2. Ivy
IVY
The man in the chair doesn’t know he’s going to die tonight.
He’s too busy laughing at something his friend said while he swirls expensive whiskey in a crystal glass. Enjoying the kind of evening people like him take for granted. A private dining room in the sort of restaurant most people would never be able to afford.
Here I am, across the street, perched behind a rooftop ledge.
My rifle is assembled, ready to do its job.
I’m early, because I’m always early. Vincenzo taught me to be early.
Arrive before anyone expects you. Study your environment.
Learn the exits, blind spots, patterns. And by the time the moment comes, everything should feel as natural as an exhale.
Normally, it would. I’ve done this enough times that the entire process is, indeed, as natural as breathing.
Today, though, my mind isn’t where it should be.
It’s in a hotel room where a man with dark hair and pale blue eyes told me my name wasn’t my name.
Two days later, I still haven’t managed to shake it.
His voice follows me like a song I can’t get out of my head.
Not the words themselves, because words mean nothing.
People lie. It’s what they do. They tell you what they think you need to hear if it means getting what they want.
I’ve built my entire career on that principle.
It wasn’t his words, but the way he said them.
I grieved for you.
I shift on the ledge, rolling my neck to work the tension out of my shoulders.
I have to focus. My target is still down there, laughing and drinking because he’s still alive.
His friend excuses herself, probably to go to the restroom.
A waiter refills his glass. Every night, he steps outside for a cigarette at exactly the same time, and that time will come around in roughly ten minutes.
Creatures of habit make the easiest targets.
While I wait, I check my phone, flipping through the feeds from the cameras positioned at different angles around the hotel.
There’s one in the lobby, pointed at the front entrance.
One covering the side exit. One in the hallway outside his room.
Hacking the hotel’s security was child’s play.
Why bother having security in the first place if you’re going to make it that easy?
I hacked it within hours of our little encounter, because I knew he wouldn’t listen. Men like him never do, especially when they feel like they have the moral high ground.
Sure enough, he’s still there. The hallway camera shows his closed door, along with a thin strip of light visible underneath.
I watched him go out and come back earlier.
I told the son of a bitch to get out of Prague, and he’s sitting in his room now like I handed him an invitation instead of a threat.
It should piss me off. Actually, it does. But there’s something else mixed in with the anger. Something that feels uncomfortably like curiosity.
Who is he?
I know his name now. I know both of them.
When I pressed the barrel of the Beretta to his chest, my other hand was busy.
It’s reflex at this point—if you get that close to someone, you take whatever you can.
My fingers found the inside pocket of his jacket and lifted his wallet before he ever knew it was gone.
He was too focused on my face. Reaching for me, trying to touch me. Trying to find someone who isn’t there.
The wallet held two IDs. The first matched the name on his hotel registration: James Ward. It’s a decent fake, good enough to pass a casual check, not good enough to survive real scrutiny. I’ve seen enough forgeries to know the difference.
The second ID was tucked behind it. Real. Worn at the edges, like it had lived in the wallet for a while. Nick Brooks.
I’ve carried enough fake IDs to wallpaper a room, but there’s something about the fact that he keeps his real name close—hidden, but close.
It tells me more about him than he probably realizes.
He hasn’t let go of who he is. Some people in this life do.
They become the cover so completely, the original person disappears. He hasn’t done that.
I ran the name as soon as I got back to my apartment. I plugged Nick Brooks into every database I have access to, every search engine.
I found almost nothing.
No social media. No public records leading anywhere useful. There are a few hits on the name, but none that matched. They were the wrong age or location, the wrong everything.
Digitally speaking, the guy’s a ghost. Someone has gone out of their way to keep him off the grid and done a good job of it. That takes resources. Connections. Regular people don’t scrub themselves from the internet. Regular people want to be found.
The fact that he doesn’t, means he’s anything but regular.
I’m pulled back to the present by the buzz of my phone. A text from a blocked number, which means it’s from the handler Vincenzo assigned me years ago. I’ve never met him in person. I only know him as a voice on the phone and words on a screen.
Status?
