Authors: Ashley Rhodes
If he was being honest, Nick knew that he was going to feel something when he saw Cassandra again, and especially when he saw Ramon. Granted, there was every possibility that Ramon wasn’t his. After all, Cassandra was a grown, beautiful woman. Once she knew she was safe, maybe she’d opened herself up to having a real, full life.
Irrationally, that doubt vanished when he saw Ramon scamper across the grass, crouched low, head down, zig-zagging as though he expected to be shot at. A thrill of mixed wonder, anxiety, and panic shot through him.
Then he saw her.
She came out after him, smiling—they were playing a game, not actually evading pursuit—and as she did she looked his way and almost stumbled forward before she stood up straight and stared at him. She was somehow more beautiful than she had been before. Maybe motherhood agreed with her. He wished she hadn’t seen him; that he’d been more careful, and that he’d been able to watch her being happy just a little while longer.
“Ramon,” she called.
The boy peeked out from where he’d ducked behind the car, first at her and then at Nick. Then, hesitantly, maybe sensing that something was wrong, he approached Cassandra and reached out to take her hand.
Together, they walked toward him. Both were cautious, but only Cassandra scanned the parking lot, the roof of the St. Peter’s Auditorium, and the darkness beyond the lot where the trees could hide would-be assassins. Good girl.
“Cassandra,” he said when she got close.
Ramon looked puzzled, and peered suspiciously at Nick. “My mom’s name is Elena. Who are you?”
“Honey,” Cassandra said after she licked her lips and swallowed. “This is Nick Graves. He’s… ah…”
She looked up at Nick. He saw confirmation in her eyes without having to ask the question. Thunder shook the inside of him, cracking some long sealed vault. His stomach dropped as the reality of Ramon’s existence—his son’s existence—finally hit him full force. Outwardly, he was calm. Inside, he was unraveling. He nodded to her.
“Nick is…” she had to swallow again, “…Ramon, this is your father. Nick.”
If he showed even a little emotion, it was over. So he didn’t. But he looked at Ramon and let the corner of his mouth be the only bit that moved.
“Where have you been?” Ramon asked, instantly challenging but somehow hopeful at the same time. As far as stories went, Nick supposed his were the stuff of little boys’ fantasies. If he left out the blood.
“It’s a long story,” he said. “But I’m here now. And we need to go.”
Cassandra shook her head. “No. No, no, no.” She was starting to cry.
It tripped Ramon’s defenses immediately, and he stepped between his mother and Nick. “What do you want? What’s wrong? Mom?”
Cassandra’s hands were over her mouth, and she had bent almost in two. “It was so good,” she sobbed. “We were happy. Why?”
Ramon opened his mouth again but stopped. He frowned, and pointed to Nick’s chest. “What’s—”
“Nick!” Cassandra shouted.
He didn’t think. He didn’t need to. Nick dropped immediately, and pulled Ramon forward by his collar, Cassandra by her arm, down between the two cars just a split second before the bullet took out the rear view mirror—clean, instead of with his blood on it.
Cassandra screamed. Ramon struggled. Nick silenced them both. “Do exactly as I say,” he said. “Keep him close. Only move when I tell you to. Ramon… be brave.”
He didn’t look like he could be, just yet. Ramon was shaking from the adrenaline, animal fear making his eyes wide, and he clutched at Cassandra’s arms as she pulled him close and tucked herself almost under the car they were sheltered by for the moment.
There was no time to reason out why there was another shooter and why they had targeted Nick first. No one had a reason to suspect he wouldn’t follow through. He’d figure it out later. For now, he reached under his rental, felt around above the car frame for the cannisters he’d stored there by long habit, and tugged their magnets free of the frame.
The miss had given him a mental map of the sight lines, and he pulled pins and threw the cannisters out into the parking lot. Black smoke spewed from them and began to spread. The ghost of a sniper’s laser sight—amateur crutch—swept through it, wobbling and unsteady as the shooter got nervous from missing the first shot.
Nick pointed to the car across from them. “Crawl under the cars, don’t come out in the open until I give the all clear.”
“What if you don’t?” Cassandra asked desperately.
“I will,” Nick told her. But… she needed to know what to do. “If you have to go without me you’ll know. There’ll be a flare. Don’t jump the gun until you see it, and then go inside—around people. Call the police. Alright?”
