Page 2 of Her Mercenary
Another minute passed as I surveyed the block, cataloging everything around me. The rusty cars, the old shopping carts, the line of the starving homeless.
“Fuck it.” I stepped out of the shadows, flipped up my collar, shoved my hands in my pockets, and strode down the sidewalk, retracing the steps of the men. The wind was biting, stinging my cheeks and blurring my vision as I quickly passed the diner and rounded the block.
I stopped and looked around.
No one.
Feeling again for the knife in my pocket, I continued forward until reaching the alley behind the diner where my mother worked. Steam rolled from the street vents, obscuring the alleyway.
My stomach vibrated with nerves as I pulled the knife from my pocket and stepped through the steam. There they were, two looming silhouettes, the sharp outline of their suits punctuating the gravity of the moment.
The older one turned, and I stopped.
We stared at each other, faceless men in the dirty alley. The outline of a knife twinkled from the man’s hand. The shorter one, whose face I never saw, turned and hurried in the opposite direction.
My instinct that something was wrong skyrocketed.
Gripping the splintered hilt of my knife, I advanced on the large silhouette. Though I couldn’t see his face, nor he mine, I knew without question his eyes were locked on me.
Until I saw the dying ember of a cigarette butt at his feet, the smoke swirling upward, catching on the wind. The pale, delicate hand lying limp next to it.
I lunged forward, focusing on the body lying in a crumpled heap on the cold concrete. My heart seizing, I recognized the curly auburn hair, the small stature, the tattered blue coat.
“Mom!” I screamed, dropping to my knees, no longer caring about the man in the suit. Tears welled in my eyes as I gently rolled her over.
Her head lolled to the side, strands of auburn tickling across a pair of glassy green eyes, staring blankly up at the night sky. A circle of deep crimson colored her stomach, and a growing bloodstain spread over her blue coat.
I opened my mouth to talk to her, to say something, anything, but nothing came out. Carefully, I pulled open the flaps of the coat. My mother had been stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen.
My mother had been murdered.
My tears freezing, I stilled, the realization igniting a fire that swept through me in a hysterical rage that I quite literally felt consuming my body.
I dropped my mother from my arms, her dead body landing with a thud on the concrete. Slowly, I rose, no longer human. Instead, I was an animal, feral, wild with fury, tunnel-visioned on my prey.
I left my mother’s body lying there in the middle of the alley while I chased down the man who killed her. She lay, dead in her own blood, as I tackled the man in the suit and shoved my knife into his throat.
For the rest of my life, I’ll never forget his face. His stoic expression as the tip of the knife opened his skin. The way his gaze pierced mine as I dragged the blade across his jugular. His expression wasn’t one of fear or panic. Instead, the man stared at me with an intensity that turned my blood to ice.
Never once did his eyes leave mine.
Never once, as I watched the first man I’d killed take his last breath. The first of many to come.
In that single moment, that night in the slums of Dublin, I rewrote my path, my life, my goals, what I would become. It solidified the monster I would become.
Just like him.
I still see those eyes every night when I close mine. Taunting me, guiding me, hypnotically keeping my head underwater as I navigate revenge.
There’s no way out. The man in the suit now owns me.
There’s no way out.
Not until I find the other man. The one who got away.
SAM
The present