I type back without looking away from the restaurant. On schedule.
Confirm when complete.
I don’t bother responding. He knows I’ll confirm because I always do. That’s the arrangement. I do the job, I report in, and I collect payment before disappearing until the next one. That’s the deal I made with myself a long time ago. No complications, no attachments. It’s served me well.
Until now, anyway.
The target stands up from the table right on time.
He buttons his jacket and says something to the waiter before heading toward the back of the restaurant.
A service corridor leads to a small courtyard with high walls and a security camera I disabled this morning.
There is no line of sight from the street.
Time for his nightly cigarette. It will be his last.
I take my place behind the rifle’s scope, peering down into the courtyard.
He probably doesn’t deserve the mercy of a quick death, based on what his file told me, but I don’t get a say in how these things are done.
I can’t afford to act like an undisciplined vigilante.
It doesn’t matter how many people he’s hurt or destroyed or how he did it.
He’s going to get what’s coming to him, either way.
He looks so damn self-satisfied as he lights a cigarette, the tip glowing in the darkness. He might as well wear a target.
I squeeze the trigger. He goes down, cigarette still burning on the ground next to his hand.
I’ll be long gone by the time anyone goes to look for him—I’m already disassembling the rifle, placing it back in its case and swinging it over my shoulder.
I drop onto the fire escape and take it quickly, silently on soft soles.
I should feel something, right?
In the beginning, each job left a film on me that I couldn’t wash off no matter how I tried. Not like guilt. More like the awareness that I’d just done something I could never take back. A person who existed no longer existed, because of what I did.
But over time, that feeling faded, the way everything fades after long enough. Now it’s muscle memory. The same as tying my shoes.
So why couldn’t I do it to him?
That’s the question that’s been gnawing at me for two days.
I had him at point-blank range. Gun to his chest, my finger on the trigger.
I had every reason in the world to put him down like a sick dog and walk away.
He’s been asking around about me. He knows things about me, or thinks he does.
He’s a loose end, and loose ends get people killed. I know that better than anyone.
So what did I do? I shot him in the leg. In the goddamn leg, like some amateur who can’t finish a job. I could’ve put a bullet between his eyes without blinking, but I gave him a flesh wound and a warning. Like warnings ever work on men like him. They don’t. They only make them more determined.
I knew that when I pulled the trigger, and I chose the leg anyway.
I’m three blocks from the restaurant before I slow my pace and blend into the foot traffic.
Tourists staring at their phones. Couples walking arm in arm.
A group of kids, probably living the college experience I never had, spills out of a bar.
I adjust my jacket to cover the case strap, becoming another woman walking home.
But my mind won’t stop moving. It insists on going back to that room.
To his face when I told him my name is Ivy.
It hurt him; something crumbled inside, but he pulled himself together.
I recognized it because I do it, too. We’re both people who’ve learned to keep the inside from showing on the outside.
The difference is, he slipped in front of me, and more than once. He talked about grieving for me, and his voice cracked. He reached for my face, and his hand was shaking.
The worst part? The part that still makes me feel cold inside? My chest went tight when I noticed that shaking hand. I didn’t understand it in the moment, and I sure as hell immediately resented it.
Because I don’t do feelings. Feelings are liabilities. Vincenzo made sure I understood that much from an early point. You feel nothing, fear nothing, and nothing can be used against you.
So why does part of me want to know what it would’ve felt like if I’d let him touch my face?
That’s dangerous thinking. It gets people killed. I need to get my head straight.
I need to go back to the facts.
Nick Brooks has been searching for me for months.
He has almost no digital footprint.
He claims to know me from a life I don’t remember. He says I have a brother who’s been looking for me.
I shot him in the thigh, and he didn’t scream. He didn’t call the police. He didn’t fucking leave.
I wish I could stop thinking about it. I wish it more than just about anything as my feet slap against the pavement.
No matter how I try, Vincenzo’s story runs on in my head. I was rescued. My biological family was dangerous. There was an accident. I was hurt badly, scarred. I still carry those scars to this day. The Russos found me and took me in. They gave me a home and an education. A purpose.
