Cry Assassin (5 page)

Kirk sat very still on the couch. He had not yet moved from the position he'd spanked her in. His legs were spread shoulder width apart and the arm that had delivered the stinging blows to her backside now  rested by his side. He was looking at her with a cool, clear gaze, a slight smile glimmering on his lips as he waited for her to react.

She had a choice. She could throw the tantrum that was rising steadily in her breast, fueled by a sense of outrage and unfairness. She could apologize for her behavior. Or she could pretend that what had happened had in fact not happened. That was the path she chose. Oh he was strong and virile and he could thrash her if he chose, but she did not have to acknowledge it. Her hand moved away from her stinging bottom as she composed herself and moved to sit gingerly in the soft arm chair furtherest away from him. She did not speak, she did not trust her voice to be as steady as she wished it to be.

A rumbling sound started from the couch. He was laughing. He was laughing at her. “Oh Evelyn, you are a prize,” he said.

“You are a filthy criminal,” she bit out in harsh response. His laughter died on his lips. So the truth hurt him, did it? Kirk obviously liked to think of himself as one of the good guys, but the good guys did not come down into dark basements and threaten helpless old men and take their daughters as deposits on bad debts. She made no effort to hide the derision on her normally sweet face, but when he stood up swiftly she was forced to choke down a cry of fear.

“Yes Evelyn, yes I am,” he purred, stooping next to her. “So be careful what you say, pretty one.” Menace rolled off him and she could no longer hide her fear as she recoiled into the depths of the chair.  The look in his eyes was entirely cold. Gone was the amusement at her reaction to being spanked, and gone too was the anger that had proceeded the spanking. There was nothing there now, nothing at all. A  mercury cold shiver trickled down her spine as she realized that Kirk, if that was his name, was one of those men capable of anything, anything at all. She was not the only one who had been playing a fine game of pretend. His smiles and his friendly glances had been but a facade. She was now seeing his true nature, and his true nature was a void of terrible possibility.

Just when she thought she might scream from fear, he winked and his expression was transformed. He looked just like a normal man again, an everyday man. The chill did not leave her bones as he stood up and walked into the kitchen.

“Are you hungry yet, little one?” His deep timbre rolled from the other room. A perfectly ordinary question from a singular man unlike any she'd ever known before.

She was hungry. She was starving in fact. “A little,” she admitted in a voice that trembled. “Sir,” she added as an afterthought. She wanted to appease him desperately, she had the certain sense that being on his bad side would not be pleasant and she'd felt herself slipping to that dark place when he'd looked at her with those cold eyes. She did not want to go back there. The Russians with their harsh words and harsher hands had not put that primal fear in her nearly as effectively as he had done with one look.

Eve heard him moving about in the kitchen making comforting domestic sounds. She kicked her shoes off and drew her knees up to her chin, wrapping her arms around them as she took refuge in the fetal position. It had been a long day, a long day of bad decisions and worse consequences. If only she'd ignored the call this morning. If only she'd resisted the lure of easy money. She should have known her father would never help her.

She was vulnerable and exposed. Kirk was offering her protection until the end of the week, but what then? Would he simply hand her over to the Russians then? He had certainly agreed to if her father didn't pay. Lost in worry, she began to twirl a silky strand of hair around her finger. She couldn't trust anyone and nowhere was safe. The best thing to do would be to escape, run away to another city, but her bank account only had fifty dollars in it and that wasn't going to get her far.

When Kirk returned with two plates of chicken salad, she was still worried. He handed her a plate and she looked at it as if she'd never seen food before and didn't know what to do with it. “Eat,” he told her. “It will help.” He sat down and turned on the television, the inane blather washing around them as they ate in silence.

The food was good, she discovered. Though she picked at it suspiciously at first, the chicken had been seasoned nicely and was still hot from the pan. He'd tossed a few sautéed mushrooms and tossed them in with the lettuce and applied a thick dressing that brought the meal together. As she filled her belly, she began to feel slightly better about things. Not a whole lot better, but slightly better. The depression that had been settling over her as she sat alone had lifted slightly by the time she cleared her plate.

