by Rob Sinclair
She moved through the darkened rooms then came to a stop looking at the man asleep in the bed in front of her. She took two steps forward, reached out, and turned on the bedside lamp which glowed softly. He stirred and opened his eyes. He looked at her with confusion, then with fondness. Then with knowing.
‘Anna,’ Alex said before taking a few seconds to further compose himself. ‘You finally did it, didn’t you?’
Anna smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘Good for you. I always thought you had it in you.’
‘You did.’
‘What will you do now? Where will you go? I can help you.’
‘No. You can’t. I only came to say goodbye.’
‘I’ll miss you around here.’
‘No. You won’t. You won’t be able to.’
Alex looked at her quizzically. Did he already know?
‘I liked you, Alex,’ Anna said. ‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you. You remind me of my father. I never told you that.’
‘I’m flattered. I truly am.’
‘But I know the truth,’ Anna sneered. ‘You’re no different to the rest of them. No different to Kankava.’
Alex looked confused. Anna was almost disappointed in his lacklustre response. She’d never really seen the man who was inside him – the warrior, the Vor. She’d only ever seen the cripple who liked to chat to a young teenage girl. In a way, she wished he could fight back, show how strong he really was. At the least, she had expected that when this moment came he would fight back with his tongue. But it appeared he no longer had any fight in him.
‘I know what the other girls have to do for you,’ Anna continued. ‘You may not touch them, you may not rape them, but only because you can’t. I see it in you. I know what you are. Goodbye, Alex.’
‘No, Anna!’
She reached out and placed her hand firmly over his mouth. He moaned and tried to shout but he was helpless.
As Alex’s brain was starved of oxygen and shut down for good, Anna stared into his pleading eyes. What she saw – fear – only proved what she already knew, and saddened her further. Alex wasn’t the Vor he claimed to be. Not anymore. He was weak. He was pathetic.
He was nothing.
‘Shhh,’ Anna whispered. ‘Remember what you told me, Alex. Don't ever let them see that you’re scared.’
Soon after, Anna removed her hand. Alex was still, his lifeless eyes staring up at her.
Anna got to her feet and silently headed back through the house. She unbolted the main doors, stepped out into the bitter cold night, and walked away from Winter’s Retreat, never once looking back at that disgusting place.
CHAPTER 23
It took Anna over two weeks to track her father to a ramshackle town ten miles north of Bucharest, Romania. Not Bosnia where he had claimed to be. Sixteen-year-old Anna had lied, begged, stolen and killed her way through countries and across borders to get there. Skills that came naturally to her, it seemed.
At first, Anna was surprised at how easily she could manipulate adults more than twice her age. The men in particular would drop to their knees and do whatever she asked at the merest suggestion that they might get a piece of the teenage beauty. Not that she’d ever actually stoop to that level. Not after what had happened to her at Winter’s Retreat. Anna was prepared to do almost anything to track her father down, to survive. But not that. Her looks were undoubtedly a powerful weapon in her arsenal nonetheless.
After her initial surprise at her apparently inbred skills, had come regret. Because after what had happened at Winter’s Retreat, and now that she knew who her father really was, she would never get to live a normal life like all the other girls she’d known at her school back in Georgia. They would go on to get jobs, husbands, have children. But then, had she ever really seen herself as their peer?
Once the regret had subsided, she felt disgust – at herself for what she’d done, and for what she saw as the life that lay ahead.
Finally, after she banished those negative thoughts and emotions from her mind, she’d been left with determination. Anna knew now what she was. And no one on earth could stop the inevitable from happening.
Anna walked down the dirt road, passing various mish-mashed breeze-block messes that barely resembled houses. Large tarpaulins were propped in place here and there adjacent to a number of the homes to create additional covered space for the meagre properties. A heavy rain storm had not long passed and the ground underneath was sodden and soft. Anna cringed with every squelch that her knee-high leather boots made.
Had her father fallen so low that this was a place he would call home?
Back in Georgia, before Winter’s Retreat, they’d lived in a penthouse apartment overlooking beautiful manicured gardens. Her father had sent her to Winter’s Retreat so he could travel, earn even more money. Doing what he did best – killing people. With his lucrative work they should surely have been moving up in the world.
Yet he’d somehow wound up living in a shit-hole town in the middle of Romania that didn’t even appear to have electricity. Anna had never before been to the country, though she knew from the books and newspapers she’d read at Winter’s Retreat that, like Georgia, it had a troubled recent past following the fall of communism. Yet the level of poverty she saw as she traipsed along the muddy road was eye-opening.
When she reached the property she was searching for, Anna stopped and looked around her. The area was deserted, no sign of anyone. The dirt road gave way to a haphazard run of broken paving slabs that led up to her father’s house. At least the house where she expected to find him.
Anna moved slowly across the blocks, her senses high. She believed the information she’d been given – about her father’s whereabouts – to be genuine, but there was no way she could be one hundred percent sure. Not without seeing for herself.
And there was always a chance she was being set up.
In fact, given the troubles she’d gone through in locating him, and the hard time she was having in understanding how her father had ended up in this place, her sense of paranoia was growing by the second.
