Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
M y knees buckle and I land heavily on the bed. The Silent Assassin . Tovi had said it as if they were a different person to me. But it is me.
“Who?” I croak and have to repeat the question. My mind is running through the list of Erduborn men I’ve assassinated. Out of the almost forty sanctioned assassinations I’ve had, fifteen have been Erduborn, and thirteen were male. Unless he was part of a group of mercenaries, then I wouldn’t even remember him. My stomach acid begins to churn at the sheer number of people I've killed. Yet I remember every single face of the men and women I've been paid to assassinate.
“It was eight revolutions past, his name was Koly, but you wouldn’t know that. He wasn’t your target.” Tovi’s voice is getting sharper and meaner. Her breathing is increasing, and she fidgets as she paces.
“I’m sorry, Tovi. I don’t remember. If he wasn’t my target, had he been caught up with mercenaries?”
“No! He was fifteen, and you used him to assassinate a farmer in his hometown of Vavabora,” she screams, tears beginning to stream down her face.
Vavabora. That’s in the far northwest of Erdu, which I've never been to. Almost all of my Erdu assassinations were on the east coast or in the southeast, and a handful were in central Erdu. Not to mention I've never assassinated an Erduborn farmer. Cautiously, I ask, “How do you know this happened?”
“My father told me before he died. By the time Queen Neo helped me find him, he was dying from the drink. My mother had already killed herself, after Koly was murdered.”
Taking a deep breath, I ask again differently. “How did your father know it was the Silent Assassin?”
“After it happened, the royal guard came to tell my parents, officially,” she cries, her face hysterical.
“Officially? What does tha?—"
“Koly was the farmer’s hand. The Silent Assassin, you , asked him to let you into the farmer’s house, and he refused. So, you forced your way in, using him as a shield. Koly was stabbed, and then you assassinated your target. You left my brother to bleed out and die!”
“Tovi, listen to that story. Does that sound like me?” I say calmly, but she’s not having it. “You’ve seen me fight! I wouldn’t need to use a child as a shield. Also, why would I be assassinating a farmer? My targets were always highly influential people or big problems for influential people. It sounds like this farmer owed taxes, and the king wanted a scapegoat. Your poor brother was collateral.”
I pause, waiting to see if she’s going to respond but she’s hysterically sobbing as she paces instead.
“I didn’t kill this farmer, Tovi, and I certainly didn’t kill your brother.”
Tovi collapses into her bed and screams into the straw mattress. How many other murders am I being blamed for? Eventually, she crawls into the bed properly, resting her back against the wall, heaving, and trying to catch her breath.
“I have never even been to Vavabora. I have never killed anyone except the intended target during an assassination. I have never had collateral deaths. I could find the paperwork in Osraed to prove this—all sanctioned movements into countries have to be documented,” I ramble at her.
“You have to have done it,” she sobs quietly. “Because if you didn’t, then…”
“I didn’t do it.” I’m mirroring her position in bed against the wall with my knees against my chest, hugging them tightly.“Tovi.”
She looks me in the eye briefly and then resumes staring at the ceiling. I can’t look at her when I begin to speak. “Did the others know…did they know you thought I murdered your brother?” The last few words barely scrape over the lump of shame in my throat.
Silence. Long enough that I think she isn’t going to answer, so I look back to her. Her head is still tipped back but her eyes are squeezed tightly.
“No,” she says as she gulps in air, trying to contain herself. “They didn’t even know you were an assassin, remember? But it is the reason I volunteered to join them. I couldn’t let you betray them.”
“But it was you who betrayed them instead.” The words hang heavy in the air, and I regret them immediately, wishing I could grab them and shove them back down my throat.
“I know!” Tovi fists her hands to her eyes and lets out an anguished cry as she breaks down into heaving sobs once again.I open my mouth to speak, but Tovi’s voice cuts me off. “I regretted it instantly. The moment Riley woke us to say you were gone I wanted to rescue you, even though I knew what it would mean for me.” She’s looking at me now, almost pleading, wild. The whites of her eyes are wholly visible.
“I knew Beans was a lost cause from the moment he met you. So, I started trying to convince Riley that you couldn’t be trusted. That he should cut you loose. But he liked you and had started to believe you could help rescue his sister.”
I’m in a daze as my brain tries to understand the words as she says them.
Tovi takes a shaky breath before she continues. “Then I saw the mercs in Teorann and had the idea.” Her words are coming out fast now, like a runaway horse that she can’t rein in. “I paid them to make you leave , with half up front and the rest when you’d left. I didn’t care how they did it. I gave them a rumor, about you, about our journey. But you came back to confront Riley about it instead, and I panicked. I couldn’t let the team find out what I had done, so I went back to them and said the deal was off. They laughed at me!” she bites out, and then tries to catch her breath.
“With Bitty and Beans nearby, I didn’t want to make a scene. So, I told them that they’d get no more gold from me, but that they better not fail if they tried again.”
I’m shaking. I knew she had betrayed me, orchestrated this, and wanted me gone, but this is more—this is so much more .
“Time passed, and I was stupid enough to think that they’d just taken my gold and moved on.”
But of course, they tried again. Now they knew I was the Silent Assassin. Worth far more gold than you’d given them.
I didn’t say it. I wanted to. I wanted the venom to coat my tongue and let it lash out on a whip. But I bite my tongue until I taste blood instead.
She laughs, an ugly sharp sound with no humor. “But everything I did, it wasn’t until you’d been taken, that I realized.” She angrily wipes the tears away from her face as if they were the ones doing the betraying. “I wanted my brother’s murderer to pay, and I let hate fuel my decisions.I just realized too late that I didn’t hate you , Mika.”
