by Ian Hiatt
“I’ll make her scream,” Jessie says with all the truth of the frat boys and wiseguys that make up my once flawless record.
That’s your cue.
Trying to ignore my injuries, I smile and look up to Jessie. “I bet you can.”
Ivan backs away and looks me over. “How girl is doing that?”
“Doing what?” I look up at Ivan and force out a sniffle.
Jessie is silent as he watches.
“Girl had darker hair before.” Ivan holds my knife to my skin, and despite my blood loss, the look of the burly man wielding a four-inch blade amuses me to laughter.
He’s not wrong. I can tell by the spark in Jessie’s eyes and the fidgeting that he prefers blondes.
With pouty lips.
And blue eyes, of course.
I sniffle. “I’m sorry, someone else put me up to it!” I start to cry. I don’t have to pull out my tears often, but when I do, they’re award-worthy.
Jessie watches my faux confession and nods in agreement. He looks at me with equal parts heartbreak and lust. A very disturbing―but common―appearance in my life. “It’s okay. Ivan will stop, won’t you, big guy?”
Ivan looks incredulous between the two of us. I imagine it’s not often someone like him gets to watch the intricate dance of predator and prey. I smile at Jessie, ignoring the behemoth beside us, and try to force what little blood I haven’t spilled to my face. Rosy cheeks. Full, crimson lips. His mouth parts just enough to let me know my hook is in.
“Ivan will not stop until girl says who pays her to kill Mister Donahue.”
Once I’ve pinned my prey, elaboration is really unnecessary. There’s no need to sink a separate hook once you’ve caught the fish. “But I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to hurt anyone!” I cry, the warmth spreading across my face refreshingly not blood.
“Tell Ivan, witch!” The beast of a man lurches toward me with the knife.
Jessie launches up from his chair and grabs the curved butcher’s blade from Ivan’s table of instruments and swings it at the man. Ivan grunts as the blade sinks into his shoulder. “What is Jessie doing?” He may as well have been bitten by a mosquito.
Jessie reaches for the next largest blade on the table and turns to Ivan, but before the knife can find a home in the torturer, Ivan swings a fist and grabs Jessie around the neck.
“You will not hurt Ivan again, little boy!” Ivan shakes his fist, and with a sickening crack, the thug who bested me earlier in the night falls limp. Ivan flexes his hand and several more pops and crunches follow as he drops the lifeless body and turns on me.
“What is this power, witch?” he bellows. He reaches up, and with a wet thunk pulls the butcher’s blade from his own flesh and levels it at me.
I stare at him and sigh, fidgeting in my own chair. “What are the odds that Donahue’s torturer is gay?” I ask in annoyance to no one in particular.
Ivan stares at me dumbfounded, his face showing the shock at my guess―the only explanation for why he’s not cutting my bonds to try to have me all to himself.
He opens his mouth, but before he can utter a word, Jessie’s body crackles audibly.
Ivan and I both glance at the lump of a man as the electrical static noise grows louder and voices begin to fill the room.
“Contact! Contact! Contact!”
From somewhere beyond, gunfire splits the night.
“Who’s shooting?”
“Where is it?”
More blasts from guns. The pops of pistols.
“East wing! East wing! Can’t get a lock on it, she’s moving too fast!”
She?
Ivan leans down and fishes a radio from Jessie’s coat pocket, and he fiddles with the knob.
“She’s not going down. No… no!” A shriek of pain. Choking sobs. Then nothing.
“Dodgson, get a grip!”
The repetitive booming of what I think is a shotgun.
Moments of thick silence pass, and I fidget, trying to escape my ropes. Ivan stares intently at the radio, but I know damn well that no assassin ever had the pleasure of experiencing a rescue mission. Whatever hell is being unleashed past the four walls of my interrogation room, it’s not to my benefit.
“She killed him! Shit… repeat, he’s dead. The―Oh, God!”
Gunfire crackles over the radio and outside in the estate. The automatic fire of rifles. More pistols. Multiple weapons blasting away at some unknown enemy.
The radio falls quiet. And so does the house.