She nodded.
Nick looked at Ramon. “Be good. Do what your mother says. You’ll be scared and you’ll want to run. Being scared is fine. Just don’t let it control you. Don’t let it make you run. You can’t outrun a bullet. Got me?”
Ramon nodded, eyes still wide and unblinking.
“Go,” Nick said.
As they scrambled under the car and began to belly crawl toward the front of it, Nick checked for the laser. It was gone, but it had been coming from the corner of the roof. Why hadn’t they taken the shot while Nick was waiting?
Anyone who needed a laser scope to hit a target that was standing still couldn’t hit a moving target. So he bolted. There were only so many feasible ways down from a roof that high, the structure was steeply peaked. Had to be the northwest corner.
The shooter almost got him. Nick ducked as he came around the corner, heard a silenced shot ping off the stone work at the corner of the building, and dove into a roll that took him to the assassin’s left flank.
He caught the gun hand as he came around, crashing his forearm against a gloved wrist. A shot fired uselessly past Nick’s ear, and he snapped his torso around to throw his whole body into an elbow that landed with a wet crack against the shooter’s cheek. There was a grunt. A man. Not that it mattered. Anyone who took a shot at Nick and missed was dead regardless.
The man recovered quickly, spinning away, and a managed to keep a hold on his gun. Most people would have dropped it when Nick blocked that arm first. He tried to get another shot off but he made the mistake of locking his elbow.
Nick dipped, stepped in and turned. His hands came up and over the gun hand that was extended in front of him and trapped it as he shot up and broke the man’s elbow with a sickening crunch. There was a high pitched bark of pain, and then only a growl as the man’s weight shifted.
Just as the knife came out, Nick finished a side step that took him to one side and away from it. He gave the broken arm a vicious jerk, but maybe hand to hand was this particular hitman’s forte because instead of being distracted he sacrificed the arm to twist and stab at Nick’s face.
Forte or no, Nick was just faster, and not distracted by a wrecked arm. He blocked the stab with the man’s own broken limb, and trapped it by bending the broken elbow back the direction it was meant to go. The man stiffened, struggled, and Nick loosened him with another punishing jerk against the break.
From there he took hold of the other arm, kicked the killer’s knee in, and then buried the knife in his neck while he was still holding onto it.
He held onto the thrashing body until it stilled, and then dragged it to the hill and kicked it into a roll to the bottom. He’d be found, but it would take time. If he was chipped, it would be fast. They’d have to move more quickly than Nick had originally thought.
He made his way back to the parking lot, wary for any back up the man might have had. It wasn’t the usual way, but it happened. He made it to the lot without incident, though, and hissed for Cassandra and Ramon. “Let’s go.”
They came out of hiding a couple of cars away. Cassandra gasped when they got close to him.
“It’s not mine,” Nick assured her.
“Is that… blood?” Ramon asked.
Nick pressed his lips together and then nodded once. “Yeah. From a really bad man. You kept your mom safe, though. Good job.”
“What now, Nick?” Cassandra asked. “Jesus… it’s been eight years. Why is this happening?”
“I don’t know yet,” Nick said, “but there are only so many reasons. Right now we need to get far away and make a plan.”
“I can’t disappear again,” Cassandra said. “Not with Ramon. I was barely grown when I left home but he… he’s just a boy, Nick. I can’t do that to him.”
“You won’t have to,” Nick said. “We can talk about it later. Let’s go. Now.”
He didn’t wait for them to agree to anything, or ask more questions. He took Cassandra’s hand, and pulled her toward the rental. She and Ramon got in the back of the car without another word, thankfully, and he peeled out of the parking lot just as people began to pour out of the Auditorium doors.
Cassandra was clutching Ramon to her, barely keeping it together, and Nick glanced into the rear view mirror to see Ramon watching him. That was going to be a long talk. One that Nick was in no way prepared for. Of the many skills he’d cultivated, being anything resembling a father was the last thing he ever expected he’d need to know.
More pressing for now, if he hoped to survive long enough to pick that skill up, was what had actually happened. Alex had no reason to think he wouldn’t complete the mission. For all he knew, Nick had made the query request for reasons to do with a personal vendetta. Granted, Nick had turned down targets who were minors before, and even convinced Alex to reject the contracts out of hand; so, maybe him taking this one had set off red flags?
