Her face lights up with recognition. She waves enthusiastically, abandoning her strawberry mission to bound toward me like an overexcited puppy. “Kolya! What are you doing here?” Her smile is a burst of sunlight breaking through the clouds. “So funny to see you last night and then today.”
“Hysterical.” My dry tone doesn’t dim her glow.
A vanilla scent tickles my nose while her cheeks flush a pleased pink. “Isn’t this the best farmers market? They have everything. You come here regularly?” She gestures broadly at the surrounding stalls but doesn’t wait for my answer. Just keeps talking. “The peach guy’s here today. He wasn’t last week. And Mrs. Lee brought her special kimchi that sells out in, like, twenty minutes.”
Her enthusiasm for produce should irritate me, but I find myself momentarily speechless in the face of her genuine passion. Her excitement is a little infectious.
Even if it is over a produce market.
Does she ever calm down?
Or have an off button?
I regard her as I would a complex security system. What makes her tick? What vulnerabilities can I exploit?
I search for the right reply to the question she asked three sentences back. “I’ve never been here before, so I’ll have to take your word about the kimchi.”
There we go. Implying I trust her, so she should trust me. She might even invite me to join her.
Her eyes widen. “Oh my gosh, then you absolutely need a tour.”
Bingo.
“I’ve been coming here every week for years. I know all the secret spots.” She leans closer, dropping her voice to a theatrical whisper. “Like where they hide the good honey samples.”
She must be joking. Surely no one gets this excited over “the good honey samples.”
Except her open expression suggests otherwise, and the sparkle in her eyes and the way she vibrates with energy draws me in. So much enthusiasm for such an inconsequential thing. It’s…
Excruciating, I decide, but this weakness will grant me unrestricted access to my target and a chance to uncover her connection to the missing diamonds.
I wave her forward with a flourish. “Lead the way.”
She beams as if I just informed her she won the lottery rather than simply advanced my own agenda. Her smile sears my chest, leaving raw burns in its wake. Her sweet, innocent teacher act comes with a surprising and unexpected amount of intensity.
She navigates us through the market while I observe her. A predator tracking prey through her natural habitat. She speaks in a stream of consciousness, making it difficult to follow her abrupt shifts in topic.
If she weren’t so unapologetically luminous, she might be hot.
Still. She’s useful. A talker lets things slip, so despite the inanity of most of what she says, I listen.
She rambles about classroom craft projects and her disastrous attempts at creating slime. Occasionally, her chatter pivots to organic kale and the injustice of bruised peaches.
“People always push them aside.” Her brow furrows as she points toward a box of discounted fruit overlooked by picky customers. “It’s so wasteful. It makes me so sad. They still make great juice and jelly and smoothies.”
Her genuine distress for imperfect produce catches me off guard. I study her profile, once again scouring for signs of deception, but find none.
Instead, she’s utterly guileless, practically brimming with earnestness and optimism. This brand of sweetness is foreign territory to me.
I exist within shadows and purpose. The work I do carries meaning, consequences that ripple through power structures. I never had the chance to choose otherwise.
Roman decided my life for me when he recognized my talents for violence and calculation and chose to shape me into a weapon.
But here I am, tethered to a woman who’s infused my life with more brightness in two encounters than I’ve experienced in years.
At least she’ll be easy to exploit. Unless this is her cover.
Her hand brushes my arm as she gestures toward a cheese vendor, and I tense at the contact. Not from aversion…just the opposite. Her warmth seeps through my shirt sleeve, lingering even after she pulls away.
