Assassins in Love (13 page)

He stopped the lift.

He needed to make a decision. He had no idea what she was telling the security office. He wanted to wait for her outside, but he wasn’t sure how that would look, particularly if she told them that he had ordered the hit on Testrial.

Misha sighed.

He had no idea why she would report him. Or maybe she was going to report the square little man. Maybe the man had lied to Misha. Maybe he had tried to hurt Rikki.

A flash of anger ran through Misha. He didn’t want anyone to hurt her, anyone to touch her.

But he knew she could handle herself.

He would talk to her later, after she left the office.

Until then, he would continue to imitate a passenger having a good time. The best way to do that would be to return to the lounge on B Deck. He would drink or, to be more accurate, pretend to drink, and continue to maintain his cover.

There was nothing else he could do.

Windham led Rikki to another part of security. This cubicle had lab equipment, which surprised Rikki. The ship had more sophisticated systems than it claimed to have. She would have to be careful not to get her own DNA mixed in here, because that might misidentify her as well—not as Rikki Bastogne, but not as Rachel Carter either.

Windham brought over a small device, shaped like a keypad. Rikki recognized it: a DNA coder.

“This won’t tell us who he is, unless he’s in one of the systems we have access to,” Windham said. “But it’s a start, anyway, and if he’s not here, then we can check other systems when we get to port.”

Rikki nodded. She had known that, but her alias Rachel hadn’t. Or at least, that was how she decided to play it.

“What do I do?” Rikki asked.

“Which hand is it?” Windham asked.

Rikki did not hold up the hand she used to touch her collar. She had been very careful here.

“Touch it right there.” Windham pointed to the tiny pad on the device.

Rikki touched it, and released Misha’s skin cells from the pouch she had kept them in. Then she looked up. “Like that?”

“Like that,” Windham said.

“What if my DNA gets mixed with his?” Rikki asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Windham said. “I have it set to look at male DNA only.”

Excellent. That was better than Rikki could have hoped for. That way Windham wouldn’t know that none of Rikki’s DNA got into the mix. Windham would have thought that odd.

“It’ll only take a minute,” Windham said.

Rikki nodded, hoping the gesture came off more nervous than knowing. She wondered if the ship had access to the Assassins Guild’s member database. It wouldn’t surprise her if the ship did have it; that would be one way to protect Guild members if there was a dicey incident far from any port.

“Well,” Windham said.

Rikki looked at her. Windham was staring at the device. Rikki couldn’t see the display, and she knew that had to be on purpose.

“You found something?” she asked, making her voice more breathless than usual.

“Yeah,” Windham said, and in her slow speech, Rikki could hear Windham debating something, probably how much to tell this passenger who suspected she had been coerced into something she wouldn’t have normally done.

“What?” Rikki asked.

Windham frowned a little. “You’re right. He’s not who he says he is. He’s a member of the Assassins Guild. Have you angered anyone lately, Miss Carter?”

“N-No,” Rikki said. She was beginning to wonder if this had been such a good idea after all. She hadn’t thought that Windham might think her an interstellar criminal.

“I see nothing in your records that would indicate problems either,” Windham said more to herself than to Rikki.

Rikki had to get her away from this line of thought. “Was I, like, um, a diversion or something?”

She made her voice sound small and frightened. She hunched as she spoke, as if she couldn’t believe who had touched her.

“Possibly,” Windham said. “It says here that his name is Mikael Yurinovich Orlinski.”

Rikki looked up in alarm. Suddenly she was no longer acting. “What?”

“Mikael Yurinovich Orlinski.” Windham looked up at her curiously. “Do you know him?”

Rikki’s breath had left her body. She had to force herself to inhale. She felt ill.

She sank into one of the nearby chairs.

“Miss Carter?” Windham asked. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Rikki said softly, and she wasn’t lying.

“Then you do know him,” Windham said.

“Not exactly,” Rikki said.

“Then what is it?” Windham asked.

Rikki looked up at her and told her the absolute truth:

“Eighteen years ago,” she said, “his mother murdered my father.”

What she remembered about that night—the night her father died—lived in flashes. Initially, she had no memory of it at all. She woke up in a hospital bed, burned and immobile and in more pain than she had ever been in in her life.

A nurse soothed her, told her to go back to sleep, she would be taken care of, really, and oh, she was lucky to have survived.

Survived
what?
she wanted to ask, but she drifted to sleep before she could form the words.

It took weeks to form the words. By then, she had had nanotreatments that had repaired every wound, and had prevented the worst of the scarring. Later she got more nanotreatments, these to permanently vanquish the scars.

(Which made her privately wonder as she told the story to Windham: why hadn’t Misha gotten rid of his scars? The treatments were easy, harmless, and certainly not expensive for an assassin with the Guild.)

But as she sat in that security office on a cruise ship, eighteen years later, she found she couldn’t explain how the memories came back or indeed, even what had happened.

She never talked about what had happened. She tried not to think about it, which of course meant she thought about it every single day.

About the flashes, and why they only came in flashes, and why the memories were never complete, even after the courts ordered a review, something that should have brought the entire memory back. Her counselors and therapists—and there were dozens—all said the power of her mind kept those memories away, that as long as she didn’t want to remember, she never ever would, at least not past the memories that she already had, that she had permitted herself, because those memories were, apparently, the only safe ones.

