Chapter 7
T he best part about the painful process of journaling her meager life was that it helped her sleep. Each night when she was finished, she practically fell into a coma, drained of all energy and thoughts. She slept hard, barely moving until morning when she woke feeling, if not optimistic, at least refreshed. The drawback was that she often woke disoriented with no idea where she was or whether it was day or night.
She did so on the night she wrote about third grade, woke with heart thumping, palms sweating, head pounding.
You are in Montana, she coached herself. It’s the middle of the night. Everything is fine.
Usually the reassurances were enough to make her take a few deep breaths and calm down. Sometimes, if she verified it was the middle of the night, she went back to sleep. But this time something was different. In Celeste’s world, different was always bad.
Cautiously, silently, she reached to the nightstand for her gun, palming it as she closed her eyes and attuned her senses to the house around her. Something was off but she couldn’t yet discern what.
Squeak.
There. That. It was faint, but there was a tiny squeak downstairs. If she had a cat, she could easily attribute it to that. But since she was still too frightened to take on the responsibility of trying to nurture another life—especially when she was failing to nurture her own—it was definitely not an animal. Unless a bear broke in. When she started researching her future home, she read that bears sometimes broke into buildings or cars in search of food. A bear would make a lot of noise, wouldn’t it? They would scratch, paw, snort, sniff, growl, and stomp. Not faintly squeak, as if trying not to make any noise.
Satisfied that the noise went beyond mere paranoia, Celeste slipped out of bed and headed for the stairs, pausing every ten feet or so to reassess. The first thing she did when she moved in was walk up and down the stairs a few times to memorize which boards made noise. She avoided those now, tiptoeing her way down the stairs. Once at the base she paused again, cocking her head to listen. Someone was breathing. The sound should have been alarming because absolutely no one should be breathing inside her house. But it was instead reassuring. No professional would allow themselves to breathe so loud or noticeably. Maybe it was a wayward local who had a bit too much to drink and decided to allow curiosity to overcome common sense in their quest to glimpse the “new girl” as everyone in town called her. It had been so long since anyone referred to her as a girl, she decided to let it stand, secretly delighting in the fact that they clearly thought she was younger than she was. Ever since she turned thirty a few years ago, she’d started to feel her age a bit more. I’m still young, she assured herself, gripping her gun to her chest. Young enough to take on an intruder and win, for certain.
“You might as well show yourself. I know you’re here,” she announced, trying to sound stern in case it was a teenage local. That should be enough to flush them out or make them run away.
Instead nothing happened. The breathing remained in the same spot, not increasing or decreasing. No feet shuffled. No one leapt at her or fled in panic. And now she was getting annoyed. Journaling helped her fall asleep, but if she woke up like this, all hope was lost for regaining her rest. She would be awake all night, and then she’d be a grumpy mess tomorrow. And it was the intruder’s fault. Time to make them pay.
“You have about five seconds to make an appearance before I put a bullet in your brain,” she said, each word firing out of her like the threatened weapon.
“Don’t shoot,” a male voice said. It was at once smooth and mellow and raspy and that pinged on her radar for reasons she couldn’t yet discern.
“Give me one good reason,” she demanded.
He stepped into her line of view then, hands aloft in surrender. “Because I’ve already been shot,” he said, and then dropped into an unconscious heap on her floor.
“Well, that was unexpected,” she said. To no one, apparently, since the man seemed to be sincere in his faint. Or at least he appeared so.
Now what? Part of her wanted to kill him and have done with it. She so didn’t need this headache now, in her new town, in her new life. She had left trouble behind forever, or so she hoped. I’m country now. Country people didn’t kill intruders in the middle of the night. Did they? She sighed, annoyed as she thought through the ramifications of taking him out. She couldn’t, obviously. In the army she had lived her life by one rule: I don’t need to know the why, but I have to know the who. They had sent her to take out various people in various places over the years. She never asked why, never, not once. But she never, ever took out a target without verifying his identity. The de-sensitivity training had worked wonders on her. Her conscience remained untroubled as she did her job. Someone told her where to go and she trusted they had a good reason; she didn’t feel the need to know it. But she always, always, always verified her target’s identity. If she had any anxiety or remorse over her job, it was that she would inadvertently take out the wrong person, deprive some child of a mother or father incorrectly.
And that was why she couldn’t eliminate the man on her floor. It didn’t matter why he was there, only who he was. Without knowing his identity, she couldn’t assure herself he was on the wrong side. So she remained frozen a cautious thirty seconds, gun trained on his inert form, before carefully inching forward. Once she was close enough, she toed him a few times, giving him a couple of light kicks that received no response.
When it became clear it wasn’t some ruse to spring at her and attack, she let her gun go slack as she crouched and frisked him. He wore a holster, with a gun—American made—and it was loaded. She took it, along with a wicked looking knife from a sheath attached to his ankle. Only after he was safely disarmed did she make an inspection of his body. And then she sucked a breath and gripped her gun again, bringing it to his temple.
He was Middle Eastern. And that was why his voice had pinged on her radar. He had the precise accent of someone who had learned English as a second language, and not from television. Someone had taught him and taught him well. In her—admittedly slanted—experience, terrorists were the ones who did that. And she’d killed more than her fair share of them. Was this man coming for retribution? They had long memories and liked to hold grudges, not resting until the debt had been repaid: a life for a life. Celeste figured she had more than one bounty on her head, a head which would likely be displayed on a pike if they ever got hold of it. The misogyny of the culture had worked in her favor. The men she’d killed had believed her to be an idiotically na?ve tourist, someone with a fledgling social media following who wandered into hot spots while taking selfies. Few of them ever realized how vastly they’d underestimated her, and by then it was too late. Thankfully no one had ever learned her true identity, thanks to The Colonel’s many layers of camouflage. But it was a fear she’d live with for the rest of her life, the certainty that someone out there would find her, would finally come to collect a long-held debt and avenge whichever friend or family member she’d killed.
With the new knowledge in mind, she searched him again, this time looking for better clues. He had a wallet, but it was clean. No ID, no money, nothing. He smelled like sweat and dirt but not the particular spices she’d come to associate with the culture. If he’d left his tribe in pursuit of her, it hadn’t been recently. He was either rogue or had been working alone for a while.
She was making her final pass when she felt something taped over his heart. With her own heart thumping, she retrieved it, giving a yank to unstick the tape stuck to his hairy chest. Good thing you’re asleep, pal, because that would have hurt, she thought. The card was blank on one side, but when she flipped it her heart stopped completely because she saw something she recognized, something she’d carried for as long as she’d worked as an assassin, a sort of SOS that could be used in any country at any time to contact one man and one man only.
She inspected the guy’s face again, her own clouding with puzzlement. Whoever this guy was and for what reason he was there, one thing was certain: he’d been sent by The Colonel.