The other possibility was that the contractor had simply taken out two contracts. It had been too dark to tell if the shooter had been anyone from Alex’s agency. So, a second agency. Just redundancy? No. He’d been targeted first. A clean-up job?
He took his phone out and messaged Alex.
“SNAFU. Second trigger. Asset targeted. Mission bust. Advise.”
“Confirm, Foxtrot. Second trigger?”
“Confirmed. Target: Asset. Advise.”
Cassandra hissed, “Who are you texting? Your man from Newcastle?”
“No,” Nick said. “His cousin. My new boss.”
“Your new… so you’re still…”
He didn’t answer. Later. For now, Alex messaged him back. An address.
“We’ll be meeting him soon,” Nick said. “But we have to make a stop first, and we’ll get some water and food for the road. It’s going to be a long drive.”
“Good,” Cassandra said. “You can catch me up.”
They drove in silence until they got to Nick’s drop site. He parked the car but left it running while he stepped out and retrieved a heavy duffel from under the bridge. There was a similar one in the trunk, of course—the car itself was practically a rolling arsenal—but it paid to have every possibility accounted for. If Alex planned to ambush him, it was at least going to hurt.
His instinct told him that wasn’t the case—he was too valuable an asset to ghost on some kind of suspicion—but instincts were sometimes wrong.
“Are you really my dad?” Ramon asked when he was back in the car. Cassandra had crawled into the front seat on the passenger side, and Ramon was laying down in the back seat.
Nick glanced at him, and then at Cassandra, looking for some kind of guidance.
“Yeah,” Cassandra told her—their—son. “This is the white knight I told you about.”
“The one who cast the magic spell?” Ramon asked. He looked back to Nick. “Are you going to cast another spell?”
Nick wasn’t sure what that meant. He’d have to ask Cassandra about it later. But he nodded because it seemed like what the boy needed. “Yeah, buddy,” he said. “I will if I can. We’ll see how much magic is left in me, okay?”
“Okay,” Ramon said.
Nick put the car into reverse and pulled out of the spot, and then sped off down the highway going east. All the way back to Jersey, where Alex was waiting.
“Thank you for coming for us,” Cassandra said after Ramon seemed to have dozed off, sapped from the stress of the night. She reached over the center console of the sleek Audi rental, and rested her hand on Nick’s arm. “It’s… sort of good to see you.” She glanced back at Ramon, and then raised her eyebrows as she smiled weakly at Nick. “Surprise?”
“Yeah,” Nick said, shaking his head as he processed it all. “Surprise. It’s good to see you, too, Cassandra.”
“Though,” she said, “it would be nice to see you without having to run for my life.”
He sighed, and bobbed his head. “Yeah. I’ll work on that. I promise.”
Finally meeting his employer was, he hoped, a good start to fulfilling that promise.
Cassandra kept one eye on the road, and one eye on Ramon. He’d drifted off, finally, but was sleeping fitfully. “It’s more than a day to Newcastle,” she said quietly, without taking her eyes off of him. “We’ll need to stop. You and I could go straight through but Ramon can’t. He’ll need to eat, decompress.”
Nick glanced at her, pursed his lips for a moment and then nodded. “Alright. I left a trail going south, toward Mexico, when I set this up. We should be able to take a break, and I’ve got a fresh identity we can use to get a hotel room and a new car.”
“Do we have new identities, too?” She asked. The thought of having to remember a whole new life and history was daunting. It had taken almost three years to commit all the details of her current ‘life’ to memory enough that she’d made them her own. It would be worse for Ramon, probably.
“Not yet,” Nick said. After a moment he looked at her again, sympathetic. “I’m sorry this is happening again. I tried to make sure—”
“There was nothing you could have done,” Cassandra said. “You bought me eight good years. And gave me a wonderful gift. Believe me. Ramon is… well, there are no words. Remarkable. Beautiful. Kind hearted. There is a lot of you in him, I think.”
“Hopefully not too much.” The muscles of his jaw trembled, and his eyes checked Ramon in the rear-view mirror again. He’d done that constantly, every few minutes, since they started driving.