Vincenzo told me I should be grateful. For a long time, I was. I was so grateful, I didn’t ask too many questions. I was so grateful, I accepted the blanks in my memory as a mercy instead of a wound.
But there are cracks in the story. Tiny ones, the kind you don’t notice unless you’re looking. For years, I wasn’t looking… or I refused to, because not looking was so much easier than the alternative.
The way Vincenzo’s face would go tight whenever I brought up the past. He would change the subject with a joke or a distraction, smooth as silk, making me forget I’d ever asked.
The way no one offered me a single detail about the family I supposedly came from. Not once in twelve years. Not a name, a location, a picture.
Nothing but the scars on my arm and down my leg to prove any of it happened at all.
Nick Brooks is specific. He has names and details. He has emotion in his voice. He’s the first person in twelve years who’s offered me something concrete about a life I can’t remember, which makes him either the most valuable person I’ve ever met or the most dangerous.
I need to find out which.
The walk takes fifteen minutes. My apartment is small, two rooms above a bakery in a neighborhood where people mind their own business.
It’s functional, not comfortable. I don’t do comfortable.
My space is clean, organized. A bed, a chair, a desk.
A rack of equipment I keep behind a false wall in the closet, the same rack I keep in all of my safe houses.
Once inside, I set down my case and released a long breath. The job is done. I’m back safe.
And I’m still thinking of Nick. The hotel. I should let it go. Letting it go would be easier and safer. I should text my contact, confirm the job is finished, and move on.
Instead, I change into fresh clothes. Black, as always. The only way to get answers about Nick Brooks is to get them from Nick Brooks.
Which means I’m going back to the hotel.
I won’t be sloppy about it this time. Last time, I stood there in the light with my gun drawn like some dramatic character in a movie.
It was stupid. Effective, maybe, but not for extraction.
If I want information out of him, I need the upper hand in a way that doesn’t give him room to appeal to emotions I’m not supposed to have.
I’ll go in quietly. I’ll find out what he knows and get my answers. If those answers aren’t satisfactory, I’ll finish what I should’ve finished two days ago.
No more warnings. No more leg shots.
I check my weapons before leaving. I have the Beretta, plus a backup strapped to my ankle and a blade in my boot. Force of habit. I pull my hair back before checking the hotel feed one more time.
The door is closed, the light off this time. He’s either asleep, or he’s out.
I take the long way to the hotel. The east side has no camera coverage in the alley, and the entrance lock is a joke.
Thirty seconds with a tension wrench and a pick, and the door is open.
The stairwell is empty. I move up four flights without making a sound, stepping on the inner edges of the stairs, where they’re less likely to creak.
It takes nothing to bypass the deadbolt on the door, sidestepping the key card system. Ten seconds, tops, barely worth calling it a lock. I ease the door open, leading with the Beretta.
The room is dark. The bed is empty. I guess he’s refused maid service, for obvious reasons—there’s a rust-colored stain on the carpet between where he dropped to the floor and the bathroom. His bag is on the floor by the closet.
The bathroom door is open. The light is on, but the room is empty.
He’s not here.
Something prickles at the back of my neck. It’s the instinct that’s kept me alive through situations that should’ve killed me. That instinct is screaming now, telling me something is very wrong, that I need to get out.
Maybe I would, if it wasn’t for the hand that clamps over my mouth from behind.
Instantly, I react. Driving an elbow backward, aiming for the solar plexus. He’s already turned, absorbing the blow against his side while his other arm wraps around me, pinning my weapon arm against my body. Damn, he’s strong, stronger than I expected. He moves like someone who’s done this before.
The needle slides into my neck before I can get free.
Cold. It spreads from the injection site, radiating outward, turning my muscles into liquid as it pumps through my system with every quick heartbeat.
My fingers loosen around the gun. My legs stop cooperating, going loose, useless.
The room begins to blur. Somewhere in the fading distance, I hear his voice, low and steady against my ear.
“I’m sorry, Laura. I really am.”
My name is Ivy, I want to say, but the words dissolve as the darkness takes me.