J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

She thought about reality—her mission, the quickly dwindling days to its end, what would happen if she failed—and decided to order room service. Reality sucked.

She found the menu on the desk in the living room and ordered what amounted to a meal large enough for five people. It arrived in less than fifteen minutes, and she let the black-suited man who arrived with it set it all up on the long polished wood table on the terrace, beside a trellis covered in scarlet bougainvillea.

When he was finished and bowed out the door, she stared down at the white linen napkins and silver domed dishes and the glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice, stalling. It was still dark, and the air held a cool, dewy tinge, but there was a faint hint of lavender along the eastern horizon and she knew the sun would be up soon.

Another day. Her third day in Rome. Only eleven left, and then her fate would be decided.

She caught her lower lip between her teeth. And this assassin you just ordered breakfast for , she thought in a fit of agitation, will be the one to decide it. You moron!

“Oh, for God’s sake, I still have to eat,” she muttered, and stalked off in the direction of the master suite.

When she knocked on the door, there was no answer. There wasn’t an answer to her call, either, so she pushed open the door and peeked around it.

“Xander,” she said into the steamy room. “I’ve ordered breakfast.”

No response. She imagined him silently bleeding out on the tile in the shower, and her heart did a strange little flip-flop inside her chest.

“Xander,” she said, louder, moving past the door and into the center of the room “Are you all right? Where are—” But she stopped abruptly because she caught sight of him standing with his back to her, head bowed, hands flat on the marble sink in front of the large, misted mirror. He was naked from the waist up. His bronzed skin dripped with water, his hair made a dark, damp cap against his head. A white towel was wrapped around his hips, and she was afforded a spectacular view of his quite perfect physique, the musculature and proportion even a bodybuilder would envy.

But his back. Oh God, his back.

She’d never seen scars like that. Long welts raised in white, crisscrossed in dense patterns all across his shoulders, upper back, spine. Imagining exactly what had caused them stole the breath from her lungs and made her legs go weak.

He slowly raised his head and met her gaze in the mirror. He wore that dead expression again, the absence of all feeling that had so frightened her the first time she’d glimpsed his face. He straightened—slowly, as if it pained him—and then she noticed his chest, reflected in a clouded outline in the mirror.

If she thought his back a painful sight, his chest was a maddening riddle. On both sides of his sternum at the level of his heart there were fields of straight lines. Black hatch marks on the right side in groups of four lines with a diagonal fifth, red hatch marks on the left, over his heart. There were dozens of them, more than that, row after row of stark, unembellished marks. They were the strangest tattoos she could imagine having.

“It’s a count,” he said very low to the mirror. She started.

A terrible idea began to form in her mind, one that she felt like icy fingers invading her brain.

She pushed it back, horrified.

He turned and faced her, without hurry, without expression, his arms hanging loose at his sides.

He made no attempt to cover himself, no attempt to hide from her open-mouthed alarm, as if he were inviting her disgust. As if he wanted it.

“Red for Ikati , black for others,” he said tonelessly.

And then she knew.

“Kills,” she whispered, understanding beyond the impulse to bury it. Her gaze skipped over his muscled chest, trying not to add, trying not to imagine all the lives reduced to short, blunt hatch marks on an assassin’s chest.

She lifted her gaze to his face. “Why?” she said in a small voice.

His hands curled to fists. “Why what?”

“Why do you keep track?”

The question startled him. He blinked and it was there again, that depth of urgent pathos, welling to the surface. A flash and it was gone, vanished behind the expression of emptiness she’d come to recognize as his mask, a very good, very practiced one, one that hid his genuine feelings well.

Almost.

He answered without inflection, his eyes as empty as his voice.

“So I always remember exactly what I am and what I have to answer for. So I can never fool myself into thinking I’m anything but a monster.”

She breathed in sharply. A monster. That’s what they’d called her, too.

Her heart began to ache, but not just for the carnage she witnessed carved into his bare flesh, and not for the red line she knew was waiting for her, the final one that would finish off an uncompleted group of four just above his left nipple.

Her heart ached for him. For the terrible toll all that death must have taken on his soul.

Haven’t you ever wanted a different sort of life? she’d asked him just yesterday, thinking only of herself. She wondered now how many times he must have wished for that very thing.

“I ordered some food,” she said, clearing her throat of the frog in it. “I thought you might be hungry.”

He stared back at her as if this were the last thing on Earth he had been expecting. She knew exactly how he felt.

“I’ll just...wait for you to get dressed.”

She turned and walked slowly from the room, leaving him staring silently after her.

In a dream, he dressed.

Underwear, pants, shirt, shoes. Knives in his boots and belt, hair combed carelessly with his fingers. Teeth brushed, watch strapped to his left wrist, his heart like a splintered piece of wood inside his chest.

That was new. He wasn’t thinking about it.

I thought you might be hungry , she’d said in response to his unrepentant admission of sin, and that was all it took. The blood on his hands had soaked so deep, into every pore and atom; the things he had done were so awful they could never be atoned for. He was beyond salvation, so far beyond the pale he was almost a cliché of evil. And yet she hadn’t condemned him. She had just looked at him with those huge green eyes, looked into him, almost as if she...

Not! Thinking! About it!

He found her sitting at the table on the sweeping terrace, gazing out into the lifting pink radiance of dawn. He simply watched her for a moment through the sliding glass door. Her hair was mussed and spilled dark over her shoulders, around the cashmere throw she’d wrapped around them to ward off the chill of the morning. Her skirt was wrinkled; she must have slept in it. He wondered if she’d waited for him. How long might she have waited before she’d fallen asleep in her clothes? The metal collar around her neck took on a rosy gleam in the light, and he felt a ping of discontent at the sight of it against the fine skin of her throat, delicate as a foal’s.

Twice. She’d had the opportunity to flee now, twice, and hadn’t taken either one.

He inhaled, marshaling his fragmented emotions with effort, pushing down the thought that rose unbidden inside him like a lure that bobbed up, unwelcome, from dark water.

You can trust her.

No. Trust was for children and fools. He was neither.

Her head turned and she looked at him through the slider. She sent him a fleeting, quizzical glance then directed her attention to the many silver domed platters on the table. She lifted one, sniffing its contents.

Bacon. He smelled it through the glass, and his stomach growled.

He stepped out onto the terrace and took a seat opposite her. Neither of them spoke for several minutes while they filled their plates and ate. Birds began to chirp in the trees beyond the plant-filled patio, hesitant little sleepy peeps at first that grew into full-throated songs of welcome as the sun rose over the horizon.