Chapter Eight: Kane

I finish wrapping her feet. I do it tight; the one isn’t as deep so the skin should heal itself quickly. The other… it’s going to take some time before she can comfortably put all of her weight on it. She’ll be able to walk—albeit not that well. Holly will simply have to be careful with how she puts her weight on her feet.

It’s only after I take care of her that I grab my recliner and pull it closer to the fire so it’s right beside her sofa bed. The wooden legs of the chair scrape along the floor, but I’m not concerned. I’m slow in sitting down, and I groan as I do so.

This isn’t turning out how I wanted it to, and unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about it now. Holly is here and she’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

We’re stuck together, because I sure as shit ain’t going anywhere, either.

I reach over my head and grab the neckline of my shirt. Up and over my head it goes, though I don’t drop it on the floor; I keep it on the armrest of the chair. It’s the only damn shirt I brought. Didn’t think I’d get stabbed, obviously.

I inspect the shallow wound on my left pec. It stings a teeny bit, but it’s something I can easily ignore. That said, it is still bleeding some, so it’s best to take care of it now. I have the first-aid kit out, so might as well.

As I lean forward and pour some alcohol over my chest to sterilize the wound, I’m well aware Holly watches me with irritation and fake disinterest. It’s like she doesn’t want to watch me, but she can’t help it. She’s also probably still pissed I have her knife on me; I slid it into my pants’ pocket while I carried her out here.

She’s not getting it back. If she wants it, she’ll have to take it from me—and we both know how her last attempt on my life turned out.

It’s only after my injury is bandaged up that I lean back and take a drink from what’s left in the bottle. It’s never too early to start drinking, and shit, after the morning I had, I’m not concerned.

Holly breaks her silence by informing me, “I hate you.”

“Yeah? Get in line.” I stare at the fire, but my peripherals can tell she can’t take her eyes off me. Whether she’s glaring at my face or the patch on my chest wishing she would’ve hit the mark better, I can’t quite tell.

“You deserve to die for what you did.”

“Are you the judge, jury, and executioner now?” Sitting by the fire, I’m not too cold, even with my shirt off. I’d like the fabric to dry before I put it back on. Plus, I tend to run hot. “Didn’t know it was official and they named you for all three.”

The way she rolls her eyes and scoffs at me tells me she finds me irritating. “You’re not funny.”

“Good. I’m not trying to be.” Even though it might be a mistake, I draw my gaze away from the fire and land it on her. The little girl in the closet, all grown up and full of hatred because of me. If comeuppance had a face, it’d be Holly’s.

“You have my knife,” she points out.

I nod. “I do, and unless you think you can take it from me, I’d drop the subject if I were you. You’ve already made it clear you don’t have what it takes to kill me.”

She folds her arms over her chest and puffs up a bit.

I grin at her and say, “What? Did I strike a nerve? Please. You might’ve thought you were ready to take me on, but no amount of planning or training in the world could truly prepare you to take on someone like me. I’ve spent my whole life training, becoming who and what I am—a weapon. You’re just a girl playing pretend.”

Holly shakes her head once. “This isn’t pretend for me. This is real. I hate you and everything you stand for, everything you’ve done. Do you even think about all of the families you’ve destroyed? How many people you’ve killed? Do you even know?”

The reason I’m in this fucking cabin is because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but I don’t tell her that. Instead I say, “One of the first things you learn when you’re in my line of work is that you don’t think. You just do. You act. I’m hired to kill, so that’s what I do.”

My stomach gurgles. I didn’t bring any food with me, so I supposed it’s a good thing she came prepared, ready for multiple days of torture. I set the bottle on the ground and stand. No way my shirt is dry yet, but I put it on anyways. I wander to the kitchen and grab two granola bars, one of which I hand to Holly when I return.

She must be hungry too, because she doesn’t say a word. She simply snatches the bar from my outstretched hand and pretty much shovels the entire thing in her mouth at once.

I don’t pack it in like her. I take my time in eating it as I recline in the chair.

“I still don’t get what you were doing here,” Holly mutters once she’s swallowed everything. “You didn’t come with any food. You just packed a shit ton of booze. Were you really going to survive on alcohol alone?”

I rub the side of my face. My mouth is full with a good-sized bite of the bar, and I chew it slowly as I try to think of a way to respond to her without making it obvious what I planned on doing during this little vacation of mine. In the end, I just say, “That was the plan.”

