Arrow to the Soul (20 page)

She glanced again to the moon and wondered if black was just another shade of blue. How she longed for Ninka’s blue, blue sky.

“The
sohei
were my mother, father, brother, sister, God, and great deceiver. They were my beginning and my end, and I lived solely to protect them. Before I could walk, I began training in the martial arts of
Wing Chun, Kung Fu,
and
Jeet Kune Do
. It began with silence—learning the feel and taste of the darkness. You cannot imagine the conditioning a baby’s mind can undergo. It would seem impossible and yet in all things great and small there is possibility.”

She shrugged. “I began to train with weapons, especially the
yumi
and
ya,
from the time I could hold them. Even before my first steps, I was shooting. And again, you may find that unbelievable but it is true. The name you call me, Saya, means ‘swift arrow.’ It was the weapon I excelled at. I held a sword for the first time at the age of two.” She inhaled slowly, deeply, let the warm, cedar and citrus-scented air of the room move through her body and settle her. “I killed for the first time at the age of four and a half.”

His attention was a blade at the back of her neck. She felt his disbelief and knew that was as it should be. Who would ever believe a toddler capable of taking life?

“Outsiders threatened our home and I was sent on a journey through the Highlands to the camp of the enemy. A single maid went with me. She was more frightened than I was. I crawled into their camp in the darkness, poisoned their water supply with the liver of puffer fish, and then I picked them off one by one. At the tender age of four I escorted many, many souls to hell and deposited them there for the
Oni
to feast on.” Silence and then, “Do you know what it is like to take a life, Mr. Collins?”

“Yes.”

Arrow nodded. “Imagine that feeling hundreds of times over. Imagine not even understanding the concept of death, just that you are the force that will mete it out, and should you fail, it will be your life that ends…horribly.”

“Goddamn it, Saya,
stop
,” he said in a brutally low voice.

“You asked,” she reminded him, giving no quarter because he’d set the wheels of this in motion. “The blood ran like a river that night, but when I returned home, it was to find my
sohei
lying dead in the temple. Only one remained, my master, and he was held tightly by the black-eyed man.”

Adam hissed in a breath.

“I was Saya before that day, Mr. Collins. I was something completely different after.”

“What did he do?”

Adam’s fury stroked along her skin. Was it for her? Or because of her? Difficult questions when she still had so much story left.

“Tell me what that motherfucker did, Saya,” Adam ordered her.

She smiled up at the moon. “He decapitated my master
sohei
in front of me because I refused to go with him peaceably. I was already a killer but I’d run up on someone worse than me. He was a bad, bad man. His eyes were blacker than the pit of hell, Mr. Collins. And I knew hell. I also knew what he was capable of and in my fear I allowed him to take my
sohei’s
life in his big hands and snuff it out.” Another deep breath though the pain of her recollection was nothing more than a dull ache after so many years. “The blood splattered on me and I stood there staring at Joseph. I wiped my face and licked the blood from my hand, desperate to capture some part of my
sohei
before it disappeared completely. The
sohei
were all I had ever known. Though they raised me to kill, I loved them as much as a killer can ever love the one who beget them.” She glanced at him then. “Blood tastes like copper, but it is a beautiful color when it is first drawn.”

“Saya,
stop
,” he demanded, mouth flattened, eyes hard.

She ignored him. “He tranquilized me because when next I woke I was in the black room. No light, no food, no water. I remember the smell of the dried blood and I remember screaming. Even as a baby I abhorred the darkness though I had been born from it. I craved the light, craved the warmth, and somehow the black-eyed man knew this and he used it against me.”

Adam was there then, kneeling in front of her, cupping her face in his big, warm hands and stroking her cheeks with his thumbs. “Saya, you’re here now, with me,” he said.

She shook her head. “I am always there, Mr. Collins, in that small, dark, cold room in Arequipa. To be anywhere else is to lose sight of my objective.” She smiled at him then because on his face was exactly the emotion she needed to center herself—disgust.
Clarity, precious clarity
. “Thank you for tonight. I have never known as much pleasure as I did when I held you in my body.”