Or at least the ones that weren’t the most traumatic.

What she remembered was this:

—Her father’s face, purple with anger, his eyes small and flashing, his voice lacerating:
You
don’t beg
.
You
never
beg
.
Begging
gets
you
nowhere
.

—The barracks (she and her father had lived in barracks) burning orange against the night sky, the flames illuminating the entire neighborhood, families standing outside covered in blankets and wearing nothing else, one little girl crying, sobbing so hard that Rikki wanted to tell her to shut up, crying got you nowhere, crying certainly wouldn’t rebuild a house or make the pain go away. Instead, Rikki stared at that little girl—blond, heavy—as if that little girl held the secret to the entire universe.

—The quiet inside the house, a movement in the shadows, Rikki’s heart pounding so hard it sounded like it came from outside her rather than inside. She couldn’t catch her breath, but she knew someone was here, someone who didn’t belong, someone was inside the house, someone else, someone stealthy and silent and oh, so very terrifying.

—And then, finally, a woman’s face, embedded in Rikki’s mind like a brand. The authorities had pulled that image. It had been predominant in Rikki’s mind, and it had stayed that way, although eventually it was more than a harshly beautiful face, more than the close-cut white-blond hair, the pale ice-blue eyes.

Later, as the memories shifted, grew, returned ever so slightly, the woman spoke to Rikki:
Don’t worry. We have not come for you. You will survive this. You will be Just Fine
.

Just Fine. Sure, she was Just Fine. Damaged, battered, bruised, unable to speak for weeks, unable to cry for even longer. Even now, she rarely cried, never saw the point really; tears were for weaklings after all, weaklings and chubby little blond girls who had lost their homes to sudden fires, but not their fathers, not their entire
lives
.

Rikki had not been blond or chubby. She had short brown hair, and had been so thin that the hospital staff kept encouraging her to eat, worried that she had forgotten how in her long sleep, worried that maybe—like some spacer families—she had never really learned how to eat solids, only how to absorb liquid nutrients just to stay alive.

She had eaten real food her entire life, but her family—her father—had never had money, so she hadn’t eaten a lot of it. She hadn’t done a lot of anything Before. That was how she thought of it all: Before and After.

She liked After better.

But the In-Between, as she healed and people kept asking questions, and they kept wanting to know exactly what happened and why, she had hated the In-Between.

Mostly because she hadn’t known the answers. Only that the terrifying blond woman, whom they later identified from the image in Rikki’s mind as Anna Ilyinichna Valentinov, better known as Halina Layla Orlinskaya, one of the most ruthless assassins in the galaxy. It was said she only killed for political gain and she never, ever left survivors, But later, Rikki learned that was not true, not in the years when Rikki’s father died.

In those years, Orlinskaya had killed for money, and she had left dozens of survivors. In fact, she had become a wanted woman by her own government because she had refused to destroy an entire town, a town (it was said) that she had fallen in love with, a town that she notified of her government’s intent to utterly demolish it, thus preventing the town’s destruction, and saving thousands of lives.

After that, after that nonevent, Orlinskaya had killed at least a thousand people, but only those she was contracted for, leaving parents and siblings and casual bystanders alive.

Oh, and children as well. She left a lot of children, mentally scarred from what they had seen, but never, ever touched or bruised or physically damaged in any way.

The fire, the bruising, the battering that Rikki had undergone—those were the unusual things, things that didn’t fit into Orlinskaya’s usual pattern, things that made no sense, and ultimately made the investigation against her come to nothing.

But the authorities had her DNA on scene. They knew she had been there, that she was the only one who could have killed Rikki’s father.

They simply hadn’t known why.

Rikki couldn’t tell the security official on the ship any of this. She wasn’t sure exactly how she could tell Windham anything pertinent without blowing her cover. Rikki Bastogne was listed as an unregistered assassin in many databases, which could easily get her in trouble.

Yet she wanted to tell Windham how to look it up. She really wanted to. Because there, in the files, Windham would find pictures of Mikael Yurinovich Orlinski who, for the six years prior to the death of Rikki’s father, traveled with his mother on every single kill. Sometimes, the authorities weren’t certain if Orlinskaya had killed her victims herself or if she had sent Mikael to do so, like a female lion providing easy prey to train her cub in the art of survival.

For everyone agreed that Orlinskaya killed to survive. First she had killed at the behest of her government, and then, after decades and their decision to put a bounty on her head, she killed to protect herself (and her cub) and to put food on the table. Killing was all she had known.

It was all Rikki had known as well, but of course, she did not tell Windham this. She didn’t mention how the testing had gone before the authorities put her in government care, how she had shown an incredible aptitude for death-dealing as well.

Death-dealers had thousands of professions. Various societies had learned to recognize death-dealers because ignoring them caused crime and baseless murders. Channeling death-dealers into the military or mercenary positions or, yes, as assassins for hire, enabled society to keep these dangerous people under control.

Rikki had always thought it ironic that the culture thought her dangerous.

Or she did until the first time she had snapped the neck of a man five times her size.

Then she understood what everyone had seen in her.

And it hadn’t surprised her that this thing existed inside her. She remained calm, detached, oddly uncaring after those missions.

After all except Testrial, when she had lost herself in heat and warmth and sensation.