Chapter 19
If I could’ve taken a picture of Saint’s face when I told her Frank was a cannibal, I would’ve framed it. Hung it somewhere classy. Maybe above a fireplace in a home I’ll never own. Her green eyes went dinner-plate wide, her mouth forming a perfect O of horror and profanity waiting to happen.
Worth it.
I roll my shoulder again, wincing. The bullet graze keeps pulling every time I move. I probably need stitches. Definitely need a shower. Preferably without a corpse nearby, but I’m a realist.
Frank starts with the arm, thank every saint in the sky he leaves it sealed in the plastic. Then he turns that oversized wand on me. I lift my arms like I’m at airport security, let him wave the device around until it gives a clear tone.
Then it’s Saint’s turn.
I expect nothing. She expects nothing.
So, when the wand emits the faintest beep, my head snaps toward her.
Frank waves again, zeroing in. Saint frowns. I frown harder.
Her Guild sigil.
A tattoo. The one every assassin gets after initiation. Their master key. Unlocks weapons caches, medical rooms, safe lodgings, transport hubs. All the places neutral or allied to the Guild. I had one too. Mine was burned off the day I became an exile.
“How is there a tracker in my sigil?” she asks.
“I’ve never heard of them doing this,” I tell her. And I haven’t. Not in all my years. Not even in the darkest corners of the Guild’s history.
“Explains why assassins showed up everywhere we were,” she mutters.
Frank starts backing away like she pulled a grenade out of her pocket. He sputters, waving his hands, yelling at her to get out of his basement lab.
“Cut it out or burn it off,” he shrieks. “Or leave. The Guild will keep tracking you. Then the assassins come. They’ll swarm this whole block. And if they find me—”
Yeah. We all know what happens.
He might have Pentagon level security on this place, but the Guild tracking us this close? The vultures will circle the entire neighborhood until they find her. And by extension, him, and me. We’ve both got an open contracts on our heads.
She stands there, thinking. Too quiet.
Then she puts her switchblade straight into the fire.
“Saint,” I say immediately. “Think about what you’re doing.”
“I have,” she says.
She’s right. Every assassin in the Guild is after her. Her contract expires in hours, and instead of dropping, it’ll spike. They all turned on her. Even if she clears her name… someone set her up. Someone high enough to get her contract past the inner circle. Get it to the Guildmaster’s desk.
If he approved the hit, there is no level of the Guild she can ever return to again.
Frank thrusts a bottle of whiskey at her like it’s first aid.
She takes it without blinking, pours some on her wrist then takes a long swallow. There is no hesitation when she presses the glowing blade to her wrist.
The smell hits first. Burnt skin. Burnt ink. Burnt identity.
Her jaw tightens. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t flinch. She holds the blade steady until her own sigil sears away in a dead-black line.
When she’s done, she holds her wounded wrist out and I catch the faint tremor she’s hiding. Frank nervously scans her again.
Nothing.
He lets out a long, shaky breath, slumping into a chair like he just survived a natural disaster. Grabs the closest bottle beside him—God knows what’s in it—and drinks deep.
“You can stay,” he says. “Shower. You stink.”
That’s rich, coming from a man who decorates with human-skin lampshades and ramen containers, but I’ll take the win.
“You got everything I asked for?” I say when Saint excuses herself to one of the showers.
Frank glances around like the walls are listening. “Yes, but you need to pay double. You shorted me a body.”
“The broker will cover it.”
He sniffs, clearly unconvinced, then waddles off through a side door. A second later, the unmistakable smell of noodles and broth seeps in. Must lead straight into the ramen shop’s kitchen.
I hope to God he’ll come back with something edible, instead of the usual… whatever he eats.
I finished my shower first. Hot water stings the bullet-wound at my shoulder, but it does what it needs to—rinses off two days of blood, sweat, and cross-country corpse transport.
As soon as I knew we were coming here, I had my broker send over a care package.
Fresh clothes, boots, a new shirt that doesn’t smell like the inside of a body bag.
I requested one for Saint too—figured she’d either appreciate it or stay in hotdog scented leather. Which I highly doubt.
When I stepped back into the main room, I grab a trash bag from under the sink and start clearing off the table. Takeout containers, rusted tools, a handful of things that definitely used to hold something that previously had a pulse.
The arm is gone—hopefully Frank put it in his fridge. Hopefully.
Saint emerges minutes later in clean clothes, hair damp, skin flushed from the hot water. She looks… lighter. Human, almost.
“Thanks for the clothes,” she says.
I nod. No point making a thing of it.
Frank returns—praise whatever deity handles miracles—carrying stacked to-go containers of ramen wrapped in plastic, steam fogging the inside.
Behind him shuffles an old woman with a hunched back and a red apron, like she’s been cooking noodles since the Industrial Revolution.