Holly groans. “I can’t believe you’re the assassin that killed my parents.” The way she says it, like she’s insulted on her dead parents’ behalf that I’m the one who did it and not someone more impressive really ticks me off.

Narrowing my stare at her, I ask, “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

“You’re a drunk.”

“A drunk you still couldn’t kill, so what does that say about you?”

The way she glares at me tells me I struck a nerve. Her lips curl into a pout. The way the light from the fire dances across her skin, she looks like she belongs on a beach somewhere, not trapped in a cabin while snow falls soundlessly outside.

With a shrug, she says, “I just thought you’d be more impressive, that’s all.”

I drop the wrapper of the granola bar as I stand, giving her full view of my height—for someone who’s barely over five feet tall, she has absolutely no right to look at me and tell me I’m not impressive. “Excuse me?”

She offhandedly gestures to my standing figure. “Is this posturing supposed to do something to me? Make me cower? Make me rethink what I said before and tell you that you’re the epitome of a dangerous assassin? Please.”

“I could kill you in over a dozen different ways in less than five seconds.”

“Maybe, but you’re not, just like you didn’t back then, so…” She shrugs.

I’d be lying if I say I’m not irritated. Somehow she pushed my buttons and made me annoyed—and I never let myself get riled up. There are a few things I could tell her right then, but all I end up doing is huffing and sitting back down.

Minutes pass. Or, hell, maybe even longer than that. Anyway, it’s a long while before I ask, “How’d you find out who I am?”

“Like I’m going to tell you my sources. Let’s just say anything’s possible when you have money and you try hard enough.” This time, it’s Holly who gives me a smirk, like she knows she’s somehow found her way beneath my skin.

“Most people would never be able to find out my name, let alone track me down to a cabin like this. Your murdering skills might need some work, little killer, but you are resourceful, I’ll give you that.”

If looks could kill, well, I would’ve been a goner a long time ago. I can see it in her eyes: she’s imagining all the ways she wants to kill me. Holly is full of hate and rage for what I took from her thirteen years ago, and I can’t blame her one bit for any of it. She is the person she is today because of me, because of what I took from her.

Maybe it’s my guilt over that night, or maybe it’s just the look she’s giving me. Either way, I grab my bottle and take another sip before I mutter, “You weren’t supposed to be there that night. The job was your parents. They were the only ones who were supposed to be in that cabin. Not you.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” When I don’t say anything more, Holly sighs. “They were going to leave me behind, but Stacy, our au pair, got sick. I was secretly glad she got sick, because it would’ve been the first Christmas we didn’t spend together as a family.”

I can’t say I ever had anything like that. I meant it when I said the Guild was my whole life; holidays, birthdays, all that crap was just that: crap. Days full of fluff and no substance that made you soft.

Then again, look at where I am now. I got soft anyway, thanks to the girl on the damn sofa bed.

Holly goes on, totally unaware I’m trapped inside my own head, “Christmas used to be my favorite time of year. Obviously, the presents were high on the list, but everything else… there’s nothing like it when you’re a kid. The time off school, the decorations, the movies, the cookies. It really is magical, and since you’re just a kid, you think it’ll always be like that, but it’s not.”

Her voice hardens as she says, “You killed that joy in me, Kane. You killed it when you killed my parents, when you opened that closet door and pointed a gun at my face. You killed everything I was.”

She turns her face away from me so I can’t look at her, and her hair falls across her cheek to further hide her face. “Not that I expect you to care. Monsters like you never care about anything.”

Her words cut me like knives, and I want nothing more than to get up and shut myself away in that bedroom. Put some distance between us so I don’t have to hear the way her voice cracks when she talks about her childhood innocence and hope and how I took it from her that night. I don’t want to hear her go on and on about how I destroyed her, annihilated everything she was.

I don’t want to hear it. I already know.

Of course I know. This whole time I knew. That has to be why I couldn’t get rid of this nagging feeling the past thirteen years, why her face and those green eyes haunted my dreams. My emotions were supposed to be turned off, but that night she shocked them back into place and after thirteen years I couldn’t ignore them any longer.

“For what little it’s worth, I am sorry for what I did to you,” I whisper, knowing it’s not enough. Words will never be enough. Such is their burden.

“If you’re so sorry, come over here, hand me my knife, and let me try again.”