With each step Anna took, the advice she’d once been given by Alex reverberated in her mind: Don't trust anyone. The ethos was quickly becoming second nature to her. She realised, though, that even if her father really was living in this downtrodden place, he also lived and breathed by that ethos.
And her father, the deadly assassin, certainly wouldn’t be one to welcome unexpected guests to his home.
Anna placed her foot down onto a slab. The edge of it gave way, sinking into the uneven ground. The back of the slab lifted, just an inch, sending a small pebble scuttling across the stony surface. The noise wasn’t much louder than a whisper but Anna’s brain was whirring.
Feeling her heart quicken, Anna slowed her pace further, eyes darting back and forth as she scoured her surroundings for any signs of traps or tripwires or other pitfalls. She took two more steps before she stopped moving again. By that point, her heart was thudding almost uncontrollably as adrenaline coursed through her, and her breathing was heavy and fast.
She daren't risk another step. She simply didn’t know what she might be walking into if she were to surprise the deadly Silent Blade.
There was only one option left.
‘Pappa!’ Anna shouted. ‘It’s me.’
She waited. Nothing.
‘Pappa!’
A few more seconds of silence. Anna spotted movement. She turned her head slightly and saw an elderly man on the street, walking along hand-in-hand with a small boy. The man stared at her intently – suspiciously – for a few seconds as he carried on his way.
Then the front door of the rickety house creaked open, just a few inches. Anna whipped her head back round. She could see nothing but blackness inside the house but she moved forward again, senses still primed.
‘Pappa?’
Anna was two steps from the open front door when movement off to her right – much closer this time – caught her atte
ntion. She stepped sideways to her left, her stare fixed in the direction the movement had come from.
Nothing there.
A second later, she was grabbed from behind. An arm wrapped around her chest, pinning her arms to her sides. She felt cold metal against the skin on her neck. She was bundled forward in through the open front doorway. She heard the door slam shut behind her.
The attacker released her, shoved her forward, further into the darkness. Anna spun and looked at the black space ahead. Nothing. Where the hell was he? She started to panic. Her body, her head jerked in all directions. She was about to bolt towards the door when...
‘Anna?’ came a man’s voice.
Anna stopped. She held her breath as she stared into the darkness, where she was sure the voice had come from.
A few seconds passed. She saw nothing. Heard nothing.
‘Anna, it really is you.’ His voice came from the other side of the room.
Then out of the shadows a figure emerged. A figure she’d longed to see. Her father. Vlad Abayev.
The Silent Blade assassin.
CHAPTER 24
Anna sat in an armchair in the sparse living area that was crammed with worn furniture and lit by a single overhead bulb. Vlad came back into the room from the tiny kitchen carrying two mugs of steaming coffee.
Despite the surroundings, Anna felt a sense of ease and relaxation that she hadn’t known for too long. It had been nearly three years since Anna had last seen her father. Time hadn’t been kind to him; he looked fifteen years older. The picture in her head was of a man in his prime. Handsome, full of strength and life. Now he looked... damaged. Weak and old. He was still handsome, but his eyes were darker and tense, his forehead was creased, his hair was scruffy, and he had thick stubble with messy splashes of grey.
How much of the look was real and how much of it was a persona he’d adopted for his job, Anna couldn’t be sure. She hoped it was the latter. The thought that her father, the person she’d looked up to most in the world, had fallen so far in such a short time was hard to take.
Vlad set the cups down on a wobbly coffee table, and Anna got to her feet. She flung herself at her father, taking him by surprise as she wrapped her arms around him then sunk her head into his chest. He reciprocated, hugging his daughter tightly.
The feel of him, his distinctive smell that Anna wouldn’t even know where to start describing, fired so many pleasant memories in her mind. Anna had grown at least two inches in the years she’d been at Winter’s Retreat but she still fitted snuggly into her father’s chest. She would have stayed in the warm embrace for much longer, but Vlad took his arms away, stepped back, and gazed down at his daughter.
‘You look... beautiful.’
Anna felt her cheeks blush.
‘I can’t believe it’s really you. You’re so grown up.’ He reached out and brushed a lock of hair away from her face.
‘It’s really me.’ Anna smiled.
Vlad reached out toward Anna’s neck. She didn’t flinch. He gently took hold of the locket that was dangling there.
‘You still have it,’ he said, glowing.
‘Of course.’
She took the locket from his hand and looked down as she opened it up to reveal two pictures, tiny head shots. One was of Vlad as a young man in his twenties, the other of Anna as a nine-year-old girl. Vlad stared at the pictures then turned and with a pained face sat in an armchair. Anna closed the locket and took a seat in the chair opposite.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ Vlad said. ‘I’ve not been well. But I’m getting better.’
An injury or illness? Anna wondered. She decided against asking.
‘How long have you been here?’ Anna asked, unable to hide her dissatisfaction as she looked around the decaying room.
‘Just a couple of months.’
Anna’s eyes moved from her father over to the mess on a set of drawers in the corner of the room. An ashtray, overflowing with cigarette butts, was surrounded by at least a dozen bottles of spirits, most of them empty or not far from it.