As I sit and Ivan stands, the only noise either of us can hear is his heavy breathing. It’s a strange thing to see three hundred pounds of Russian muscle quake, and while I know I’m in the same situation he’s in, I can’t help but enjoy this moment.
I sigh, the noise making Ivan spin on me, holding up my knife and dropping the radio. It cracks and sizzles on the hard cement floor. Leaning back, I let my now blond hair drop down against my back. I’m covered in sweat, blood, and grime, but I still managed to halve my captors in only a few minutes. My hair returns to its darker shade as I relax.
“So now what, big boy?” I ask, dropping the seductive tone for one of mocking.
He shakes his head as if he’s knocking off an annoying bug. “Girl stays here. Ivan will go find Mister Donahue. Explain to him that girl killed Jessie.” As though the radioed events we heard were something that happened miles away, not just over our heads.
Ivan walks to the door and grabs the knob in his beefy hand. When he opens it, a chill blows in. He leans out, looking in both directions.
The silence hangs over the world, draping like so many strands of a spiderweb. As I try to control my breathing and focus on the barest hints of noise so I can know what kind of situation I’ve been caught in, Ivan rushes from the doorway down the hallway, huffing and puffing his way. His movements are that of a freight train as he moves in the dearth of sound that has become the Donahue mansion.
But what stumbles through the door, covered in everyone’s blood but his own, is not Ivan. It’s him. My mark.
Thomas Donahue stares at me, taking in everything about me, as though I resemble a dream he’s only just woken from and he’s grasping at the image to transform it into a memory.
“You…?” Ivan pushes him into the room and slams the door behind them both. Thomas collapses on the nearby chair before he sees Jessie’s crumpled body at his feet and he jumps up.
“Boy!” Ivan shouts. “Where is father? Where is Mister Donahue?”
Thomas has begun a staring contest―one he’s sure to lose―with the corpse on the ground. Apart from the husky breathing of the burly-yet-out-of-shape Russian in the room and the stuttering gasps of Thomas as he tries to make sense of his situation, the room is silent. I feel like a fly on the wall until my mark ignores his trained dog.
“What is she doing here?” he asks through gritted teeth, without tearing his eyes away from Jessie.
Ivan looks frustrated but seems to know better. “Girl was caught on property. She was here to kill father. Mister Donahue.”
A scoff, unwanted, escapes me. I don’t slip up often, but when I do, it always seems to be funny in hindsight. I instantly tried to imagine that moment as Thomas glares at me.
“You were at the country club last night. I know you. You were with me when Andrew―but you don’t look―who are you?” Thomas has progressed from shocked statements to full-on anger.
A noise comes from the hallway. The two men’s gazes flit to the door a hair of a second after my own have focused on the thin line of light beneath the door. And the shadow that crosses it.
I kick down, launching myself back, the legs of the chair snapping at my sudden movement as I sprawl on the frigid concrete floor. Thomas tears his intent gaze away from the door and our eyes meet for just the barest of moments as I press against the rear wall and curl up. He gets it, and as annoyed as I am that he’s likely to survive, I’m a little impressed. His legs turn―willingly and deliberately―limp as he drops to
the floor and sprawls out.
Ivan, the poor big teddy bear, doesn’t get it. I feel something akin to pity as the walls on either side of the door begin to pop like so many air pockets on a roll of bubble wrap, bullets tearing through the weak drywall to blast the room. Every third or fourth round, entering the room now at about fifteen or twenty every second, hits a stud in the wall with a thick thunk.
Ivan is still standing as the bullets rip through his body, some exiting out his back in bursts of globby red, others staying in his meaty torso. His legs give out and his body drops in time to have his head meet a bullet on the way down, his skull bursting like a rotten tomato, spraying the wall above me with red and gray. He slumps over and catches a few more lead slugs before the bullets stop their horizontal downpour.
I chance a faint movement to look at Thomas lying on his stomach. The floor is bloody and my view is obstructed by the annoying-even-in-death Jessie who looks at me with dumb eyes. The quiet that falls over the room now is as cold as the cement I’m laying on and I dare not move.