He pulled her up and she didn’t resist as he took her seat and placed her in his lap. At some point he pulled on his sweats but his chest was bare. She hissed as his warmth pressed against her chilled skin. He pulled her closer.

“But you are right. I am a killer, Mr. Collins. Reborn from the black swamp, death is all I know. What my
sohei
began, Joseph Bombardier perfected.”

He pushed her head to his shoulder, held her tight. She didn’t deserve this from him. Where was his antipathy? “Tell me the rest,” he said quietly.

“What is there to tell that you cannot guess?” Desperation slithered through her gut. Surely he didn’t care about her life. What was his game?

“I believe you said it best in Mexico, Saya. This is not a game,” he murmured.

She’d spoken aloud? Arrow was losing control, the waves crashing and ebbing, battering and slicing through her sea of calm.

“Don’t do this, Mr. Collins.”

He tipped her face up and her gaze sought his unerringly. “It must be done.”

She swallowed hard and pushed up and away from Adam. “I won’t do this with you.”

His face went hard and her heart stuttered. “You will.”

His tone brooked no argument and anger pierced her. He thought because he’d fucked her once he deserved something from her? “You want the truth, Mr. Collins? The entire, sordid, unvarnished truth? You want to know how Joseph Bombardier took innocent children,
babies
, from the only homes they knew and forged them in the hot fires of his hate? You want the details of how I was placed in a darkened, locked room, starved and thirsted until I begged for death? Is that what you want?” She began to pace, her rage forcing her to move lest she fight the man who’d given her something no one else ever had.

“I want the truth. All of it. But mostly, Saya, I want you to purge it.”

She stopped and glanced at him before she grabbed her hair and pulled. The pain did nothing but his face blanked. Arrow felt herself decompensating—she had to fight to hold onto her sanity in that moment. The memories were always there, but normally she was strong enough to hold them off. Tonight, after taking this man inside her body, she was weak.

And it was unacceptable. He made to get up and her gaze drilled into him.

“Do not move, Mr. Collins. You want the entire truth, but if you move I will kill you where you stand and walk away from here unchanged and committed even more to death.”

Please let him understand. Please let him just…be…still.
Any movement on his part would be considered an act of aggression. She was beyond logic now as the memories cleaved her in two.

His hands fisted on his thighs and he must have recognized the truth of her words because though he sat up straighter, he didn’t move otherwise.

“When Joseph killed my
sohei
I made him a promise. Four years old, covered in the blood of the only father I had ever known, I swore to him I would take his throat with my arrow and I would drink his
chi
, revel in the feel and taste of it as it slid down my throat. Do you know what he did?” she asked as she continued to fist her hair and pull, hoping the bite of pain would center her.

Adam shook his head. Silence was good.

“He laughed at me and kicked my master’s head down the steps of the temple. I didn’t even get to bury my dead. Then he knocked me out and when I woke in the darkness fear held my hand and drenched me in its bittersweet perfume.”

“Darkness has been used against me from the crib. You asked how my
sohei
punished me. They used the black. Do you know the things that can be seen in the absence of light? My eyes are sensitive, they always have been, and I’ve discovered it is a genetic mutation that gives them this color, but I can literally
see
in the dark. Do you know how incredibly lonely the darkness is? It presses on you, unrelenting until it’s all you know, all you taste and all you feel, but it never offers succor. I was a baby but it did not matter how loud I cried, my
sohei
never came until I was silent. To have that used against me again by Joseph was akin to tearing off my fingernails one at a time.

I was four when I took my first life but then Joseph took me and began his conditioning and it was
my
life being taken. “You will be a fine addition, killer.” That’s what he said to me when he opened the door the first time. I had nearly broken but finally remembered that a blind man doesn’t fear the snake.”