“You should get some sleep,” Kirk said when she yawned a few minutes later. “Come on.” He stood up and walked down the hall that lead out of the lounge, the hall she'd not been down before. At the end of the hall was a bedroom, furnished in the same clean and comfortable style that typified the rest of the house. The center of the room was a fairly large bed covered with a cream quilted duvet and topped with thick pillows that looked very comfortable indeed. “There's a shower, through there,” Kurt pointed towards a door that stood slightly ajar.

“Thanks,” Eve said in a whisper soft voice. “Where do you sleep?”

A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Usually I sleep here, tonight I'll be keeping watch. I'll wake you when it's your turn, soldier.” Eve giggled softly at being called a soldier. He smiled when he heard her laughter, gave her another one of those charming winks and left her to her own devices.

* * *

Kirk looked in on Evelyn thirty minutes later and discovered that she was obediently curled up in bed. She must have been completely exhausted, poor thing. There was a sweet scent in the room, the light feminine smell of a woman. It had been a long time since a woman had lain in his bed, since his home had smelled so light and pretty. She was already asleep, her breath was deep and slow and she barely stirred when he pulled the coverlet up so that she would be warm.

Satisfied that his reluctant guest had been taken care of, Kirk made his way to the small office that lead off from the lounge. There he picked up a phone that at first appeared to be dead. It wasn't until he pressed a sequence of numbers that he got an open line.

“Command and Control.” The operator's voice was brisk, business like.

“Kirk here. I need a meeting with Command. Tonight. Things have changed.”

There was a long moment of silence in which the faint clattering of keys could be heard in the background. “Your request is approved. Hold the line.”

Kirk sat down heavily, the phone clutched tightly in his powerful hand. He had one chance now to convince his handlers that they needed to move quickly.

A grunting came over the line. The Commander sounded irritable, as if he'd rather be in pajamas and drinking a hot chocolate than talking to a field operative. He was old now, past his operational prime but they didn't keep him around for his physical abilities, they kept him around for the mind that had navigated the Cold War with precision. The Commander played with people like other men played with chess pieces. You never knew what part you played in his plan, sometimes you were the king, sometimes you were the pawn to be scarified. The Commander had no loyalty to any man, his loyalty lay with the state, with the overarching principles he'd sword to protect long ago. He expected the same type of loyalty from his men.

“What is so important, Kirk?”

Kirk cut to the heart of the matter.“This deal is going sour. Phil isn't going to pay. He's traded his daughter to the Russians instead. I have her now as collateral.”

“How do you know he isn't going to pay?”

“How can he? The federal government keep hitting the shipments. There's a bubble in the supply line and its going to hit him first. It's time to make an arrest.”

The pause was brief, too brief. Kirk knew before the Commander spoke that his request would be denied. “We don't want Philip Day. He's small time, nothing. We want Vladimir Flerko. Without a trade, there's no evidence. Without evidence, there's no charge.”

“Without an arrest, I'm going to have to hand over a nineteen year old girl to the Russians,” Kirk explained.

There was a brief sigh, a sigh that seemed to bemoan the sentimentality of the modern agent. “Sometimes collateral damage is unavoidable.”

Kirk's eyes hardened as he stared at the wall in front of him. “She's innocent.”

“That's unfortunate,” the Commander replied, his tone devoid of emotion. He didn't care about the fate of an unknown woman. In his lifetime he'd seen thousands sacrificed for the political machine. What was one more soul in the grand scheme of things? “Is that all?”

“Yes sir,” Kirk tried to hide the disappointment and frustration in his voice.

“Stay the course, operative,” the Commander ordered. The line went dead as the call was disconnected.

Kirk sat back in his chair and tried to take stock of the situation. He hadn't joined the force to make innocents suffer. But the Commander wasn't going to give Evelyn safe haven and in less than a week, he would have to hand her over to the Russians, unless Phil paid up.