The door creaks open and the footfalls that enter the room are confident. Unquestioning.
The same way I’d walk into a room after I killed my mark.
A sigh. “All too easy.” A woman’s voice cuts through the air. She chuckles with all the arrogance and lithe of a predator looking upon her kill.
I see the sharpened steel out of the corner of my eye, and before my mind has a chance to fully understand, my body has already reacted. My hand shoots out and finds the grip of my knife, coated in Ivan’s bits. I slide away from the wall and launch myself up on my knees, facing the attacker.
A girl. No older than me, maybe even younger, is hunched over Thomas’s body. Long, dark red hair falls over her shoulder, complementing the black peacoat she wears very nicely. Alabaster skin shows on the back of her neck and peeks out from the sheer tights clutching her legs beneath a plaid skirt. She’s slow to swing around, bringing up a pistol to level at me. By the time her finger finds the trigger, I’ve already launched my knife. It slices through the air and doesn’t stop until it embeds itself in her wrist. The pistol drops to the floor with a sharp clink. She snarls and her eyes meet mine, glaring as she ducks out of the room and the sound of her footfalls echo down the hallway.
Another assassin. Someone to finish the job I couldn’t. In the midst of letting my mind catch up with reality, I lament my lost knife, debate my next move, and stand all in the same breath.
Well, at least―
A shuffle from the floor interrupts my thought before it grabs purchase, and I look down to see Thomas Donahue moving. He rolls over and looks up at me, his gaze a blend of every emotion he can possibly have.
Except happy. He’s definitely not happy.
The rubble scattered across the basement floor makes me feel like I’m strolling through an abandoned construction site, drywall and splinters biting at my bare feet. Thomas, slow to rise behind me, is no longer gasping for breath. His panic attack has either subsided or grown far beyond the point of its usefulness. Unarmed and unwilling, I leave him alive.
It’s my first experience, being replaced in a job. Then again, it’s also my first time failing a job. The guy beside me is meant to be dead, and now two separate killers have failed to bring him down. Remembering his dive to the floor at a mere glance from me, I can’t help but hope it’s less luck and more intelligence.
I step lightly over destroyed wall toward the doorway to make sure the party crashing schoolgirl is gone. I clearly heard her running, but someone who can wipe out an entire compound of heavily armed men is not someone to underestimate. Or at least I hope that’s true as I cling to some piece of a plan that makes me feel like I still know what I’m doing.
I turn back to my ward/mark to find him staring at the two stringless puppets in the room. Jessie with a neck like used silly putty and Ivan whose head seems to have been replaced by a rotting melon. A soft plop echoes in the room as a piece of gray matter slips out between the sheer white of his skull and lands on the floor. Thomas takes this as a cue to look to me.
“What the hell is going on?”
“The girl who just made a hasty retreat was sent here to kill… well, probably everyone in this house, I guess.”
Thomas brushes plaster off his shirt with the fervor of a man swatting at bees as he speaks through gritted teeth. “Then why’d she run? She just killed… everyone. They’re all dead.”
My orders were just for the sons…
Something about it stuck in my mind like a glass shard. In my business, you never deviate from the orders. You kill only two types of people. Those you’re being paid to and the grunts that might stand in the way. Not important people, and certainly not family. It’s not out of any moral stance; it’s just sloppy to kill unnecessarily.
“Who are you?” Thomas asks.
“Layla,” I say, my own flippant speech surprising even me.
I step out in the hallway and giving Thomas a once over, consider for a breath.
The enemy of my enemy…
“Come on.” I wave him forward, deluding myself that I hold some authority. Thomas stands firm.
“What are you doing here?”
“We really don’t have time for this.”
“Last night, you looked different. Like… more than a change of clothes.” His returning snark makes a smirk creep over my lips. “There’s no way you’re not involved in this.”
“No shit,” I mutter, eyeing up and down the hallway for our co-ed hitwoman.
“Why should I go with you?”
I duck back into the room and grab Thomas by the scruff of his filthy shirt, then shove him back against the rear wall, making him trip over Jessie while I deftly step over the corpse. My arm presses to his throat and his arms flail, grabbing at me.