She hid her smile. Already the instinct to protect Ramon was working its way into Nick’s mind. Of course it was. No real father could help but want to safeguard his children. It sparked a hope in her that she did her best to dampen. Whatever kind of father Nick might be, given the chance, there was every likelihood that he couldn’t stay with them forever.
They took a turn and headed south; Nick explained that just in case someone did manage to track them, he wanted them to think they were still planning to head toward the border but had merely taken a different route.
Nick pulled into a traveler’s motel, not a palace but not a cesspool; it had an indoor pool, but not hot tub, and the beds were still uncomfortable but they were large.
“I’m hungry,” Ramon announced when they’d settled in and he was fully awake again.
“I’ll order pizza,” Nick assured him.
Cassandra cleared her throat, even as Ramon’s eyes lit up. “Really?”
“Consider it vacation food,” Cassandra told her son, and flashed a patiently disapproving eye at Ramon’s father. “Pizza isn’t our typical fare.”
“Well it’s high calorie,” Nick said, “and we don’t have to go out to get it. I don’t know how often we can stop tomorrow.”
“How long are we going to be on vacation?” Ramon asked.
Nick shared a look with Cassandra, and took the cue that she stared into him. He kept his mouth shut.
“It might be a while, Mi Mijito,” Cassandra said as she sank onto the edge of the bed and patted the space beside her. Ramon sat down next to her, and she put her arm around him. Where to start? A deep breath was one way. Nick turned away from them, and looked through the phone book for a pizza place.
“Listen, Ramon,” Cassandra said carefully, “we… we may not be able to go back to Denver very soon. There are some bad people out there and your dad, Nick, he’s going to keep us safe from them. But to do that, we have to… pull off something of a disappearing act.”
“Well how long?” Ramon asked. “Like a week?”
“Longer than that,” she said. “Maybe a very long time. I don’t know yet.”
Ramon shifted next to her. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know that yet, either.” She hugged him close, and kissed the top of his head. “But for the next few days probably, it’s going to sometimes seems like I’m a little stressed, or angry. I want you to know that it has nothing to do with you, okay?”
“You’re just worried about the bad people,” Ramon said.
“Exactly.”
For a moment, Ramon just mulled this over. Eventually, though, as Nick dialed out on the hotel phone, he looked up at her. “I didn’t get to say good bye to Angus.”
Cassandra sighed, and rubbed Ramon’s arm as she held him. “I know, Mi Mijito. I’m sorry about that. As soon as we know we’re safe, I promise you can call him.”
“Where will I go to school?”
“I know you have a lot of questions,” Cassandra said. “How about for right now we focus on where we are and what we’re doing. We’ll figure everything out. Okay? I promise.”
“Okay,” Ramon sighed.
“Pizza’s on the way,” Nick announced as he hung up the phone.
Cassandra turned, and bit her lip. “What did you get? He’s allergic to olives.”
“So am I.” Nick chuffed softly as his eyes settled on Ramon. “I guess we’re more and more alike, huh?”
Ramon only shrugged.
“It’s a lot to take in,” Cassandra said to Nick, softly. “Having a dad all of a sudden. Give him time.”
Nick nodded his head slowly, face nearly expressionless; but Cassandra could have sworn he looked hurt.
When Ramon grew restless, Cassandra turned on the television and found him something at least passably appropriate to watch. Late night television really wasn’t programmed with kids in mind, apparently. As he settled down to watch, Nick took his duffel bag into the bathroom, and began cleaning weapons.
Cassandra leaned on the door frame and watched him in silence for a few minutes. His movements were efficient, precise, and well-practiced as he took each firearm apart into pieces that, individually, didn’t look dangerous at all. One by one he examined, brushed, and oiled each component, and then as if performing some sleight of hand, he made the weapons whole again too quickly for her to see how it all worked.
He set a small handgun down on the counter. “So. Ramon. That’s your grandfather, isn’t it?”
Cassandra nodded, almost startled by the sudden conversation where there had been only mesmerizing work before. “I guess I shouldn’t have to wonder how you know that. It was in my… dossier or whatever?”
