“No need,” We’d taken our feet from the water some time ago, so she just slips her shoes on, “I live five minutes from here.”
“It’s late and dark.”
“And this town is my home,” she tells me, “I’ll be just fine. Good night, Kolten.”
“Good night, Vanessa.”
I watch her walk until I can no longer see her, and then I linger some more, holding my breath as if it’ll help me hear better, but when five minutes turn to ten and then fifteen and silence remains, I turn back to the house.
I needed to get some sleep, even if my dreams are filled with the woman I’d never be able to call my own.
Chapter Three
For the next night, and the next and then the next I’m with Vanessa. Our meetings are only witnessed by the dark, beneath the starry skies and the moon. We are left alone, in a bubble of our silence until it feels as if we are the only two people in existence.
And with each night I’ve noticed something new about her. She has a scar on her right knee, it’s the shape of a crescent moon, and when I asked her about it, she told me she fell off a skateboard when she was seven and landed badly on a rock. Seven stitches later and she was left with the scar. On the second night I noticed that she touches her nose with the tip of her finger when she’s feeling nervous and on the third night, I spotted the tattoo she has at the very top of her thigh.
It was pure luck that I had seen it, her little shorts had ridden up when she had turned to me and crossed her legs beneath her. Ata different angle, I would never have seen the constellation inked into her skin. I couldn’t get a good look to see which one it was, but the lines were enough to tell me it was one of them.
I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, but I would. At some point.
Now it’s the fourth night, Torin and Rett are drunk again, and I’m sneaking out of the house like a teenager, and not a grown ass man. I was the eldest out of us three too, which just made it all that more ridiculous.
But I didn’t need Rett prying into my shit. And I knew how the conversation would end, especially since this stay here on the island would only be for another few weeks, if that.
It’s later than I usually meet her when I finally get away, the air a little colder than it had been all week, the sky covered with clouds that stifle the stars, but it doesn’t deter me. I looked forward to these hours beneath the dark skies where it was just her and me. I found peace in the silence, found light in the dark and in her. It gave me something I hadn’t yet experienced in any other aspect of my life.
Peace.
Like the world stopped spinning, tragedies stopped happening and it was just us, for a few hours.
I didn’t feel weighed down or burdened, didn’t feel like the ruthless monster everyone else knows me to be.
I was just Kolten.
I wasn’t the abandoned child no one wanted, I wasn’t the sought after assassin everyone needed. It was just me.
And I hadn’t known I’d needed that.
I’m only ten steps from the house when I hear it.
Shoes on gravel, a scuff of someone trying to move away quickly, the whoosh of a breath. If I hadn’t been trained to always be alert, I would have missed it. But mistakes like that means life or death in my line of work. I don’t stop to investigate, that would alert whoever it was that I was aware of their presence, and continue my path away from the house. When I’m far enough away that they’ll no longer expect me to be a problem for them, I double back, returning down a different path.
But where he didn’t hide his presence well, I do. I’m silent on my approach back, body one with the shadows and where I’d grumbled about the clouds stifling the light of the moon and stars, I’m quietly grateful for them now. They hide me, allowing me to come up behind the house.
I find the figure immediately, he’s at the side of the house, not even trying to conceal himself with a gun and hands covered in gloves.
Assassin.
I knew this would happen,
You don’t leave the organization. Ever. And those who try never make it past a few weeks free. They always die.
Fuck, I’d even been the assassin on the job a few times.
They were coming for Torin.
He publicly left, everyone was talking about it. They thought that last job was his comeback but after Grace and Leo died, he made the statement again that he was never coming back. I’d hoped they would allow it, especially with the circumstance, but my mistake was thinking any of these people had a heart.
