Assassins in Love

by Kris Delake

  But just sitting around would drive her nuts. Hell, traveling here with no real purpose behind her had driven her nuts.

  She had been alone in her head ever since she left the cruise ship and that was just too long.

  She sipped the coffee, decided it was the right amount of bitter mixed with sweet, and took it back to the office.

  She didn’t have to do anything today. She could take her own sweet time vetting the targets. In fact, she could take extra time vetting someone to vet the targets. And then maybe find someone else to vet the clients.

  Still, she wanted to keep busy. If she kept busy, she didn’t have to think about Misha (Mikael), and if she wasn’t thinking about Misha (Mikael), then she didn’t have to worry about what Jack would find.

  Even though she was—both thinking of Mikael (Misha) and worrying about what Jack would find.

  In fact, she was obsessing about them. Which was the last thing she wanted to do.

  And the only way to stop obsessing that she knew, anyway, was to work hard.

  So she took the coffee back to her office, leaving the door open so she could hear the slight ping from the robot delivery service.

  The sandwich sounded good. The perfect way to cap her day, and to welcome herself to Lakota. She’d sit in the living room, look at the lake and force herself to decompress.

  When the sandwich arrived.

  Until then, she had targets to vet.

  She sat down with the tablets and got back to work.

  Chapter 30

  Rikki appeared suddenly, in the area where she had been standing when he lost her. Misha frowned. There was no way she could suddenly be at the entrance to her own apartment, but she was, standing just inside the door, near the chair where she had dropped the rucksack.

  He sat in the apartment two and a half blocks away, the sniper lenses scraping his eyeballs as he squinted. He got as close to his windows as he could. He was frowning. That was making the sniper lenses hurt too.

  She stood in that entry as if she had just come back into the apartment. Which she hadn’t, so far as he knew.

  But he had no idea what had happened to her. There was no way she could have disappeared as thoroughly as she had either. She had even dropped off his heat vision sensors, which was very strange. His equipment should have kept an eye on her, even when he couldn’t see her.

  And it hadn’t.

  She ran a hand through her hair, tugged up her loose pants, and made her way to the kitchen. She was acting like someone who did not know she was being watched.

  He always thought he would have a sixth sense about it if he was being watched. But the Guild told him he wouldn’t. They told him to always behave as if someone could see him, which made him just a bit too cautious, just a little to aware of his surroundings at all times.

  Except that night with Rikki.

  His cheeks warmed. God, he blushed every time he thought about it, which was just strange. He wanted to think that flush came from anger, but it didn’t. It came from the intimacy of the memory.

  As he watched her meander to the kitchen, he also studied those bearing walls.

  She had appeared in front of one of them.

  Which only meant one thing: she had some kind of hidden passage in there.

  He knew she had bought nearby apartments under other names. He wasn’t sure how many of the neighboring apartments she owned—he doubted he could track down all her aliases as fast as he wanted to—but he knew that she owned several of them.

  Maybe she had built some kind of interior staircase that had taken her down to a different apartment, and maybe that staircase had been protected from all kinds of surveillance.

  That was the only thing he could think of that would cause her to disappear like that.

  Once she reached the kitchen, she walked to the building network. And ordered food. He could see the information on the screen: a delivery menu, although he couldn’t make out the company’s logo.

  Delivery. That shocked the hell out of him. Ordering food for delivery—of any kind—meant that she was feeling comfortable. Truly comfortable, like a person who didn’t believe she could be in any danger.

  That thought made him rock back on his heels and frown. Was she in danger? From him?

  He shook his head, then leaned forward again. As he did, he tapped into the building network through a hack he had set up days ago.

  She had ordered from a business called Robby’s Heroes. It took an actual glance at the menu for Misha to realize that a hero was a kind of sandwich, one he had never heard of. But it made his stomach growl when he looked at the ingredients. The sandwiches were huge.

  And they were delivered by robot—also a risk. Any assassin knew—or rather, any good assassin knew—that a robot could be reprogrammed to do anything a person wanted. Even to kill, if need be.

  He wondered if she had something in the apartment that tested for poisons. He wouldn’t trust outside food like that.

  He never ate take-out or delivery or any food he didn’t prepare himself, except when he was on the job and playing a role.

  Again, a Guild rule.

  She was so clearly not Guild.

  And she was giving him an opportunity.

  Robby’s Heroes told her that she would get her food in fifteen minutes.

  It would take Misha five to get to the apartment. She had finally given him a way inside, and he planned to take it.

  Chapter 31

  Half an hour later, the delivery service pinged the network gateway near Rikki’s apartment entrance. She had almost forgotten she was going to get food because she had gotten so deeply involved in her research.

  Of the five targets she’d been given, one intrigued her the most—a woman with a severe but beautiful face, which displayed a calm, almost ethereal expression. Rikki figured she could either rule out the woman as a target early or the woman would be so intriguing that she would want to stay on this case.

