the deadly weapon, Serena was unsure of what she was going to do. But the decision was taken from her miraculously when the pressure of the situation became too much to handle.
Even later, she had no idea how the firearm in her hands went off. Her wild shots were dead on as the man closest to her side of the room crumpled. She saw the spot on his shirt bloom into a grotesque bloody flower that soon claimed the bulk of the fabric, before fat droplets built a small puddle.
Father Time was slow in those seconds. Every tick of the clock was a single mote in the eye of a god. The other man seemed stunned as she aimed at him with no hesitation even as she saw him fumble for his weapon. Two more shots rang out, and Serena had killed for the second time in her short life.
When the horror of the crime scene was complete, Serena cried silent tears huddled on the floor as she memorized the last hours she had with her mother. No one came to check, and maybe that was for the best.
Serena lay on the floor for what remained of the night and mourned the loss of her sole parent. Her body seemed strangely disconnected from the carnage around her, even though she was personally responsible for the brunt of it. She knew it was strange that she felt no guilt for killing the men, but even as she looked at their bullet-riddled hides, she knew she had served justice.
When she stretched her swollen lids to see better, Serena was transfixed by the sight of her mother frozen stiff within death’s grip. Her mom’s eyes were wide, as if she had lived and died with the view of nightmares as the only witness with nothing to comfort. Yet there was only a neat hole between the brown orbs to mark her passing, even with the evident violence visited upon her flesh.
Serena’s last gift to her parent was to close the blankly open lids before she clasped the cold fingers around a stem of blossoms that she picked from a nearby tree. She wiped the snot from her own face and packed what little she could take with her. For one of her age, it was amazing what seemed important. The gun was carried in a wrapped bundle of fabric to be tossed into sea later. A picture of her family still whole and happy, a shirt with her mother’s scent still fresh on the fabric, an apple, and her parents’ wedding bands. Nothing else seemed worth having or fighting to keep.
At that very moment, when her mother’s bands left the stiffened thumb and ring finger, Serena knew she was alone and that no one would ever kiss her or tuck into bed at night. She had no one that she could trust, and she somehow knew that she was next if the person that ordered her mother’s death caught wind to her presence.
None of the poorer caste would be able to offer her aid, as she was considered dirty and unclean due to the stigma of her skin color. The wealthy would see her as less than a dog or horse. She had seen enough of that during her travels.
The only items she had of value were kept close on her person at all times. The meager things were protectively wrapped within a blanket that she kept over one shoulder as she wandered the miserable village directionless. Serena roamed the streets during the day, and at night she used dry docked fishing boats to sleep beneath and protect her small frame from the elements.
She made her way into Fukouka, Japan as a stowaway on a cargo ship, and after she arrived, she begged for scraps on the street. If the offerings were poor that day, she also made a nimble-fingered pickpocket. She stole whatever she could, fruit from a market stall, or clothes from backyards strung on lines as her own clothes became too worn for her to use as suitable covering.
It wasn’t until she picked the wrong pocket that her career as a sneak thief ended.
Serena bumped into a robed man on the street and quickly relieved him of his money, but left his pouch around his waist. He stopped for a moment, and she apologized in her best version of butchered Japanese when he snatched her by the front of her most recently acquired shirt.
“What do you think you are doing?” he asked her in faintly accented English, just a slight drag over the vowels a hint that this was not the man’s first or second language.
“Nothing. I didn’t mean to bump into you.” There was a rush of adrenaline that accompanied her reply. She knew she was in trouble, even the shop owners didn’t speak to her. When she was actually capable of making a purchase, she normally just took what she needed and left an estimate in yen on the counter.
“No, I mean with my money.” He was the man who changed her life.
The Master ran a school on mount Kizan, specializing in jujitsu and home to Rōnin warriors. The Rōnin were considered in the Japanese culture to be a samurai without a master, and her Master gave them a home and a place to help train his hand-picked students. He took a clever kid off the street and made her into a honed weapon. The first months were hard, and she cried enough tears to fill a well, but after he was done with her, she was a force to be reckoned with. The one thing Master didn’t tolerate was complaining.
If she whined at any task she was given, he made her do it over and over again until she could perform the action in her sleep with handfuls of blisters to boot. But she wasn’t abused for simple amusement. No, every cruelty had purpose. The pain made every inch of her strong and capable, not to mention she had calluses that were earned on inches of her flesh that even the sun barely saw.
Master would have her cook his rice each morning, and when she least expected it, he would smack her with a stick without rhyme or reason. It took Jaden almost three years to be able to make breakfast without getting hit once before the bowl was served.
The pain made her able to become what she was today, and without the long years under his tutelage, she would have never been able to accomplish the things she had. She would have been unable to save Kris and stop men like the ones that took her.
The first paid assassination was a fluke. She was wandering the streets after a head-banging, body-slamming night at a rave in Germany when she saw two men snatch a kicking and screaming girl off the street. They dragged her toward a van parked in the alley, and Jaden refused to do nothing about it. When she attacked, it was with the intent of stopping them, but they were determined to kill her and showed no hesitance.
>
The art of jujitsu was crafted to kill even when she was outmatched in height, weight, and weaponry. Jaden murdered both men and freed the shaken woman. Her extremely grateful father, Alderich Goethe, was more than wealthy from the years as a chocolatier, and this was not the first time that people attempted to kidnap his eldest child or her siblings. Her father paid her handsomely. At first, she was a security guard on the payroll. Then she moved her way up to the head of security detail within her first six months.
But then she felt the wanderlust, and the Goethe family as a whole was reluctant to let her leave. Although, when Alderich realized she was adamant and there was no way to stop her, he ensured she was halfway to rich upon exit, and he made referrals occasionally.
From there she was in business, and she had banked more money than she knew what to do with. Now most of it was stashed under various identities in banks across the world. She never really had the need to touch most of the funds, but it was nice to have.
The only thing that saved Kris was the fact that a grieving family made enough complaints to become a problem for local authorities. The data Jaden had unearthed seemed to plead with her to visit death on the man that took their daughter. A simple trip to Guyana gave her what she needed to know. The parents knew of him. He was a wealthy foreigner that stayed on their island during certain times of the year, and she was able to go from there.
But there was nothing paid for the kill. It was an unrequested pro bono job she performed just to keep a monster off of the street.
The edition Kris got was highly edited, and she didn’t force the most vulgar details down her throat.
The Laughing Assassin [Assassin's Diary] (Siren Publishing Classic) Page 5