“And a lot else,” Nick said. He turned to her, folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the counter. “You know… if I had known…”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Cassandra said. She swept hair away from her cheek and behind her ear. “If I really wanted to let you know, I would have tried. But I didn’t. I was afraid and… if I did try and you never responded…”
“You were afraid I wouldn’t want to know?”
She sighed, standing from the door frame, and took a step toward him. She touched his shoulder—he was hard lines and muscle, just like he had been before—and trailed her fingers down his arm until they fell off the point of his elbow. “No, Nick. I was afraid you didn’t make it.”
“I’m not made for it,” Nick said.
Cassandra frowned, and raised an eyebrow in question. Made for survival?
“Made to be a father,” he said. “I know how to be a trainer, a mentor… but I’m not sure I have anything else to give and I wouldn’t want… anyone to become me.”
“There are worse things,” Cassandra said, and leaned forward to kiss his cheek. Nick didn’t move to return it; but she felt his head move to press her lips more firmly to him for the moment they were there.
A knock came at the door, and Nick straightened dangerously, so that Cassandra took a quick step back before she registered the full picture. Nick’s eyebrows pinched at that, pained, and she wanted to take it back.
“It’s the pizza,” Cassandra said softly.
That didn’t keep Nick from picking up a handgun and tucking it into the back of his pants. He checked the peephole in the door for a moment, and then opened it to take the food and pay the kid who delivered it in cash.
“I’m starving!” Ramon said when Nick brought the pizza to the small table in their room.
“Once slice,” Cassandra told him—Nick had gotten some kind of monster New York style pie with what looked like everything in the kitchen piled on top of it. “And chew your food.”
Ramon made a mocking impression, his hands matching his mouth as he did. “Okay, okay,” he sighed.
As Cassandra ate she watched Nick. He kept one eye on Ramon at all times, it seemed. Funny that he didn’t think he’d make a good father. She wondered why, and what his father had been like and… all at once a lot of other things as well. She knew what she thought was most important about Ramon’s father—he was a good man, whatever else he had done, with principles that he was willing to fight and even die for. He was thoughtful, careful, and thorough. He was the sort of lover you remembered for years and years…
But where was he from? Where had he grown up? Who were his family? Was there cancer, or heart disease, or other allergies she didn’t know about?
All these questions made it difficult to focus on eating. She supposed most of them could wait until some other time. A time when they weren’t in mortal danger was probably best. Still, now that they were all together it was difficult not to imagine what came next. Some kind of life?
“What does he like?” Nick asked her, drawing Cassandra out of her rumination.
She raised an eyebrow at him and glanced at Ramon, then laughed quietly. “To talk, for one thing. Ask him.”
Ramon seemed unaware that he was being talked about, but she knew he wasn’t. That child was always listening.
Nick cleared his throat and then occupied his mouth with another bite of pizza. Finally, though, he spoke up. “Do you like the pizza?” he asked.
Ramon nodded enthusiastically. “Ith goob,” he said around a mouthful.
“Ay, don’t talk with your mouthful, gordito,” Cassandra said.
He shrugged, swallowed, and tried again. “It’s good. Thank you.”
Nick nodded once, and shifted a bit on the edge of the bed before he got up and sat down in the chair across from Ramon. “So, what else do you like? What do you do for fun?”
At first, Ramon glanced at Cassandra, looking for either permission or just reassurance. She waved him on. “It’s okay. You can talk to your dad, mi mijito.”
“Well,” Ramon started, hesitant, “I like Naruto. It’s a cartoon. And a game. And a comic, too, but its Japanese and they don’t call them comics. They call them manga.”
“I’ve been to Japan,” Nick said. “A few times.”
“Really?” Ramon asked, eyes wide with wonder.
“Sure,” Nick said. “I’ve been all over. What’s Naruto about?”
“Naruto is a ninja,” Ramon said, taking on the tone of a little instructor, starting to feel comfortable now he was in familiar—very, very familiar—territory. “He’s the best ninja in the Hidden Leaf Village. It’s like… like a secret village of ninjas. And he has a friend, Sasuke—well, he has a lot of friends but Sasuke is his best friend…”
Cassandra watched them as they talked about what was, hands down, Ramon’s primary interest of the last several months. Nick listened not just patiently, but… enthusiastically. She smiled, and leaned back against the head board to listen to the first actual conversation between Ramon and his father.