Chapter 10
Eva
“Sometimes a woman’s secret is all she has.”
“Fuck,” she utters as I have her secured on top of the bed, unsure what to do next.
The person who hired me gave me an emergency point of contact in case anything went wrong.
Do I text the number? Does this classify as things going wrong?
Maybe… Yes… No. I can handle this, but fuck me.
She whimpers again , causing me to table the idea of contacting whoever paid me and focus back on her.
“I know it may be uncomfortable, but it doesn’t hurt.
If I wanted you to feel pain, I would have let you try to take your life,” I spat back at her, frustration leaking into my voice.
Did we just blow the cover here? With this being a larger city, gunshots are not unheard of by its occupants.
Is anyone going to come looking for where that sound came from?
With a deep breath, I try to find my calm as I listen for activity in the complex around us.
Focusing all of my energy on my ears, I don’t register anything.
“Why do you care if I live or die?” she asks in a petulant tone as she pulls against the bindings of her sheets on her wrists and ankles.
I sigh, sitting next to her on the bed. What started as a contract has become so much more.
I don’t even know how to frame the way that I feel.
It’s too new to understand. Life and death can speed things up, but her file tells me that she means so much more to me than she will ever understand.
“It is my job to make sure that you survive all of this with as little physical damage as possible as part of my contract,” I tell her, leaving out the way that she makes me feel.
Not everything needs to be laid bare when she is so emotionally raw.
If I tell her that I have been keeping an eye on her just outside of the eye of her family since her dad died, she may have more questions than I have answers.
I got the contract a week before everything went down, and was in transit and setting up locally when her brother’s wedding happened.
“So you care about the money. That figures. Just like everyone else,” she utters, rolling her eyes, annoyed. I feel my blood boil at the insinuation that this is all about money.
“You have no idea what I care about, so maybe instead of making assumptions, you can ask the question, princess.” I snap, feeling the fire hit my veins. She laughs, and it sounds dejected and broken.
“You have no idea what I’ve gone through, but I refuse to do a heart-to-heart while I am tied up like some sort of prisoner in life,” she throws the words at me.
I sigh, wanting us to have this conversation but needing her to be safe.
Pulling the gun out of my waistband, I remove the magazine and clear the chamber.
Putting the magazine in one of my shorts pockets and the gun in the other.
There will be a momentary delay in defending us, but given her persistence in wanting to use the gun on herself, I figure this is a happy medium.
Then I untie her and offer her a hand to help her up.
She sits up on her own while staring at my hand.
Good girl. Self-sufficiency is required for long-term survival in our world.
“So tell me,” I encourage her as I get comfortable and ready to hear the stories that she is willing to tell. She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.
“Where do I start?” she asks me and then raises her eyebrow. I take a moment to consider how to respond. There is no way that someone of my level does this without having a proper background check done, but I don’t want her to feel like I invaded her privacy.
“Why am I deciding?” I ask her, not sure what her plan is here, and maybe with an understanding, I can make a decision that won’t set her off so much.
“Because you have seen the background report of me and all those that I am attached to. I don’t know where to start,” she admits, her voice almost meek. I grab her hand, holding it, and give her a soft smile.
“Let’s start at the beginning, the first of the big traumas that you remember,” I instruct her softly and give her space to tell her story without additional pressure.
There isn’t much that she can tell me that would surprise me.
I have read her entire file. From losing her mom at a young age to the violence that being part of the mafia brings, to her recently loosing her father from the same.
From everything that I was able to dig up, she was in love with her brother’s best friend who died in the same battle that took her dad.
“I am the reason that my mom died when I was a kid,” she utters, closing her eyes as we sit there in the dimly lit bedroom.
“Why do you feel responsible for that?” I ask, instead of dismissing her perspective. It’s important that I gain an understanding of why she has all of this guilt.
“The people who broke into our apartment used my life as leverage to make her cooperate. Then they raped and murdered her while I had to stand there watching the whole time. I didn’t want her to think that I would close my eyes and let her deal with this alone.
Instead of begging for her own life, she spent her last breaths begging for mine,” she utters bitterly, and even though I know the men who did this may be dead, I want to bring them back to make they pay for what they put her through time and time again.
“Flower, I am so sorry that you had to experience that,” I respond as she tries to avoid my eyes. Getting up, I find her water bottle and bring it to her, knowing that the lack of tears is probably due to a level of dehydration. She takes it with shaking hands before drinking some of it.
“After she died, I moved in with my dad, and he hid my very existence from the world. One of the few people that I got to be around was my tutor, Bella, who was brilliant and an early graduate that moved in with us to teach me. She wasn’t even eighteen yet, but her brain was brilliant.
I fell hard for her as we spent more time together, and one day she whispered something in another language in my ear.
Even without knowing what the words meant at the time, I could feel what was between us.
Bella was my first lover and the first person to whom I gave myself wholly.
We only lasted a few weeks together before my father came to look for me and found us kissing.
He didn’t hesitate to paint the walls with her brain,” her shoulders fall as the last word leaves her mouth.
“Baby, your father’s decisions are not your responsibility,” I reassure her as I scoot closer so she can lean on me. With everything that she has gone through, I don’t think she has had many people to truly lean on in her life.
“It’s okay, he decided to join the list of my dead recently, making me an orphan,” she jests back, and I can feel that the light humor might be exactly what she needs.
“That means you are one step closer to being Batman,” I joke, hoping that she finds the light in the darkness. The soft chuckle that she exudes confirms my choice as the right one.
“You are nothing that I expected,” she responds, laying her head back on my shoulder, instantly missing the way she makes me smile.
“You are far from the file I compiled too, sweetheart,” I admit to her as we sit there and enjoy each others company.
“Do you want to keep going or would you like some breakfast?” I ask her, not wanting her to feel dismissed emotionally.
“Can we do breakfast? I don’t know if I can dive into the lost lover side of this without spinning out the rest of the way,” she admits to me. So I smile, stand up, and reach for her hand to walk out to the kitchen together.
We leave the room, fingers intertwined and food fresh on our minds, when the front door slamming open stops us in our tracks.
I throw her behind me and quickly put the magazine in the gun.
Loading a bullet in the chamber, I aim at the figure in the doorway only to pause.
The scruff is new, but that blonde hair and those green eyes are ones I recognize from her file.
“Claire, you’re okay,” he says, standing there before us as she falls to her knees behind me.