Even if she never remembers my love for her.
My jaw ticks as I smoke the last cigarette from my pack, watching from the pier as sharks swarm feverishly in the dark at the drop location a couple hundred feet out into the sea. It’s dark, past midnight, but the moon allows me to see the thrashing just fine from here.
The trouble with being in the Dark Forces is that we were all horrible people before, but we’re even worse now.
I hand over a black bottle of the experimental pills. My contact guy smiles and pockets them.
“You know, Cameron. I didn’t think you’d ever give me a call. Not after you turned me away so many times. What has you so worried all of the sudden? Belerik would never hire an execution onyouof all people over two upstairs soldiers.” He takes a long pull from his cigarette too. His eyes are grinning along with his lips as he watches the sharks feast.
I’m just glad he picked up the phone and decided he’d help clean up this mess. I don’t know how he was so close, it only took him a matter of twenty minutes to get here. Almost like he was already somewhere on base. I close my eyes and try not to look too far into it. If he wanted me to know who he really was, then he’d tell me.
“I know… It’s not me I’m worried about.” I let a long breath escape me. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to hide my weariness. A man can only handle so much before the world wears on him.
“Oh?Well who is she?” He grins mischievously, twirling the pill bottle in his hands. I know I’m betraying General Nolan by leaking the drugs to him, but I’ve been considering it since the Under Trials. Tonight only made me certain. I need his help. His resources are, as promised, extensive.
I drop my cigarette and crush it beneath my boot, turning to walk back to the base. I stop at his side, facing the other direction.
My hands have never felt so cold as I clench them in my pants pockets.
“She’s the only soldier I won’t terminate on a mission.”
He chuckles and slowly starts walking away. “Purely business then? Or are you always this upset about your transactions?” His sly tone puts me on edge as I watch him disappear around the bend of the street corner.
9
EMERY
The air isfrigid and thick with mist from where I’m standing in front of an estate that reeks of old money. The walls are grayed and edged with moss, vines climb high up to the second-story windows. The fence around the mansion is ten feet tall, black with arrowheads at the tips. Lantern posts are stationed every fifteen feet along the driveway, and the house staff stands by while one escorts me down the stairs to greet my mother.
She is a tall woman, slim and wearing a tight black dress that ends at her ankles. She looks like she’s just returned from a funeral.
“Mother.” I dip my head respectfully to her as she passes me without a word. “How was the trade? Was a truce formed?” I ask.
God, I hope so. My father is going to have me on another assignment if the truce doesn’t hold up like it was supposed to.
My mother stops beneath the large marble frame of the entry doors and glances over her shoulder at me callously. “You’d better get ready to go.”
I don’t let my shoulders drop until she walks away.
She never had any objections to the role I played in the family, but she stopped loving me the day I started killing for the business.
This isn’t me, I think as I cut a clean line down the Larsen’s head guard’s spine. Reed was right, it does make me feel a little better if I put some craft into it. I guess that’s why he was always my mentor. His sinister advice always held up.
I like leaving them in ways that leave somber ideas lingering long after.
I let the scalpel glide over the skin through the back of his ribs, pulling away a ribbon of muscle so that it looks like a butterfly wing. I’ve been piecing them together like a picture book. The first of this particular piece, I left his back hardly split open. Then the next had his entire back arched into the air, like a caterpillar freeing itself from the cocoon.
I cut the corner of the man’s lips so it looks like he’s smiling. Maybe he’s found freedom in death. I hope so.
I long to be free.
I wake up to warmth at my back. The sensation is soft and easy to lean into. At first I still think I’m dreaming, then I recall where I am and what I had just done.
Those two soldiers are dead. I killed them without so much as a second thought.
The scent of iron in the air still stings the back of my tongue and makes the hair on the back of my neck rise. It felt like I was a passenger in my own head, observing the heinous things my hands were doing.
My body tenses and I take a sharp breath. It was like I had snapped and everything after flowed like water. And that dream… It was the realest one I’ve had yet. A cold shudder moves down my spine.
