The second he said my name on TV, he killed my career.
And that was not the worst of it all. I was not only on the run from the authorities. I was also hiding from the Scope, and frankly, it was not very likely that I would end up arrested and tried. The most likely thing was that I would turn up dead.
* * *
I’ve always imagined assassins with dark eyes. Black, even. I pictured them in shadow, wearing hoods or masks concealing or obscuring their faces. In my imagination their irises matched the general darkness in their aspect, keeping them unnoticed, amidst shadows.
I never imagined a pair of emeralds. Never an assassin wrapped in shadow but throwing light through his eyes. Never a gaze so clear and pristine that would make you think of an angel, contrasting so sharply with the rest of the face and body, looking like the devil’s factotum, doing his dirty work on earth, collecting a soul at a time.
I had been thrown against an assassin with clear green eyes, and as the rest of my world crumbled around me, he stood like an ambiguous pillar, full of darkness and fear, but also calling me with a pure magnetic light. Luminous emeralds completely out of place, like a pair of gems brought from Oz by a tornado and tucked into the statue of a satanic idol.
I wanted that clarity. I wanted that sharpness. I wanted that light. But I also wanted the darkness and the danger and the fear. So as Mark Cross disappeared from the screen to be replaced with an advert for real estate or insurance or some shit, I went into Six’s room and fucked him.
I fucked Six like the earth had run out of days. I grappled at his back and clawed at his chest and tugged at his hair and bit his lip and sucked his cock and closed my legs around him so tight that I could have broken him in two. In that moment, he was my last chance in life; my only chance.
It’s what the devil does to you.
SEVEN SINS
SIX
“So there’s a wild beast inside you, too.”
I said this absent-mindedly, maybe even a bit dreamily, which was so out of character that I was more surprised than Sadie. I was lying naked on the carpet, caressing her thighs, alternating between them, as she rested on the couch where we’d been fucking frantically just a few minutes before.
“Bah, it was not that good.”
I looked at her as if her words had hurt me, and jokingly gave he the slightest punch in her knee, feigning fury.
“Well, I was hesitant before, but I definitely need to kill you now,” I grinned.
“Nah. You wouldn’t kill a woman.”
“I would, and I did.”
It was true. I had killed a woman once. My woman. It hadn’t been my hand that pulled the trigger, but I had her killed, which is about the same. Sure, she had betrayed me and she was trying to kill me, so it was a survival thing. But it was a hard decision anyway.
Sadie seemed deeply impressed by the revelation. I felt her leg shivering under my touch, as a chill made her head shake.
“Who was she?”
“My girlfriend. Nine.”
“Your girlfriend was a killer too?”
“I met her on the job.”
“You really need to tell me how that works.” She said this nonchalantly, or at least she tried. That was one of the things I had liked her from the very start: she could be scared to death, but she was always trying to appear cheerful and in control. That is not only a good mark of character, it can also be a good way to survive when things get hot. Oh, I can get scared too, but you wouldn’t know it from the way I hold my gun.
“Oh, it’s kind of boring,” I replied. “Some jobs require two or more operatives to work together. Operatives are called fingers, as if the Scope was a hand. Yeah, mixed metaphors suck. I know. But we shoot people, so I guess finger is an appropriate word.”
The mention of fingers made her shiver again as she felt my own fingers touching the inside of her thighs. I had left them there, in an attempt to comfort her. I guess I’m better at killing than comforting, though. I withdrew my hand.
“What happened to Nine?”
“Seven ate her.”
She did a double take to see if I was joking. She wouldn’t see it in my eyes, of course; I remained impassible as always.
“Idiot,” she said, finally, driving her foot between my ribs. It was a good kick. Maybe she had learnt karate or something. She was smiling now, against their will. Nothing like a bad joke to relieve the tension of the moment. It’s a good thing, because I couldn’t tell a good joke if my life depended on it.
“Hey, it’s true. Well, he didn’t eat her, of course. He just killed her. I told him to.”
She stared at me intently, unsure about what to believe.
“She was after me, by the way. That’s an important detail,” I explained. “It was her or me. Seven tipped me about it, and I told him to do what had to be done.”
“Was it really Seven? As in, another operative?”
I nodded. “Nine and I had been in a couple of jobs together. This one was supposed to be just one more job where we worked in tandem. It turned out the money was too good to split in two, though. So she was planning to get rid of me right after killing the mark.”
“How did Seven realize she was going to betray you?”
“He was overseeing us. Pam does that sometimes.”
“Pam... your boss?”
“Head of the Scope. The hand that moves the fingers.”
“So Seven...”
“... did what he had to do. And then got off the grid.”
I didn’t want to talk about it, I guess. Not that I am ever in the mood to talk much, but I felt kind of dirty explaining all this to her. She was not a naïve woman, at all –I could see that she had a great future in politics, or would’ve had one if she hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there is a kind of innocence most people share, most of those who are not in this business... the ones who never killed, and would never kill others. She was one of them. One of the goodies.
And, be it as it may, it was the first time in a long, long time, maybe the first time ever, that someone had made me feel dirty because of this job. The things I did... or had to do in the case of Nine... in that moment I felt how terrible they truly were.