  So far she had just scratched the surface: the material the client had sent her said that this woman was responsible for the deaths of more than 10,000 people. The deaths hadn’t come in one incident—not one that Rikki could find, anyway. She should have been able to find something about an incident that large, with an old image of the woman. But Rikki couldn’t. Which meant that the deaths had come one by one, and somehow that seemed even more dastardly.

  But she didn’t know.

  If receiving the faces of the possible targets was always disconcerting, the research phase always proved fascinating. She focused on the woman, setting the others aside. She left their images up on the various tablets, but she doubted she would investigate them until she was done with the woman.

  But Rikki had been so deeply involved in her research that she suspected the little robotic server had pinged her twice before she even noticed.

  She carried the tablet with her out of her office, and tapped the network. She wasn’t about to open a door to a robotic server, even if she had vetted the restaurant, which she hadn’t—at least, she hadn’t vetted it since she had come back. Instead, she just instructed the server to leave the food on the floor outside the door.

  Then she instructed the building to let her know where the robotic server was, and when it exited.

  If she was truly prepared, she would have known not only when it left, but when it returned to Robby’s Heroes. But she wasn’t that prepared. She was taking a slight risk and she knew it.

  However, no one had ever figured out that she had a hideaway. So she figured she had a little leeway, if she was cautious.

  Which she was.

  Plus, she had set up this building so that she knew whenever someone had come in or out. And right now, no one was inside except a few tenants on the first floor and the building manager in the basement.

  She waited until the system pinged her a final time, letting her know that the robot had left. Then she stepped into her office for a brief moment, checked the building’s external camera
s, and watched the robot, a small round thing with a little baseball cap adorned with the restaurant’s logo, float back to Robby’s Heroes.

  She didn’t see any arms or legs on it, and figured it probably had a food storage pouch. Not that it mattered.

  Her stomach growled. She checked all the building’s security systems, noted that no one had come in or gone out since the robot appeared. Then she checked the hall cameras. Nothing. No one in the hallway. The only heat signature was tiny.

  It came from her sandwich, which was cooling on the stoop.

  “The hell with it,” she said, left the office, and stepped into the entry. One quick move, and she had dinner.

  Tomorrow, she would set up all of her protections. Tomorrow she could eat without all the stupid cautions. Tonight she would have to put the sandwich in her kitchen protector, just to make sure there were no foreign substances. But tomorrow, she would buy some robotic servers of her own, some food prep materials, and she would check out the local restaurants.

  Tomorrow, she would be more cautious.

  But tonight, she was going to eat.

  She pulled open the front door and crouched at the same time, so that she could grab the bag and pull it inward.

  The bag had the Robby’s logo and was topped with a baseball cap of its own. Nice twist. It made her smile. But it also made the bag hard to grasp quickly.

  The hallway smelled of tomato sauce, garlic, and meatballs. She was starving.

  She grabbed the bag, yanked it inside, and as she started to close the door, a hand got in her way.

  It slammed the door backwards. The door hit the wall with a bang.

  Rikki started to stand up, but she got knocked aside. She fell back, grabbed the small laser pistol she always carried, rolled inside, just as the door banged closed.

  She looked up, and saw Misha looking down, pointing his own pistol at her.

  He looked different, thinner, his cheeks pinched, his eyes an electric blue, his hair so blond that it seemed almost white. She had forgotten how blond he was. He wore a tight T-shirt and pants that moved with him, showing all those corded muscles.

  “I really don’t appreciate people who drug me, abandon me, and leave me to take the blame for their crimes,” he said.

  “And I don’t appreciate people who trespass,” she said.

  She wanted to stand, but she didn’t dare. She scooted back toward the wall until it braced her. Then she stood, using the wall and the muscles in her legs to lever herself upward without moving her hands at all.

  He hadn’t shot her yet. That was a good thing, because he had the advantage. He had surprise.

  Her heart was pounding, and if she hadn’t had a lot of training, she would have been breathing hard, showing her nervousness.

  Screw that. Her fear.

  She’d been afraid of this man ever since she found out who he was. Afraid and angry. Fear didn’t help her.

  Anger did.

  “I could kill you now and no one would think twice about it,” she said. “You invaded my home.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “If you think you’re quick enough.”

  She should shoot. Jack would be angry at her for not shooting.

  But Misha hadn’t shot either, and he could have killed her as easily as he invaded her apartment.

  “What the hell do you want?” she asked.

  “I wanted to find out why you want to destroy me,” he said.

  She raised her eyebrows. The door to her office was open. She could go in there, get more weaponry, or she could barricade herself inside. She hadn’t made a good secondary way to leave the office, though.

  Stupid her, she hadn’t thought she would need it. Not here.

  Her mistake.

  “Destroy you?” she asked, her voice level. She knew she appeared calm. Misha couldn’t feel her rapidly beating heart. Oddly, though, she was almost calm, after that moment of surprise.

  Almost, but not quite.

  Besides, she needed time to think. She hadn’t expected this. She hadn’t expected Misha to show up here. Now.