“Because if I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. But it happens that right now, you’re far more useful to me alive. So I need you to reach deep down, Thomas, find your balls, and follow me so we can both get out of here with our bodies a little less dead than these poor bastards.” I nod to the thugs.
Thomas relaxes in my grip and I step away. He doubles over and coughs, sucking air like he’s drinking water.
I kneel down and snatch up the pistol the overkill co-ed has dropped.
“Now, come on.”
Walking down the hallway, I’ve never found quiet so disturbing. The dimly lit corridor casts strange shadows on pale walls, unmoving but malicious nonetheless. The carnage heard on the radio is nowhere to be seen. On the clean cement floor of the hallway, the assault rifle I had brought to dispatch the youngest Donahue lays, clip expended with the thirty or so rounds I had brought scattered across the floor as empty cartridges. I try to keep my own breathing at a minimum, in spite of the raspy inhalations of Thomas creeping behind me. Raspy at least in part from my assault to convince him of my intent to not kill him. I try to feel guilty, but the emotion just won’t come.
It isn’t until we reach a thick wooden door that I realize the situation I’ve found myself in.
The door has been left ajar, likely from when Thomas stumbled down from the mansion above to escape hell. Slumped by the door is the body of a hulking man, only a hair shorter than the buff Russian I shared a room with for the evening. But his body, apart from looking a little roughed up on its way to the ground, shows no normal sign of death. No bullet holes. No knife wounds. He’s not even bleeding.
“Thomas?”
It takes me a moment to place the voice, childlike with fear, until I realize it’s my own. Thomas’s scuffling footsteps behind me come to a halt as he very nearly knocks me over in the doorway. He doesn’t answer me, letting his existence be enough. He follows my gaze and says the only thing I know he can, and the one thing I wish he wouldn’t.
“What happened to him?”
I kneel down and look at the bloated face of the man, disgusted, entranced―and terrified.
His lips are a shade of black so dark tha
t it looks like someone slammed a lead pipe through his face, leaving a hole in the fabric of reality. From the ring of his dark lips, a spiderweb of black veins extends up his face, ending at his eyes, which have suffered the same pipe treatment. Orbs of tar sit in his sockets, peering out to stare at nothingness.
Having just escaped a room with men who would’ve loved nothing more than to defile, rape, and murder me, I had thought the pinnacle of my fear had been reached. But I was so very wrong.
Thomas and I move along the hallways of the estate, finding the various men that the Old Man had hired to protect him. Some lie as dark as the man doubled over at the doorway, others as shot up as Ivan. I clutch my stolen pistol like a security blanket.
The estate begins to ring with the noise of rain, droplets of it appearing on the windows as the two of us walk, rooms lit as though the home were full of life. It is anything but. Thomas picks up his pace, walking beside me. I eye each gun we pass, covered in the blood of their shot-and-killed owners, or clutched in the hands of those poisoned into lifeless husks by an enemy I know all too well.
All guns sit, slides locked and clips empty. Every single round was fired.
There’s no one that can withstand this kind of assault. Certainly not if she was…
She must not have been working alone.
Thomas begins to walk even faster as we approach the same atrium I was dragged through hours earlier. “My sister… I heard her upstairs.” He grabs the banister with all the unbridled hope of a child while I kneel at the foot of the stairs in a pool of blood.
The handle of my boot knife is coated in the thick stuff, the blade unmarred but for a single notch near the tip. Crippled. I lift it from the red sewage, wiping it on the leg of my pants to clean it as best I can before slipping it back into the sheath on my ankle.
The house is silent once more as the rain falls, and I realize Thomas has left my line of sight. I open my mouth, but think better of calling out for him. Instead I tuck my pant leg back down and dash up the stairs, light on my feet so as not to make a sound. When I reach the top of the ebony staircase, I spot Thomas standing a few dozen feet down on my right, standing in a doorway and staring into the room. I creep along as a flash of lightning flits across the windows, and shortly after, a crash of thunder follows.
