Chapter Seven
The next evening is date night. Piper is with the girls, I’m wearing a mid-thigh slip dress, and Brian’s hand is on my knee across the BMW.
But my mind whirls with the possibilities.
Before I got off the phone with John last night, he agreed—Yes, Nadia, I’ll see what I can do.
And now it’s all I can think about. What does a bigger job even mean?
It sends my heart stuttering at a faster pace.
A combination of excitement and nerves, imagining it.
I can guess.
More bodies.
Or more important bodies, higher-risk kills, maybe in public, maybe in daylight. The thought makes my hands sweaty with excitement.
Or perhaps going international, a well-known figure, maybe someone who even has security.
A political figure? A scummy criminal responsible for not a few deaths, but hundreds?
I turn my head to look out the side window, to hide my face from Brian.
The glass reflects a hint of the smile curving at my lips.
My fingers drum a silent beat on the armrest, and a warm glow tingles in my chest when I think of the challenge—whatever it is.
I have no clue what this will entail and hadn’t thought to ask Ian. I won’t ask John, won’t admit I don’t even know what I’ve asked for. But he knew, or he must have had some idea—his other clients are doing these jobs.
It’s not like I’ve been in an office where I can witness the other assassins getting the best gigs.
According to Ian, most hitmen—hitwomen—hitpeople—stay far away from one another.
The risk of attracting attention is too great in groups.
It’s not like we have a yearly convention somewhere warm where we swap tips for how to best kill a mark or compare the size of our guns.
It’s just John and me, my career resting in his hands.
“You all right?” Brian’s voice breaks through my thoughts.
“I’m great. Excited.” It’s not a lie—I know Brian will think I mean I’m excited to head to one of our favorite restaurants for date night. And I am; we always have a good time.
Twenty minutes later, we sit across from each other in a darkened bar at the edge of the River Walk, windows open to the breeze giving us snippets of conversation from outside.
Brian leans in, takes a sip of his craft IPA, and shares a secretive smile with me.
It almost looks suggestive. But I can guess the next words that will come from his mouth.
“I had the best meeting today.”
“Oh yeah?” I let our hands meet across the table and nod, inviting him to continue, ever the supportive spouse.
“So, the owner of the company—”
I listen the best I can, but my mind wanders. I can’t help it. My leg jiggles as I think about the call with John—and that my work phone is tucked in my bag, just in case.
Brian says something, and I yank my attention back to him. He’s watching me with a playful smile, one that tells me he knows I was distracted, that he doesn’t mind, that he, in fact, thinks it’s endearing.
“Sorry.” I squeeze his hand, grateful for him. For us.
“As I was saying,” Brian continues with a wink, “he thought I didn’t know what I was talking about, but when he brought up the logistics of his business, mentioned that it was a multifactorial issue—”
I sip my milk stout and nod, try to focus on the man right in front of me.
The man I love, who gave me my girls. Who I do this thing called life with day in and day out, through thick and thin.
This vaguely mundane chatter is one of the things that attracted me to Brian.
Sometimes I remind myself of that—it’s safe.
Secure. He is predictable. And in a dangerous job like mine, that’s what I need. Stability in my chaotic world.
A spasm of panic hits me. Do I even want a bigger job?
I hadn’t considered what that might mean—more danger.
Putting myself in danger, and maybe my family too.
Of course, I’ve been oh-so-careful about keeping my home life and work life separated.
So that should keep them safe. Right? And they won’t ever know what I really do.
If that’s the price for me to be me, to stay sane, so that I might continue being Brian’s wife and the girls’ mother, then I can live with that.
I think I’ve got it settled until I consider that the agency might need me to go to London or Moscow.
I travel now, but only for a couple days at a time, and between Brian and Piper and my brother, it works.
But if I went overseas, I’d have to go for longer.
Who would take care of the girls, who would make sure—?
No. This is exactly the type of thinking that leads to being mommy-tracked. I won’t do that to myself. I won’t set that example for Eliza and Evie, even if they think I’m merely planning fancy weddings.
“Anyway, how was your day?” he asks.
I refocus on Brian where he sits across the table, head cocked at an angle, smiling at me, and tune out the din of voices from other patrons.
“Oh, it was a great day. I got lots done.” I followed the pharmacist from a distance for a few hours, to the coffee shop, then a salad place for lunch.
When she tossed her receipt in the garbage, I retrieved it, easily getting her name: Jennifer Patrick.
Next, I’ll track her to her home, learn where she lives, if she goes to an evening Pilates class or has a boyfriend.
The stalking, the hunting, the anticipation—it’s one of my favorite parts of the job, the most satisfying to the creature inside me.
Brian looks at me as though I should have more to say, and I rattle off, “I was thinking about expanding to vow renewals. That seems to be a hot thing right now. What do you think?”
His eyes widen because he has no idea what the market for vow renewals is, which is lucky, since I don’t either.
“I mean, if it sounds good to you—you’re so successful, I can’t imagine it’s a bad idea.
Hey, maybe we could even do that. What do you think?
The girls could join in, they’d look adorable in cute little dresses… ”
Crap, I wasn’t expecting that.
I change the topic, and fast. “Guess what Evie said today?”
He leans across the table, anticipation lighting up his face; this is one of our favorite topics.