She sets down a bag of sides, a carrier with a tokkuri of warm sake, and several chilled bottles of Kirin.
Then she’s gives a polite nod and smile, backing away and leaving through the same door.
Saint’s eyes go feral with hunger. She’s already moving toward the table, apparently willing to forget the nipple-clad lampshades if there’s soup involved.
I scan the containers: tofu, pork, chicken. I slide the tofu her way. Frank grabs the pork like a dragon claiming treasure and disappears back into his cave.
That leaves the two of us.
There are cups inside the bag. I pour us each a serving of warm sake. She clinks her cup lightly against mine.
“To not being dead yet,” I say.
She smirks. “Or a lampshade.”
We drink.
We eat. Talk. Laugh a little too easily considering the last forty-eight hours. We trade stories—mostly old ones, a few new ones we’ll pretend aren’t trauma in disguise. She sits on one side of the long bench table, I sit on the other.
“Yeah, Puerto Rico was fun,” she says, her laugh fading as she takes another pull from her Kirin.
She’s looking around the room. I’m looking at her.
The flames from Frank’s eternal fireplace flicker in her eyes. And for a second, it’s not this basement-lab-trash-pit. It’s the beach the night before I left—her back pressed to my chest, my arms around her, both of us staring up at the sky like we weren’t about to destroy each other.
She catches me looking. Holds my stare while she drinks, slow and deliberate.
“It’s good to see you, Saint,” I say.
A ghost of a grin touches her mouth, but she doesn’t give me anything back. Instead, she reaches into her bag and pulls out a medic kit.
“You need stitches,” she says.
I take another drink of beer. There she is—same woman as always. Never says the thing that matters, but she’ll fix you before she buries you.
“Shirt off,” she adds. “Turn around.”
I climb onto the bench, facing away from her. She settles on the table behind me. I hear her wash her hands, metal tools clicking, the quiet rhythm she’s always had when she works.
She inspects the bullet wound carefully.
Her hands are gentler than they have any right to be. For someone who kills for a living, her touch is soft.
Coolant mist hits my shoulder. “Feel that?” she asks.
“No.”
“Good.”
The needle goes in. Clean, efficient, no hesitation.
“You were always good at this,” I say.
She gives a small chuckle—focused but amused. “You were always getting wounded.”
I sip my beer. “Yeah, but you should’ve seen the other guys.”
She shakes her head. A few faint tugs later, the needle hits metal and gets tossed aside. She tapes gauze over the stitches.
I swing one leg over the bench to face her. “Your turn.”
She rolls her eyes but sits next to me. I check the knife wound on her arm and dig in the kit for wound-closing strips and skin seal.
“You should’ve let me stitch you first,” I say. “You used your kit on me.”
“I’ll be fine.” She shrugs. “Can’t have you walking around with holes in you.”
“It was just a scratch.”
“That bullet said otherwise.”
I pull the wound together with the strips. She winces and I mutter an apology. She lets it pass.
I keep stealing glances at her and it doesn’t feel like a choice. My eyes go to her without even trying.
“You seeing anyone?” I ask, trying for casual but it lands like a grenade between us.
“Who has time for that when there are contracts to collect?” She takes a sip of beer, hiding in the motion.
I finish the bandage. “Turn around.”
She obeys without biting my head off. That alone says too much.
I take her wrist and she faces me. Her eyes lock onto mine as I clean the burn from her newly ruined sigil. Her skin is warm and I want to press my lips to the softness here.
My own scarred-over sigil sits opposite hers, the perfect mirror of everything we used to be.
She looks at it. Then at me.
I wrap her wrist in gauze, eyes never leaving hers. The pressure in the room shifts—heavy, close, charged.
“All set,” I say, my voice rougher than I meant.
She takes a slow breath. “Thanks.”
She stands, closes the kit, slides it back into her bag.
I stand too, and I catch her wrist—the unbandaged one.
I don’t even know what I meant to say. I just know that if she walks away, this moment goes with her, and I can’t let that happen.
She looks at me.
I look at her.
“I meant it that night,” I say finally. “I was coming back.”
Her eyes flicker—hurt, sharp, quickly swallowed.
“But you didn’t.”
Everything inside me tightens, heat surging up like a pressure bomb finally going off.
“And I’ve hated that night ever since,” I say.
I pull her into me and my mouth collides with hers—two years of restraint obliterated. It’s not gentle. Not careful. It’s what happens when you starve and finally get fed.
One hand cups her jaw. The other drags her against me as I spin her, pushing her back into the table.
She braces with one hand behind her. Her other hand threads into my hair at the nape of my neck, and she moans when I kiss her harder, tongue sliding against hers with the kind of abandon I’ve been denying since the moment she walked back into my life.
I’m starving.
And she’s the only thing that’s ever filled me.