Seven would have said, once again, that I was going soft.
EVERY TIME I CLOSE MY EYES
SADIE
I stayed in that house for more than a month. Thinking back, it’s weird that it lasted for so long –one would think that the failed killer of a political candidate won’t be able to hide forever, but Six was extremely careful, leaving no space for mistakes or accidents. He went out quite often, to the nearest town I guess (he never shared the details), to buy food and other stuff, and I stayed inside. Sometimes I went out for a walk among the trees, maybe up the hill, since we couldn’t be seen anyway.
The only person Six seemed to trust completely was me. Careful as he was, he didn’t watch over me, as he left me alone with my cellphone and free access to his computer and vehicles. He was so sure I wouldn’t flee or rat on him, that it was almost infuriating. I even thought of doing it just to spite him: just disappear one day, go elsewhere, anywhere, and let him figure out if I was going to tell the police or not.
But, of course, I never did it. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see him, his beautiful eyes penetrating into my soul, drinking from my true self. I could smell him, feel the strong mixed scent that defined him as a man and as the animal who owned this place, who had left his mark on the house and the road and on my body, claiming me. I could feel, again, the touch of his rough but expert hands, the delirious burning of his tongue running all over my breasts, his lips closing around my nipples and my clit. And I could hear his voice, so deep and self-assured, the voice of a man who has found his place in the world and defined his own way to live.
What is happening to me? I thought sometimes. There was still the very real possibility that this man would end up killing me. I was with him under duress, I told myself. Even
though I knew it wasn’t true. I was looking for a way to recover my balance. He had thrown me completely off center, and I could barely remember the Sadie that I had been six weeks before. The young promise who was on the fast track to becoming an influential woman. The idealistic lawyer who would have never even thought of letting her gaze fall upon a seasoned killer.
Sometimes, if I kept my eyes open wide and stared through the window, looking at everything and nothing, I could remember her. But then I closed my eyes and Six was there again, filling me with his presence, making me forget myself. I saw him, felt him, and ended up falling deeper and deeper into that mess.
I didn’t dare put a name to it, yet. But of course I knew what it was.
The L word. The big one.
You say that word best with your eyes closed.
GOING SOFT
SIX
Seven used to say it often. He said it jokingly, of course, because we were too young to care. Young, I mean, even for this job, where a man can grow four decades older in just ten years. “You’re going soft,” he said once and again, with a sardonic smile, or looking at his beer as if it held some universal truth.
It was a joke. But what he mentioned was something that exists. We knew about it, we had heard the stories of men who had gone soft in the course of the job, and paid for it. You can’t go soft in this business. You need to be always hard and strong, 24/7, when you’re awake and when you’re asleep. That’s why the last rule in the hitman’s code exists: A hitman has no heart. Having a heart is weakness, and weakness gets you killed.
We pitied those men, and talked about them with a faint, abstract horror. They had fallen victims to something that wouldn’t happen to us, because we were smarter and stronger than them. We would never fall into that trap. No woman, no comfort, no promise of a cozy life with a family and a day job and a garden that you could water every day would win us over. We lived in a different world, a world that was sharp as steel and cold as ice.
But now I wasn’t feeling so sure of myself. A crack had appeared somewhere in my world. I wish Seven was around to kick me in the butt and say it as a joke, again, instead of being on my own with the thought meandering along my brain’s squiggly tunnels.
I was feeling something odd: a softness growing inside me. The softness had a name, Sadie, and a face, a pretty face with big eyes and a mouth that was an invitation to sin. Such a harmless sight... but deceptively so. Because just a glimpse of that face had made me fail, for the first time.
The stories hit closer to home now. A finger who had lost his temper when he met a girl in the course of a contract and let himself be killed in the middle of the street. Another guy who had tried to retire earlier to live with a woman and call her (gasp!) his girlfriend; she turned out to be a spy sent by the buyer’s enemy, and she cut his throat as she rode him on a hot night. A third man who delayed the assignment for a quick side job, saving a girl he had just met, and who could never complete the original task because he died in the process.
It’s not that women are bad, we used to say as we waited in a car outside some building, sipping coffee like bad cops in a bad movie; women are perfectly fine. It’s men who fail, it’s us who cease to be hard and become soft. Break all the rules in the hitman’s code, we said, and you can still recover; break the last one, go soft, and you’re dead.
This had never happened before. I had met quite a few women during my hits, but they were always an aside, a welcome distraction before or after the thrill of the job. Even Nine had been no more than a pastime, and her treason, just a routine business transaction. I mean anyone can get killed in this business; it just happens. I had claimed Nine and she had claimed me in a lustful but dispassionate way; we had met each other through a thick layer of preventions and failsafes. And even so, we never knew each other. We never truly touched.
Sadie was different. Too different for comfort. It was like we had known each other before we even met. We touched each other as our gazes touched, an instant contact that muted every warning and made every failsafe fail.
I would have to find a way to put an end to this ridiculous situation as soon as possible. The sooner I could bring her to safety and get rid of her for once, the sooner I could start rebuilding the wall around me, fixing the crack in my world.