Even though the situation is solemn and the weight of the air around us is heavy, I find myself smirking. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. If you want to kill me, you’ll have to put in the work. I won’t make it easy for you.”

The sigh she lets out after that tells me she suspected that would be my answer. “Is that why you cut your old man beard off?”

Out of everything she could’ve said, that’s something I don’t expect to hear, and I laugh softly in spite of myself. I lift a hand to my cheek and run my fingertips along the stubble. The knife could only cut so close, but it did its job.

“Old man beard?” I echo. “I think that hurts me more than the knife in the chest.”

Holly groans. “Come on. It was an old man beard. All long and scraggly. You looked like you hadn’t seen a mirror in months.”

“And now?” I don’t know why I ask. I probably shouldn’t, but once the question is out of me, it’s out and there’s no taking it back.

Her eyes drop to my jawline, and Holly studies me in an intensely scrutinizing way. “You look more like the man I remember—but way older, obviously. You’re an old man without the beard now.” She takes so long to respond it makes me wonder if there’s more she wants to say that she held in.

“Old man, huh?” I should be insulted. I am only thirty-eight. That’s not decrepit or anything. But, I suppose, to someone Holly’s age—to someone who’s in their early twenties—I’m an old man. “If I’m so old, why couldn’t you take me down, little killer?”

“Well, you’re…” Unless I’m mistaken, I hear her swallow hard while she pauses. “…pretty fit for an old man. Spry for your age, too. You can move pretty fast for—”

I have the feeling she’s going to keep calling me old, so I interrupt her and say, “I’m old. I think you made your point.”

Holly stuns me by her next question. It comes so out of the blue, there’s no way I could have prepared myself for it. “How old were you when you killed for the first time?”

The Guild only employs adults. Still, sometimes there are jobs when a younger hand is needed. My first kill wasn’t an official Guild job—not for me, anyway. My father took me on a job when I was sixteen. The target was a philandering husband of some wealthy CEO. He liked underage boys a bit too much and his wife found out.

There’s no divorcing that.

So my father took me, told me what to do, where to do it, how to make it look like an accident. It was easier for me to get alone with him than my father. I suffocated him in a fancy motel room while my father cut off the security feeds. He never touched any underaged boys again and the wife was free to move on with her life knowing that her cheating husband was dead.

But I can’t tell Holly all that. My kills, as many of them as there are, are mine. The only one I share with her is the one she’s already a part of.

All I end up saying is, “Younger than you.”

“Do you like it? Killing people, I mean? Do you have fun when you end people’s lives, or is it just another job to you?”

I lean back in my recliner and say, “You’re very curious about me.”

She shrugs. “It’s not like there’s much else to do here other than talk. Besides,” she pauses and picks at the sheets around her, not looking at me as she says this next part, “I am curious. I spent the last thirteen years of my life thinking about you constantly.”

It seems we both spent a lot of time thinking about the other, then. Hearing her admit it out loud makes me want to admit the same to her—but it would be different for me. It might help her put two and two together, and call me stupid, but I don’t want Holly to know the real reason I only brought booze to this cabin.

Though I don’t have to, I answer her previous question. “It’s a job. I don’t necessarily enjoy it. I’m good at it, but… it’s not like I get off killing people. I do what I was trained to do, the same as it would be for any other job.”

She lets out a strange sound, and when I glance at her, she whispers, “That’s not… either you’re a really good actor, or you’re telling the truth.”

“Why is me telling the truth so shocking to you?”

The sigh that escapes her after that is explosive. “I guess I just… I had this image of you in my head these last thirteen years. I filled in the blanks. I pictured what kind of person you were, what kind of person I thought you had to be to do what you did to my parents. Evil, cruel, vicious. I thought you were the king of bad guys.”

Watching her come to the realization is almost painful. I want… well, I want to go over to her and hold her, tell her everything will be okay. For obvious reasons, I don’t let myself do that, though.

“I don’t know what’s worse,” Holly whispers. “You not being who I thought you would be or you saying killing my parents was just another job and you didn’t feel a single thing when you did it.”

“It’s complicated,” I say.

She mutters, “No shit.”

As I stare at her, I can’t help but feel as if things are only going to get more complicated from here on out. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, whether Holly will do what she came here to do and avenge her family, but I do know one thing.

If she tries again, I might not stop her.

If my death means she can have peace, then maybe that’s the sacrifice I’ll have to make.