22. Brian

TWENTY-TWO

brian

The drive is quiet and tense, and I know I’m the worst kind of monster. But she needed to see the truth. From the moment that bomb and that boy were in the same building, his future was gone.

Fate had decided.

You can’t go half ass on a kill. You have to plan it down to the last detail. It’s not like the illusion of movies where everything magically just comes together. And it’s not like all the fantasies in your head. The way you stay alive is by knowing your limits and following a well-laid out plan. And having contingencies. I didn’t think we needed a lot of contingencies for this. A kill at a distance has far fewer things to account for.

I never could have seen that boy coming. But still, I should have been prepared for things to go sideways, especially bringing a partner to the kill.

We were beyond lucky tonight.

“Mina, you need to think long and hard about if this is the life you want.”

“What does that mean?” She’s been crying in the passenger side since she got in the car, and I’ve mostly ignored it. It’s one thing to be hard enough to be a killer. It’s another to be hard enough to accept collateral damage like this.

I get that she’s got darkness, but she still isn’t quite the same as me. She’s still got a soul, a conscience. The inky dark didn’t slip into her too soon, building its dirty tightly woven nest inside her heart, blocking out all the light that might otherwise get inside. She was already formed with morals and a sense of right and wrong. Guilt. Shame. She’s not a homegrown sociopath like me. It doesn’t mean she can’t be great at this, but she needs to really think about what she will become. And what she will lose in the process.

I’m so selfish. I want her to be like me, the mirror I look into to see a person staring back, but if this is going to destroy her, it’s best to stop now—before she crosses too many lines she can’t uncross. It was one thing to come after Matsumoto’s son to save me and get some lateral personal revenge. It’s quite another to enter this seedy world of killing random people you have no actual personal vendetta against.

It takes either a hollow soul or a whole different sort of rationalizing to make that kind of thing okay.

“It means, if you want to keep going on jobs with me, you have to understand what that could mean. What could happen, and what you might be a part of.”

“You’re still going to let me go on jobs?”

I know she’s looking at me. I can feel her eyes burning a hole in me, but I keep my gaze on the road. “I already made my choice. Now you have to make yours.”

I thread my fingers through hers and squeeze her hand. She squeezes back, and while I’m not sure if we, as two carbon-based life forms will survive, at least for now, what exists between us will.

“I just shouldn’t have brought you out before you were properly trained. The first rule of assassin work is if it can go wrong, it will go wrong.”

“I thought that was Murphy’s Law.”

“Where do you think Murphy got it? Don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia.”

“Brian, I…”

“Shhhh, you don’t have to give me an answer now. Take some time to think about it.”

We’re silent the rest of the drive to the house. When we get back, it’s late, the whole place is still as a tomb. I punch in the code and guide her inside.

Wordlessly we go down to our dungeon level room. We’re both still covered in blood. We lay all our weapons on the bed and strip down. I toss our clothes and shoes in the incinerator, then I take her in the shower with me, and she just cries while I wash her off. I wonder if she regrets more than just the boy, if it’s the people she’s killed, or if it’s seeing me in action.

I watch as the blood of our fresh kills swirls down the drain.

It occurs to me that this is the first time she’s actually seen me kill people. Before tonight, it was all theoretical. She’s seen me hurt people in the dungeon but never actually take a life. She’s seen the evidence—the garbage bags on their way to the incinerator. She’s seen other people’s blood on me. But she was unconscious when I rescued her from Matsumoto, so she’s never actually watched it happen right in front of her.

I want to talk to her about this, but I just don’t know how to have those kinds of conversations, and I’ve never cared enough about another living soul to be interested in their pain. So I just do all I know to do. I get us both clean and dressed in sweatpants and T-shirts. I help her into her socks.

“A-are we running?” she asks. She sits on the edge of the bed looking down at me, seeming so lost as I slip her tennis shoes on and tie the laces.

I just nod. And she nods back.

And that’s it. We run together on the treadmill, Chopin blasting from the gym’s sound system. When we’re both wrung out, I take her to the kitchen and make her scrambled eggs. Then I lead her back into the dungeon, carefully undress her, press a kiss underneath the platinum collar I had made for her, and then put her in bed.

I put our weapons in the locked room, and then I join her.

I spoon her, shielding her with my body, my arm wrapped tight around her as though she could ever escape me. I am the monster in the dungeon and no matter how many times I save her or she saves me, we will always be the twisted broken limbs of a tree that never got enough sunlight.

I may be a bad guy, but I knew that the best choice out of several wrong choices tonight was to let that boy die in the explosion. It would have been quick, fast, so fast as to be painless. I used enough C4. No one would have survived that explosion. And no one would have suffered, despite how much it might have amused me if some of them did.

The odds that I was going to be able to go in there, break the plan and not be detected by security… the odds that I wasn’t going to have to fight my way out of there and possibly die were not good. There were three realistic outcomes for that boy the second he stepped into that building: die in the explosion, die in the crossfire while I was stupidly trying to spare him—not for his sake or Mina’s but for my own selfish need to keep her—or live, traumatized by this night for the rest of his existence.

But I didn’t have time to explain it or reason with her. Nothing would have taught her but the experience, and I’m sorry I had to hurt her, but I’m not sorry she understands now.

This is not a game, but if she wants to play at my level she has to understand.

She still thinks I’m the hero for saving that boy, but she didn’t know or think through what would happen. I did. I knew what this night would do to him. And I know what he will likely become… a monster, just like me.

I am that kid’s villain origin story, and if Mina ever understands I knew this would be the outcome of my choices tonight, I’ll lose her forever.

I can never let that happen.