‘It’s not me, Anna,’ Vlad said. ‘This isn’t me.’
Anna said nothing for a few moments. ‘Then why are you here? Why is it like this?’
‘It’s hard to talk about it.’
‘A job?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘You’re hiding?’
‘Hiding. Running. Surviving.’
Anna humphed at his words. ‘So what is that?’ she asked, looking over at the empty bottles again.
‘It’s who I need to be right now.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Yes. I’m still the same man I always was. The same man you knew.’
‘But I never did know the real you, did I,’ Anna said, her words tinged with bitterness.
‘Of course you did, Anna. You knew the man I wanted to be. The man I had to be for you.’
‘I’m not sure that’s the same thing.’
Anna leaned forward and picked up her coffee from the table. She pulled the mug toward her face. The vapour from the liquid caught her nose. It smelled stale and bitter. She took a sip. It tasted even worse.
‘Hard to find good coffee around here,’ Vlad said, smiling – in embarrassment, Anna sensed.
‘Hard to get good anything around here, I’m guessing.’
‘The Tuica isn’t too bad.’ Her father looked over at the spirit bottles.
Anna didn’t respond to the quip. Her mind was too occupied with her next question. ‘Why did you leave me in that place?’
Her blunt words caught her father off guard and he stared at Anna for a good while before answering.
‘I had no choice,’ he said. ‘It was becoming too dangerous for you. For me too.’
‘You think that place was safe for a teenage girl.’
‘Safe? You’re still alive, aren’t you?’
Anna said nothing in response, and the same old question reverberated in her mind: Did he know?
It was the only question she wanted to ask. Yet she knew she never could. Because she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. ‘Were you ever coming back for me?’
‘Yes. I said I would.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘I said I’d come for you as soon as I could. As soon as it was safe. It never was.’
‘So you would leave me there forever? Never once wondering what had happened to me?’
‘I’m sorry,. It was the only way I could see. But don’t ever believe I didn’t think of you. I thought about you every day. You’re one of the few things that has kept me going.’
They both took a break from the increasingly awkward conversation. Anna tried again to drink her mug of coffee, hoping that, despite the taste, at least the warm liquid would soothe her. She took a small sip but it made her gag and she set the nearly full cup back down for good.
‘Is that milk off?’ Anna asked.
‘There isn’t any milk in it. Hard to get good fresh milk around here.’
‘Then why is it that colour?’
Her father shrugged. ‘Best not to think about it.’ The look on his face hardened. ‘How did you find me?’
‘It wasn’t that difficult.’
Vlad smiled again. ‘You’re a lot more like me than you realise.’
Anna agreed with that. Though she wasn’t sure it was a good thing. ‘There was a man in Winter’s Retreat. Alex Meskhi.’
Vlad pursed his lips and shook his head, his way of showing the name meant nothing to him.
‘He was a Vor.’ Anna saw the twinkle in her father’s eye.
‘Never trust a Vor, my dear Anna.’
‘That’s not far off what he said.’
‘He knew me? This Alex?’
‘No. Not really. But he gave me the name of someone he said could help me find you.’
‘Who?’ Vlad asked, eyebrow raised.
‘Levan Chichua.’
The look on her father’
s face changed to one of anger.
‘Chichua,’ he said, practically spitting the name.
‘He’s looking for you too, apparently.’
‘He has been for years. Like I said, you shouldn’t trust the Vory. So Alex Meskhi was trying to set me up?’
‘Maybe. Or maybe he really did think Chichua could help find you.’
‘And did he?’
‘I’m here aren’t I?’
‘You are. And they’re not.’
‘That’s because they’re both dead,’ Anna said, calmly.
Her father stared at her coldly and she saw a look in his eyes that she’d not seen before. It was the look of a dangerous man. A man to be feared. A killer. Silent Blade.
Anna smiled and got to her feet. ‘Come here. Take a look at this.’
Anna once again saw the man she knew – her father. It was as though there were two different people inside him and it took a split second for one to overcome the other.
But which man was real? Which persona was in control of the other?
Anna took the photo from her jeans pocket and held it out. Vlad came over and put an arm around her shoulder as he stared down at the picture. He beamed.
‘Do you remember?’ Anna asked.
‘Yes.’ He took the photo from her hand and brought it closer to his face.
‘It was my eleventh birthday. I don’t remember it ever snowing on my birthday before.’
‘No. Me neither.’
‘We had fun that day.’
‘Yes. We did.’
‘I’ve always loved that picture.’
‘I didn’t know you had it.’
‘It’s the only picture I have of us together’
‘I don’t have any,’ Vlad said, his smile vanishing.
‘That picture has kept me going for so long.’ Anna looked up and stared into her father’s eyes, feeling her own eyes welling up. He gazed back, and she could see the love and devotion that he was feeling. ‘But that man,’ Anna said. ‘He’s not you. Not really. Not anymore.’
Before Vlad could say another word, Anna whipped her hand behind her. She unsheathed the small hunting blade that was strapped to her lower back. She thrust the knife forward and plunged it into her father’s side. Four inches of metal sliced through skin and flesh, and penetrated his right kidney, severing the renal artery at the same time.