The Last Assassin

19

Delilah sipped a cappuccino at Chez Prune on the Canal Saint-Martin, one of her favorite cafes in Paris. Ordinarily, a solitary hour here people-watching or with a book or just looking out on the water relaxed her body and emptied her mind, but today the effect was lacking.

The few days she'd spent in Manhattan after seeing Midori had been much the same. She'd visited the Neue Galerie and the galleries in Chelsea and shopped in the boutiques in the meat-packing district and run for miles in Central Park, but none of it had been any good. She was glad to finally abandon it and just come home, and now here she was and this didn't feel right, either.

The thing that was bothering her was the recognition that she probably hadn't needed to go to New York at all. At the time, she'd been frustrated and jealous and angry, and all of that had clouded her judgment. But now, having confirmed that Rain had killed Midori's father, and that the woman knew it, her perspective had changed. People didn't get over things like that, not even for the sake of a child. Midori might have felt 'confused' at the moment, and maybe whatever passion she had once shared with Rain had temporarily reignited when her former lover suddenly reappeared in her life. But shacking up with your father's murderer would be a betrayal of blood. It would violate everything Delilah understood of human nature, or at least human nature as it continually manifested itself in the violent little corner of the world from which Delilah derived.

Yes, she probably would have been better off just letting Rain and Midori realize on their own that what Rain had done would forever poison the ground they stood on. Probably over time they would have worked out some accommodation for the sake of the child, but that was to be expected and in itself wasn't undesirable. People had children from previous relationships all the time. They divorced and remarried but of course were still involved with their offspring. Why would Rain be different? And why would she want to deny him the opportunity?

So what had she gained by visiting the woman? Just some knowledge, really, but nothing that would change the route things were going to take anyway. And the knowledge came at potentially high cost: if Midori mentioned Delilah's stunt to Rain, he was going to be understandably upset. She didn't know where things would go at that point.

She was worried, too. The woman said Rain cried when he held his child. That was exactly the kind of thing Delilah had been afraid of when Rain left Barcelona. Afraid that it would cause him to gravitate toward Midori, yes, but also that he wouldn't be himself, that these new emotions would impede his ability to protect himself. She wondered what he was up to in Tokyo. Whatever it was, she doubted it was smart or well thought out.

But there was something else bothering her beyond all this. When she really thought about it, she had to admit that what she'd done was run an op on the man she professed to care about so deeply. At the first sign of trouble, her first doubts and fear, she'd defaulted to the professional tools and tactics that in their proper context divided the world into operators and assets, assassins and targets. Ironic, too, because Rain had gotten through to her precisely by bypassing her operator's persona and somehow accessing the person beneath it.

If she couldn't keep her professional and personal lives separate, if she brought the same mindset to bear in both, she was going to lose herself. She knew men like that in her organization, men who thought they were superior because they used their training to solidify their power bases and manipulate their colleagues and hide mistresses from their wives. She thought they were burnouts and found them pathetic. And now she was appalled to see that she shared with them some common indecency.

Well, the only thing she could do was stay aware of the problem, stay watchful, and never, ever give in to the temptation again. No matter what it cost her.

She almost wanted to laugh. She was still so angry at him, and yet now she felt she'd wronged him, too, almost betrayed him.

She didn't know how she would make it up to him, but she would try. If he ever gave her the chance.