He'd told Evelyn that his name was Kirk and indeed it was, but his underworld clients knew him by another title, 'Ender'. That was why he'd been called down to the basement, to ply his trade, to rid the Russians of a weak link in their chain in a way that would serve as warning to others thinking of crossing them. His reputation for killing with flair that left his enemies quaking was the reason they'd employed him. Any idiot could pull the trigger on a gun. It took a true artist to tease death out of a body. That talent had landed him on death row a decade earlier, before Command had taken an interest in the bitter young man and offered him a second chance at life.

He was an agent for Command, but in his current cover he was working as a mercenary for private cartels, anyone with enough money to pay him for his services. He did whatever they wanted him to do, assuming the price was right. He'd done terrible things, things that haunted him many nights, faces rising up from the darkness of his mind to taunt him. Most could be sneered at, even gloated over. How do you live with yourself when you're a killer? You kill those who need killing. You tell yourself that you're acting in the service of a greater good.  Most of the time he could believe that, but tonight he could not.

His mind drifted back to the sweet faced innocent sleeping in his bed. If there was good in the world, it was in her. She was beautiful and she was sweet and she was brave. The thought of Vlad's stained old fingers on her body made his stomach turn, and the knowledge that Vlad's touch would be the beginning of a sadistic game of sexual torture that would go on and on and possibly not end for years made his blood burn. Whatever impulse draws a man to protect a woman at the cost of his own life had taken Kirk strongly in its maddening embrace. Commander be damned, he would die before he saw harm come to that girl.

Chapter Four

Eve stretched out between soft sheets and sighed. Soft sunlight was leaking through the curtains and she was filled with a peaceful sense of calm that dissapated the moment she realized where she was. The brief amnesia of morning passed all too quickly and her mind was quickly assailed with memories of laughing gangsters pressing her into a chair and taping her there harshly and the man with eyes like death who had taken her from them. She swung herself out of bed and dressed quickly, not knowing what this day would bring.

Kirk was waiting for her in the kitchen with fresh coffee brewed. His smile was warm and welcoming, so much so that she had trouble remembering how terrible his expression could be when the warmth drained from his face. “Hello my dear,” he purred, pouring a fresh cup. “Did you sleep well?”

“I did,” she said, taking the cup he offered her gratefully.

“Good.” He seemed genuinely pleased that she'd had a restful evening. She looked at him cautiously as she raised the cup to her lips. He met her gaze evenly and openly, letting her stare. This man was something of a mystery. She tried to gauge his age and decided that her was in his thirties at least. Objectively she knew that wasn't all that old, but he seemed much older than her and worldly and wise in ways she couldn't begin to imagine. He was always vital and alert, filled with energy that flowed around him, changing according to his moods. As he looked at her, his gaze was troubled. Though he tried to make his expression inscrutable, she could feel his concern.

“What are you going to do with me?” There. It was the question she had avoided asking. The twenty million dollar question that stomped around them like an elephant in the room. “I mean, when the week is up, when my father defaults on his payment.”

“That is a very good question, Evelyn,” he replied softly.

“Are you going to hand me over to them?”

He looked at her with those darkly rimmed gray eyes, eyes that had seen so much. She could feel the weight of his gaze like a tangible thing. “No,” he said finally.

Could she believe him? Even if he intended to hand her over he surely wouldn't say that, it would make her so much harder to control. Then again, if all he desired was control he could keep her tied up and locked away until the deadline passed. She realized with a jolt that he was actually going out of his way to be kind to her.

“Thank you,” she said gratefully. The relief she felt hearing his answer was quickly followed by new fear however. The Russians would come after them both if he didn't hand her over. She knew that. They had come for her even before the deadline. Vlad wanted her badly indeed. A tremor passed through her as she remembered the one time she had met the man who was going to great lengths to take her. A month ago she had made the mistake of accepting her father's dinner invitation. It was at a nice restaurant and the silly part of her brain that wanted him to love her had convinced her that this was his way of reaching out. Perhaps they would reconcile.