Adam’s gaze bored into her skull. She felt his perusal, but she was locked in that tiny room again, alone and frightened beyond measure.

“I managed to rip a piece of wood from the wall of that room and I honed it into a small sliver. When Joseph came close, I stuck him with it, but I was not yet quick enough, strong enough to damage him the way I needed to escape. He laughed at me and I went into the water pit. When he pulled me out, I was put back in the black room.”

I learned to do what he wanted or suffer the room. I knew the darkness hated me, but even so that’s where I thrived. My hate found a purpose in that room and it grew, festered, until I had to kill or go mad.

I was almost a full year younger than the others, though they did not know that. But my mind was stronger than theirs. I had been born to kill, you see, and they were being broken and reconditioned. His work with me was more about controlling the demon inside.

“You will take my enemies to hell for me, Arrow,” he said before my first kill for him. In my head the only person I wanted to see there was Joseph. He is very superstitious. He believed the ramblings of my
sohei
; he believed I was a descendant of a demon. But I was not. I was a child, flesh and blood, bone and marrow, and I had been made into a killer.

When he began to train us all together, it was—
difficult
. I had not been trained to work with others and Bone, Blade, and Bullet were older than me. We were each punished in specific ways but sometimes we were given each other’s punishments and those times were actually reward. Punishments can be reward, did you know that?” She took a deep breath then, let it flow through her body and mind. She glanced at him and saw his gaze trained on her, black eyes bright in the moon-bit night.

“I messed up frequently because trusting another child with something you don’t even understand is nearly impossible. But we did it and learned from one another in the process. Bullet taught us revenge. Blade taught us hate. Bone taught us how to lust for death. And I taught my sisters how to control their fear and panic, how to make their minds stronger in the face of destruction. The weakest of us, Ninka, was a tool Bombardier used to sharpen our hatred.

“When he had her killed in front of us, it was the string that bound us tighter together. From the moment she left this world, the rest of us became sisters. Not based in love, Mr. Collins. Based in hate. As we have grown, we have become more than sisters. As we trained we became pack mates. Like wild animals we bonded together, conditioned to kill or be killed, and we are effective at what we do.”

It was quiet in the room and she barked out a laugh.

“So there you have it. Not too much detail, but just enough to give you an idea of what you laid down with in that bed.” She laughed again and it sounded horrible in the stillness. Adam watched her, face blank, black eyes full of compassion and so different from the ones she saw in her dreams. “When you say purge, Mr. Collins, it is a pipe dream. I could no more purge Joseph Bombardier from my life than I could stop breathing. He created the hate inside of me and to separate from that will stop my heart from beating. But I can kill him. I can bathe in his blood and know that he’ll never do to another baby what he did to First Team. But once that is done, I am finished. As a soulless creature born only for death, Arrow will disappear.”

“Why?”

“Always with the questions, Mr. Collins. But the answer to that is simple. Arrow will disappear because a killer without a target is a killer no more. And killing is all I’ve ever known.”

Chapter Nineteen

Soulless, she’d said. Adam could not comprehend the thought. She was so much more than a killer. Yet how to tell a woman who’d been bred for death-bringing that she could be…

What
?

Adam growled. Her gaze pinned him to the spot and rage simmered in his gut. A baby in a crib honed to become a killer. What the fuck kind of monsters did that? And it all began with a mother who should have protected her child, and instead, because of some superstitious bullshit, turned her over to the devil.

“Come here,” he ordered.

Her back straightened before her stance relaxed. She was fucking glorious just then. A warrior silhouetted in moonlight that bent and curved around her body, highlighting her danger while at the same time making him
want
.

“I will hurt you, Mr. Collins.”

Her thumb and forefinger rubbed together, the only tell she’d ever demonstrated. That she longed for the string of her bow between those fingers was an indication of just how upset she was.

“My name is Adam. In this room—tonight—you will use it because you are not Arrow here, you are Saya,” he bit out between clenched teeth.