I think she pauses after that to finally let me speak if I want to. But I don’t want to. Or I can’t. Or I don’t trust the words on my tongue yet.
“I knew what it meant that they had taken you, not run you off. I didn’t think about the risk of that before, but it was all I could think about after. Especially when Bitty…” Tovi pauses to swallow and take a breath. “When Bitty said we had to charge because of what was about to happen in the cave,” she says with a raw voice.
Her eyes are on me, so I tilt my head forward enough to see her properly. She looks wild, with tears clearing paths down her dirty face, revealing red and angry skin. Her eyes beg me to understand, and maybe I do.
“I knew when you woke, that I would have to leave. I was a coward, one that couldn’t face any of you, not after you fucking saved my life ,” she croaks with desperation.
“So, I prayed to the Divine that you would wake, that you would be okay. Not for me, not to assuage my guilt, but because I just wanted you to live. And then you woke up.”
“How did you even know who I was?”
Tovi takes her time answering me, clearly struggling with her words. “I came to find you after… after I found out about Koly. I never saw you up close, only found out your name and that you were Mievaborn. Then, I’d seen you from a distance.
“I was originally only supposed to be an escort for whoever we hired or purchased, swapping with Bitty and another Gifted Patron in Nemoris. But then Beans had said your name while sending the request for Queen Neo’s seal of approval. I wasn’t sure if it was you when I asked to join the rescue, and no one batted an eye because they knew Lyss and I were friends. But I recognized you straight away. Though I didn’t expect you to be so…small.”
“Why did you risk the entire mission for this? Why not just tell Beans and Riley straight up?” I ask, my voice raw from unshed tears.
“I wasn’t thinking logically, or even about Lyss anymore. You’d been this big bad monster of my nightmares for so many revs. But then I met you, and you were this…tiny creature that made everyone laugh, and you had this lost look about you. I recognized it. But the need to make you pay and get you away from the people I love was too strong. It was obviously a shitty plan.”
“Fuck, Tovi,” I scream. “You think?” I don’t even care if the guard comes down to see what is going on.I haven’t been down here very long, and the desperation and hopelessness of being in a dungeon has already crawled under my skin. What hope did Tovi have when she’s been in here for weeks?
“I thought you murdered my brother!”
“But I didn’t. I know I’m a monster, but I wouldn’t have killed a child, much less used one as a shield,” I say quietly, no longer yelling. My rage quietly reminds me that I've killed a mother and her unborn child, though. I am a monster.
Tovi goes back to the hysterical sobbing. I’m furious at her, but I cannot find it in myself to hate her. Despite everything she has done, I care about her. I’m definitely going to punch her in the tit when we get out, but that’s it. Beans’ words about knowing what’s in her heart play in my head.
“Tovi, stop. Please.” I’m standing up against the bars, as close as I can get to her with the empty cell between us.
“I’m the biggest monster in this room Mika, not you. I deserve to rot away in here.”
“Stop. ”
At least she’s no longer hysterical, but she’s hitting the back of her head against the stone periodically.
“You need to stop crying and save what little hydration you have left.”
Tovi snorts, mumbling. “What’s the point…”
“Because we’re going to need every bit of strength to escape.”
We sit in silence for a long time. I replay every word she’s ever said to me, every interaction. I can see it now. The way she kept her distance, the wariness whenever anyone else was alone with me. She was worried about her friends. Worried about the reputation I had crafted and let run wild. It doesn’t matter that what traumatized her is a lie.
“I used to pick up your things constantly, you know,” Tovi says into the murky light that is neither darkness nor daylight.
“What? What do you mean?”
She barks a laugh that causes her to cough. “Whenever you put something down, I’d pick it up. See if you were feeling assassin-y or devious or something.”
“And?”
“Nothing. I didn’t get much from you at all, really, which fueled my suspicions. It was like you knew how to cover everything with a blanket of noise.”
I’m trying to formulate a response. A question. Anything.
She answers me, though I didn’t articulate a question. “It was like a fog, but also a storm. Sometimes it was really clear: happiness, humor, compassion. But I’d get these flashes of…rage, fury, fear, and loathing. Just a flash. And then I wouldn’t be able to feel it again, like feeling it once was the only taste of it left. I’ve never experienced anything else like it.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding. “I don’t know what any of that means. ”
“Neither do I. Though I wish I knew then that it didn’t mean you were trying to hide nefarious intentions.”
“Me too.”
Interrupting us, a guard brings us some kind of gritty gruel with chunks of… something mixed in. It’s not until we’re eating that I realize Tovi and I aren’t alone down here. Only a handful of the cells are empty. Not a single one of them stirred while Tovi and I were screaming at each other.
After our meal, we settle down to sleep, but it eludes me. The sounds and smells are a barrage on my senses and my rage won’t leave. I’m exhausted, yet it’s like I’m still adding fuel to the fire that’s keeping me awake. I replay the conversation with Tovi about her brother, and the weight of it is crushing. Though I didn’t kill him, being blamed for his death still makes me complicit. The legend I created for myself was used as a coverup.
My last moments with Riley also plague me. His refusal to promise not to kiss me again. I didn’t want him to agree, yet I was still furious when he didn’t. Fucked up doesn’t even begin to describe me.
I fall asleep indulging in the fantasy of Riley holding me, imagining his smell and the warmth of his skin. Jaena’s voice tells me I’m pathetic, whispering alongside my rage.