  She had learned long ago when she was ambushed or had the disadvantage to get the other person to talk. If they talked, she had time to assess. Time to think.

  Time to plan.

  “Don’t play coy,” he said. “You nearly got me in trouble for Testrial’s death. It took some fast talking to get out of it. And, as we established earlier, that’s not the first time you managed to get me to take the blame for everything you’ve done.”

  She raised her eyebrows. She had known she would make him angry. She hadn’t realized he would track her down.

  “So avoid me from now on,” she said, sounding much calmer than she felt.

  “If only that was an option,” he said.

  “The universe is big,” she said. “I’m sure you can figure out how to stay out of my way.”

  His eyes narrowed. He looked dangerous. Maybe he wasn’t tracking her to complain. Maybe he was tracking her to make her stop getting in his way once and for all.

  And the only way assassins knew how to solve their problems was by plying their trade.

  “You think I’m here to kill you, don’t you?” he said, his voice level.

  She started. He had echoed her thoughts. She wondered if she had lost her ability to hide her emotions with him.

  She hoped she hadn’t. Because in addition to the anger she was feeling, she couldn’t stop thinking about how good he looked in that shirt, a flush on his own cheeks, his blue eyes just a bit too bright, his hair tousled over his forehead—

  The very idea that she was still attracted to this son of a bitch really pissed her off.

  “If you are thinking of killing me,” she said, “then you’re fucking up. Because you’ve had at least two chances in the last five minutes to take me out and you’ve blown both of them. Either you’re not as good as you think you are, or you’re not sure you want to pull that trigger.”

  “You could have shot me just as easily,” he said. “In fact, you could have shot me from the ground and done some pretty serious damage. Like you said, no one would have thought twice about it. So why didn’t you?”

  “Because I need a few answers before I send you to the big Assassins Guild in the Sky,” she said, using a phrase Jack used to use when they were kids.

  “Answers?” Misha asked. His eyes suddenly sparkled, and she wasn’t sure why. What did he find so amusing? That she had thought about him? That she had questions for him?

  Or that she was prolonging this?

  Maybe he was some kind of cat, who got off on playing with his prey before killing it.

  “Yeah, answers,” she said. “Why didn’t you kill me the first time we met?”

  A slight frown creased that beautiful forehead of his. Why did this man have to be so goddamn attractive? “Why would I have done that? You were doing a job for me.”

  “Which,” she said, “was a convoluted way of meeting me. Once you confirmed that I was Reggie Bastogne’s daughter, why the hell didn’t you just kill me?”

  Misha’s frown had grown deeper. “What? Why would I do that?”

  “Because something kicked in after eighteen years, didn’t it? Because you needed to finish the job, get rid of the kid, and do it right.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.

  “You should have just killed me,” she said, her voice going up despite her attempts to keep it under control. “But no. You had to sleep with me, didn’t you? You had to humiliate me, use me, make me enjoy that, just so you could get a little more sadistic pleasure before you finished the job. And since you didn’t finish it there, you should have finished it here, because I’m done with you, Misha. I’ve had it.”

  Her pistol was shaking, which meant her hand was shaking, which meant she was shaking, which meant she had no fucking control at all, and she needed control to do a good job.

  He extended a hand, upright and flat, in the stop position, and h
e stuck his own pistol into a holster on his hip.

  “Truce,” he said in an odd voice.

  “No truce,” she said. “I don’t need a truce. I really don’t need a truce.”

  But she needed something to make the shaking stop and she couldn’t quite do it. It was as if all her training had left her, all of her control had left her. She was a little girl again, in a house with strangers, and her father—her father screaming, No, no, no, no…

  Misha took a step toward her, both hands extended now, palms up, hands empty.

  “Rikki,” he said in that same voice, the voice she’d heard that morning, the morning after, when he handed her that horrible drink, when he had said his own name for the first time. “Something’s going on here—”

  “Damn straight something’s going on here,” she said. “You broke into my house, you’re trying to kill me, you’re finishing the job, you son of a bitch, you murdered my father—”

  “No,” Misha said. His expression was open, plain, as vulnerable as it had been that night—in the middle of the night, when she touched him. “I told you before. I did not murder your father.”

  “Liar!”

  “Rikki.” He hadn’t moved any closer. “Do you remember that night?”

  “Of course I remember that night,” she snapped. But now she was lying. Could he tell she was lying? She was usually good at lying, but at the moment, she didn’t feel like she was good at anything.

  She was usually good at holding a laser pistol too, but she wasn’t doing that very well either.

  “If you remember that night,” he said softly, “then you know I didn’t kill your father.”

  There had been a hand around her shoulder, pulling her close, another hand on her head, pressing her face against the soft fabric of a newly washed shirt. The smell of sandalwood and something else, something unusual, a gentle voice, a male voice—Misha’s voice?—younger, a little more vulnerable, with just a bit of a break, saying, Don’t look, you don’t need to look, it’s better if you don’t look—