Page 47 of Tank
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Nadya
Noah left and all I could manage to do was pull the covers over my head and close my eyes, but not because I was so tired that I needed to get more sleep. For just a few more minutes I needed to block out the outside world. I needed to keep my brain from spinning in all different directions because the only thing I could think right then was ‘what the fuck?!’
Two nights and one entire day spent with a man in an intimate way, well, that was a first for me. The thing was, while I was with him I didn’t give myself a chance to think about anything deeper than the surface as far as feelings for him went. Sure, I dug into my past and talked about it like it was no big deal. Like the scars of my childhood had been healed and closed over. When the truth was that it still hurt. Talking about it only felt like someone was taking a knife and cutting over those scars and I did my best to hide all of that away.
But when he took me to bed and literally cherished every inch of me, I broke. He, for lack of a better expression, made love to me. I could taste the sour in my mouth as I thought of it. I wasn’t the lovemaking type. I wasn’t all ‘here are my feelings, now share yours’ ever. In my line of work, I needed that hard outer shell to be more than just an illusion. I needed it to go through all the way to the middle. And while my heart beat like any other person’s, that was all it was there for, to keep my body alive. I led my life and choices with logic. I figured out all the outcomes and went with the best one. I looked at all the angles and determined the sharpest. That was the problem right then, there was no logic in spending time with Noah. There was no point in telling him about myself and wanting to, in a sense, save him.
“I know you’re a badass and all, but you really should lock your door, it’s just inviting trouble in,” a very familiar voice said and I sat up with lightning speed. “Shit! Since when did you start sleeping in the nude?!” He whipped around giving me his back as if the sight had scarred him.
“The fuck, Silas?!” I growled as I reached for my shirt and slid it on, then found my panties and did the same. “I’m covered,” I said in an unhappy tone once I was decent and standing. “Why are you here?”
“This place is…uhh…real great,” he said sarcastically doing a slow spin and taking in the crappy surroundings.
“You and I both know that I don’t need much. And I wasn’t supposed to be here this long anyway,” I said as I crossed my arms over my chest and narrowed my eyes at him.
It wasn’t that I was mad he was there, it was just that it was weird as fuck. Sure, we’d caught up now and then through the years, but he’d never hunted me down and invaded my space like this. Something was up and I needed to know what. The only thing was, I had no idea what was going on in his head because he was as hard to read as a book in the dark.
“I’ll ask you again, what are you doing here?” I repeated, clearly annoyed.
“I was sitting there, drinking my coffee a few days ago, and I had a gut feeling all of a sudden. So, I tracked you down, and here I am.” He sat down on the chair and crossed his ankles as he put his feet on the coffee table, his black boots speckled with the tiniest amount of mud.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “You can go now.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” he said before a flinch of a smirk crossed his face. “See, I know you better than anyone, and I’d say that right now, you are anything but fine. So, tell me, why have you been here for so long? And why is some mammoth of a beast walking out of your door at an ungodly hour of the day when you are supposed to be on a job and watching your target. Hmm?”
As much as I wanted to lie and make up some excuse, I couldn’t—not to him.
“Heismy target,” I mumbled, my eyes going to the floor. I knew I’d failed him, everything he had taught me was the complete opposite of this.
“What?” he roared, shock and anger evident in his voice. His feet slipped off of the edge of the coffee table and his boots made a hard, heavythumpas they hit the floor. The sound echoed through the small space making me flinch an unnoticeable bit. After a long second of watching me, he opened his mouth to speak again. “So, let me get this straight. You have not only made yourself visible to your target, but you have fallen for him? How do you think this is going to end?”
“I haven’t ‘fallen’ for him,” I snapped, throwing my fingers up to quote the distasteful word. It was bitter in my mouth and I completely rejected the idea that he could be right. “And it’s more complicated than that.”
“I’ve got all the time in the world,” he said, his body relaxing back into the chair to prove his point. “Tell me about it then?”
So I did. I told him how I’d taken this job because I was getting nothing else at the time. He already knew about the fiasco of the last, so there was no need to rehash that. Then I explained to him how Noah had come into town and how broken he seemed to be. And I went on about how he had shown up at the bar and how this odd thing began to grow between us. I left out a few details, knowing he didn’t care to hear them, but I was sure he could read between the lines and all.
And when I was done I didn’t feel any better. If anything, I felt even more confused and the dread started to set in deep inside of my chest. A feeling I wasn’t used to and I could definitely say I didn’t like very much.
“I’ve failed you,” I whispered, the words tasting like dirt as they rolled off my tongue.
“No,” he said in a firm tone and my eyes snapped up to meet his. His brow furrowed as his eyes stayed dead set on mine, but his gaze wasn’t on me. It was almost as if he was looking through me as he became lost in his thoughts. “I’m the one who has failed here.”
There was a long stretch of silence and I waited for him to speak first. I knew it would happen, he just had to get his words in the right order, because he and I were much the same. We calculated everything in our lives, down to the last word.
“People like us walk a fine line. I always assumed that you understood what side of the line to lean on.” His eyes came to focus on mine and I could see regret swimming in his deep green eyes. “I may work for the Devil, but I always make sure to bring him the right soul.”
“What the hell does that even mean?” I thought I understood but I was in no mood for his cryptic mumbo-jumbo. I needed some sort of blatant answer to help me through the shit pile I was currently buried in.
“It means, that just because you take a life doesn’t mean you should do it without care. The bad guys, Nadya. You take out the bad guys.”
I could swear I saw flames burning in his eyes. And just like I’d been pushed into deep water, all the air escaped out of my lungs and I couldn’t pull in a breath.
The one thing I’d been missing this whole time. The one thing that I’d never thought about. It hit me then, all the targets—all the people—I’d never taken the time to find anything about their past or their lives. I kept to my plan and learned a little of their day to day life. And while I could pretty much say that everyone I’d killed had definitely had a hand in something less than kosher, I’d never made it a point to make sure of that.
I started to grasp what he was saying. So, yeah, I may work for the Devil, but that didn’t mean I had to tarnish my soul. Sure, being a killer didn’t exactly make me clean, but as long as I was taking the evil out of the world, did that make it wrong? Or was I just like them? Was my judgment somehow just or was I just another demon in disguise?
