Page 75 of Null & Void

“The Silent Assassin murdered my brother.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

My 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.

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