THE TALL WOMAN
SADIE
As the election day approached, Mark Cross let Seth Pryce take the flak for the attack he had suffered, as of yet unsolved. Some journalists kept reporting on the story as if he was some kind of hero, and he never gave them any reason to think otherwise. He didn’t say anything about Pryce, never suggested any relation between him and the man who had been sent to shoot him, but the rumors existed, and as any politician knows, defending yourself from a mere rumor is the hardest thing. It’s not like journalists were asking him about that, because he had officially nothing to do with it, and he couldn’t address it on his own accord, because that would turn the rumor into an official hypothesis and he would look guilty.
So, Pryce took the flak. The country was talking about the presidential candidates in this election, of course, so the fight of the senators was just an aside politically, but for the media and audiences, the case of the attempt on the senator’s life was way more shocking than any presidential debate. Mark’s numbers were going up steadily, as Seth Pryce’s plummeted. The court of public opinion had decided already.
I watched everything on TV in the house between the hills, and I had to bite my tongue to avoid yelling at the TV set. If Mark Cross would have come knocking at the door at one of those moments, I think I could have killed him without remorse.
* * *
“Here, look ahead. Don’t smile,” Six said that evening after making me stand in front of a whitish wall. Then took a picture of me. “For your new ID. Your old name won’t fly anymore, at least for a while.”
“So I’ll be what? Let me guess. Jenny?”
He nodded.
“Jenny what? I definitely need a lastname now.”
“What about Jenny Shuttup?” he replied. “It has a nice ring to it. For me, at least.”
“Your ears will be ringing nicely when I show you my taekwondo skills.”
He had to chuckle, which was good, but still didn’t tell me what my new lastname would be. The next morning he went out early to hit his fake ID buddy or something.
I tried not to think about the deep network of illegal activities he relied on for his daily living –anyone could rat out on him anytime, at least in theory. The guy who did the fake IDs, the guy who sold him the guns and ammo, the guy who made the pretend plates for his cars, the guy who provided the burner phones, the motel people, and who knows who else. Staying alive in that kind of game would be a constant fight. I had only seen a tiny part of his world, and I was afraid of discovering more.
* * *
I saw the tall woman on one of my walks up the hill. Six had gone to town. I had brought his binoculars with me, because I’d always be on the lookout for birds, and when I saw the car parked beside the main road, the woman standing beside it, I just had to take a look.
She was looking for the house. There was no mistake about it. The house was not visible from where she was, but she knew it was there. She was checking something on her tablet, as she leaned on her car, and a gun hung from a holster strapped around her torso.
It was not the first time I saw a mysterious woman meandering around us. But, for some reason, I thought of it as meandering about him. I was an aside, the unexpected element in the equation.
I was not sure that she was the same woman I had seen walking to her motorbike at the motel. She seemed taller and thinner, and her hair was a natural dark blonde that didn’t match my memory of the other woman’s darker locks. But I could be misremembering, or she could have dyed her hair in the meantime. One thing was sure: she had the same feline walk and the same air of self-assuredness.
She was also extremely beautiful, by the way.
Agai
n, I wondered: was she Six’s lover? And, again, I felt jealous. There was no denying that. Who was she? And why hadn’t he told me anything about her?
Maybe she didn’t even know I was staying with Six. Or maybe she was waiting for me to leave, or trying to decide what to do in this unforeseen situation. Or maybe she wanted to kill me. Or kill Six. Or both. I felt nauseous for a minute, realizing that I wouldn’t be able to get to the house before her if she decided to pay us a visit.
A couple of minutes later, she got in the car and left.
I ran down to the house in a wave of dread. I knew Six was not there –I didn’t know what I expected to find. I found nothing out of place, of course. And yet... What scared me was what I had found inside myself just days ago. I wanted Six, I loved Six, but what if he was just protecting me out of a sense of duty, and waiting to go back to this beautiful stranger as soon as I was able to roam free?
At that moment it hit me –I was the stranger, not her. I was crazy for loving him and even crazier for hoping that he loved me back. What I was feeling was just dumb infatuation, like some stupid teenager. Yes, it was that, the effect of my whole life shaking up and the thrill of adrenaline as I had to flee from both the police and a bunch of professional killers. It would dissipate as soon as I regained my head.
But it hurt so much...
Six came back an hour later, and I literally jumped on him.
“Hey! What the f—” he started, but my lips blocked his protest, my legs splayed around his powerful torso, my hands clawed at his back and neck as I pressed my whole body against his, in a despaired attempt of fusing with him, become one. I kissed him like I wanted to eat him, absorb his tongue, the wetness and warmth of his mouth, suck all the darkness out of him somehow and make it live inside me, like in all those horror movies. He tumbled back, and only his hard, strong complexion stopped him and me from falling on the floor. He walked backwards, blindly, and sat on the couch, as I rubbed myself against him, awakening his mighty cock through the worn denim of his pants and the minimal fabric of my panties.
A Vote For Lust: A Bad Boy Political Romance Page 5