Eliza is the quiet, observant child, the one who took her time saying her first words and, as her vocabulary grew, spoke slowly, made certain she was saying them just right.
Her sense of humor is dry, cutting, and I love it.
Evie, on the other hand, has been speaking in full sentences since she was eighteen months old, likely because she had an older sister to chase after and compete with for attention.
I barely suppress a laugh as I launch into the story. “Apparently it was lunchtime.”
“Uh-huh.” He grins, sips his beer, watches me with those intense eyes of his.
“And she needed a fork…” I nearly snort out my beer, imagining what fork sounded like coming from her tiny three-year-old mouth.
Brian presses his lips together and drops his face into his hands, laughing. Last week it was truck. Except her t’s sound like f’s, and well…you get the idea.
As Brian shakes with laughter, that warm feeling hits me—the one that took me by surprise the first time it happened, and I realized that while I don’t feel the same way others do, I do have genuine emotions, the kind that you feel in your soul, for Brian and my family.
Brian clutches my hand, beaming. “That girl is trouble,” he says, but in a way that expresses what he really means is She is adorable and God, how did we get so lucky?
Or maybe that’s what I’m thinking.
My purse vibrates with an incoming call, yanking my attention away from Brian. Our rule is we don’t take calls during dates. Brian goes so far as to turn his phone off. But being the mom, I can’t. What if Piper needs something? What if the girls get hurt?
“I’m going to run to the restroom real fast.” His eyes dim a bit—like maybe he knows I’m not really going to pee. I lean over, press a kiss to his cheek. I hate to interrupt date night, but I’ll be distracted through our whole meal if I don’t take a second to see who wants what.
The hallway to the restrooms also leads outside, which I know because anytime I enter a building, I sort out where the exits are.
As I step out onto the River Walk, the sun burns hot in the early evening sky, instantly dousing me in sweat.
I’ve missed the call, but as soon as I pull out my phone, it starts to vibrate again—John.
“Hello?” My heart pounds as I answer the phone to hear video games on the other end. I don’t always feel emotions the same as others do—but excitement, that dumping of adrenaline into my bloodstream—that’s one emotion I feel strongly, and I feel it now. “John?”
“Finally. You say you want a job, then you don’t answer your phone.”
I don’t reply, just wait for him to continue, practically trembling with anticipation.
It makes me realize how much I want this—how much I need this.
Yes, I have to consider my family, but Brian leaves town all the time, often with almost no heads-up.
A client calls, his boss tells him to go, and he does.
I have a right to pursue things I’m passionate about too. In fact, other than the whole killing part, I think Brian would agree and encourage me to do so.
All of these facts rattle off in my head in the 1.5 seconds it takes John to continue.
“I have a job for you.”
Possibilities flutter through my mind at warp speed. This is coming faster than I could have anticipated. I thought it would take a week, maybe two. No doubt he got on this right away after last night’s call. As much as he annoys me, he’s good at what he does.
“What kind of job?”
In the background, what I think is Nintendo’s Mario Bros. plays—the dinging of the little plumber in red collecting coins.
“What kind of job did you ask me for?” he teases.
“A big one.” I lift my hand to block the glare of the sun and look across the River Walk.
On the other side is a garden, a family with children taking in flowers, a duck waddling by.
The mom squints at me as though she might know me from somewhere.
Probably she does, given my attempts to be involved at Eliza and Evie’s school.
I should wave, smile—that’s what Nadia the Mom would do.
But right now, I’m Nadia the Assassin, and I turn, giving her my back, staring into the restaurant.
But that only gives me a view of Brian. He’s looking around, smiling—just happy to be on a date with his wife on a beautiful Texas evening.
And I’m on my secret phone, squirming with excitement over the prospect of this new job I will lie to him about.
God, I don’t deserve him. Don’t deserve my family.
“Do you want it?”
I open my mouth to say Yes! Yes, of course! but John hasn’t told me anything about it. “Can you give me details?”
“Nope. It’s a closed file, but I did ask that question, because I knew you’d want to know. I can only assure you he is one bad dude. It pays triple your normal fee. Once you accept, I’ll send you the package.”
The “package” tells me how to find the person to kill.
It’s conveyed in various ways, usually with stunning creativity.
The pharmacist’s, for example, arrived via a note tucked into flowers delivered to my doorstep yesterday morning, supposedly from a wedding client thanking me for helping her plan the perfect event.
I’m convinced whoever is in charge of these messages is a genius.
The point is to not create a traceable pattern, to not set up coded jobs to be intercepted by the authorities, or anyone else for that matter.
And, of course, to not tip off the person who needs killing.
I shift my weight from one foot to the other, thinking.
Once you accept a job, it’s yours. And I want to say yes so, so badly.
I want to step into this deeper world, be challenged by a job instead of playing Candy Crush on my phone while I watch a local pharmacist. Killing her will be fun, but I can probably knock on the door of her apartment and walk right in, making my job as easy as can be.
But the idea of a real challenge—well, who wouldn’t want that?
It’s funny—I felt satisfied until I realized there was something I was missing out on. And now I want it with wild abandon.
“You’re sure they’re bad?” I ask.
“The worst.” The short, high-to-low-pitched tune of doo-doo-doo-doo as Mario dies.
I smile, imagining killing my future mark so theatrically.
“I’ll take it.”