Page 18 of High Stakes and Soulmates
“Ezio.”
Slowly, I look over at my commanding officer. “Yes, sir.”
“What the fuck are you doing out here?”
“Waiting for my next order,” I say as I stand at attention even though the person doing the ordering is my brother, which is likely the only reason I can get away with half of the shit I do. That, and they believe I have skills that are necessary for them to complete a job.
He jabs my chest with his finger. “I should not have to wander around to find you. I get that you don’t like killing, but you’re the best at it in the group.”
“Then I’ll just have to make myself worse at it.”
“What, so they can kill you first?” Lorenzo asks. “We have been tracking this asshole down for months. He’s killed countless innocents. He does not deserve a trial. We are to discreetly dispose of him.”
I know it’s not just the “innocents” that he’s dying for. It’s likely something he knows that we’re not privy to since the higher-ups like to keep us in the dark half the time.
“Discreetly,” Lorenzo reminds me. “One of the others will flush him out. You will tail him and kill him in his home. There will be a ledger in his belongings. Take it with you and don’t leave the house until you find it.”
“Yes, sir,” I say as I start toward the tavern. It really doesn’t take long for the man to flee. Knowing my brother, he didn’t send anyone in there as a soldier, but something less imposing so he wouldn’t run far and we wouldn’t draw attention to ourselves.
It's all very questionable, what exactly we’re doing. None of us have worn a uniform since we set foot in this place. Instead, we were instructed to blend in and pretend like we were part of a merchant crew simply traveling through.
I’m well aware that I’ll likely never know what we’re doing, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t be a pawn in their game.
Soldiers don’t sneak into men’s homes and slaughter them in their beds.
But this one is supposed to.
My target isn’t hard to trail. He’s had a bit to drink, and while he’s obviously paranoid, looking every which way as he walks, he never sees me. He hurries over to what really couldn’t be called anything more than a run-down hut on the edge of town that he slips inside. I wait long enough for him to settle down before I reach the door. I pull at it, but there’s some kindof small bar latch on it. It takes very little for me to slide a thin rock in and jimmy it until it unlatches.
Carefully, I pull it open as the hinges of the old door creak, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to wake him. There’s enough light from the moon creeping in that I can avoid any of the sparse furniture while I make my way to the corner where I see his bed and the lump inside of it.
There’s one other door that must lead to the second room in the hut, maybe a kitchen or storage, but beyond that, it seems like most of what he owns is in this room, so hopefully finding the ledger won’t be too hard. The floor creaks as I move closer to him and I grimace, knowing that it was loud enough to disturb the man who’d just fallen asleep. The man wakes, startled, but he doesn’t see me until I’m on him. He manages to get a “Wha—” out before I slide my knife across his neck, silencing him.
It’s quick, honestly much quicker than if they’d dragged him to a trial where he would’ve died anyway… but it still doesn’t feel good. Even knowing that he’s a bad man who the army needed eliminated, I feel a twisting pain in my stomach.
I try not to look at the way his body twitches in death, the way the blood pools out, the way my hand shakes as I clean the blood off my blade using the blanket on the bed.
Wanting to get out of this room as quickly as I can, I hurry over to the desk and start pulling things from it while I search for the ledger. It’s nowhere out in the open, but I’ve seen my fair share of tricks to know that one of the drawers in the desk isn’t deep enough. I just have to figure out how to open it. Finding the thin hidden latch, I press it and it releases the hidden drawer. What I don’t expect is for the ledger to fall out and hit the ground, startling me.
Grabbing it, I start toward the door before I hear a noise coming from the other side of the door leading to the other room.
No one told me there was someone else in the house. How would my brother not have known he was interacting with another? Haven’t they been watching him for days?
The door begins to swing open, and since it’s closer to the door leading out, I’m stuck in this small room until they move on. I sink back into the shadows, having little other choice in the tiny hut.
But what I see makes my stomach tighten. A child of about twelve rushes right over to his father’s bed as I have this fucked-up desire to grab him and drag him out before he can see what I’ve done.
“Father? Father… no! Father!” His screams tear through me and I feel like I can’t breathe. Using the sounds of his despair to mask my footsteps, I turn and slip through the door without him even noticing. But I can’t escape from the child’s cries echoing in my mind. I’m shaking and I know that I have to get away in case he did see me, but I’ m finding it hard to run. Hell, it’s hard to even breathe.
What have I done?
Why couldn’t anyone else have gone in there? He was a drunk, defenseless man. It took no skill to kill him, so why did it have to be me? Why do I have to keep killing these people? I just want to run, but I know they’ll hunt me down if I do.
The screams of the child echo in my mind while I grab my head. What the fuck have I done? And now that child always has to have the last memory of their father be that…
Nausea roils inside me as I rush around a corner and slam into someone.
I’m so caught up in the scene that took place in the house that I can’t even find my feet and end up crashing to the ground.
