Beauty and the Assassin Read online

  Not only that, he didn’t park his car in the garage or even in front of it. He put his car on the curb like a guest who’s here for a quick visit. The house is lit on the top floor and the living room. A cat darts across the window with the curtains pulled back.

  He moves toward the door, his gait loose and steady. Not a walk of a man coming home after a long day. More like a lion stalking an impala that’s foolish enough to be away from its herd.

  Whose house is this, then?

  He doesn’t glance in my direction, even though the headlights have been on all this time. He’s behaving like it’s no big deal. Or maybe he’s faking nonchalance. After all, you have to pretend like nothing’s wrong to make people believe it themselves.

  When he slips into the house, I kill the engine. Then I hold my breath and wait.

  Chapter Six

  Tolyan

  The little fawn followed.

  But then, I knew she would, even before I left the hotel. She didn’t try to hide or be less obvious that she has unresolved business with me. Beyond the coffee she bought me out of so-called gratitude. Even while she was eating her sandwich, she kept glancing at me from time to time, waiting for a good moment to spit out the words circling in her head. It’s so, so easy to read her innocent eyes.

  They might not have remained so innocent or trusting if she’d known what was going through my mind as I watched her eat the sandwich that would’ve taken me three bites to finish. She opened her mouth wide and went for big bites, but simply couldn’t manage it. And every time a little bit of the white horseradish sauce got on those pink lips, her little tongue emerged to lick it.

  And I thought about that mouth opening over my cock, taking it in. How wet and hot and sweet it’d feel. Would it be tight, since her mouth is so small? Would she work her tongue over the head, licking the precum like she did with the sauce? Her hair would undoubtedly be warm and silky as my fingers glided through, as I used it to hold her. What noise would she make as I thrust into her mouth? Would her whiskey eyes soften? Would she be shocked if I ordered her to fuck her pussy with her fingers and use her thumb on her clit?

  When she climaxed with her fingers inside her pussy and my cock buried deep in her mouth, I’d come, too. And watch what I gave her coat those lips…

  But no, she didn’t know any of that. Which is why she ran after me when I left the room to deal with a minor problem involving a drunken idiot. And that’s why she followed me here.

  It would have been so easy to lose her. She’s a rank amateur, after all. An old part of me, one that used to enjoy showing off, whispered that it would be easy to lose a tail as unskilled as her, but I ignored it. No need to be cruel.

  I drove like a placid old lady.

  Oh, little fawn. I know you want to ask me for help. I can see it in your eyes every time you look at me, your gaze glowing with hope and desperation.

  I want you to gather enough courage to ask. And to know what you can expect when you do.

  Because I don’t put a Band-Aid over cancer. I excise it.

  And I want you to be my bait. My willing bait.

  Roy Wilks thinks he’s a lion, but he’s really a jackal that’s very good at staying out of my reach. I could go to where he is, but that is inconvenient and poses too many unknown variables, such as where to do my work and dispose the trash afterward cleanly and efficiently. Besides, my traveling to where he is would leave a trail and leave Lizochka and Thomas unprotected in L.A. for far too long.

  I want Roy Wilks to come out of his den and make his way to Los Angeles, where I plan to snatch him and fulfill the wish my son made on his tenth birthday.

  Plus, if I must be honest—and it’s good to be honest with oneself—I want my little fawn to be grateful. If I use her regardless of her preferences, she might not be. I’m not sure why it matters enough that I’m putting so much effort into winning her cooperation, but…for some reason, it does. It started to matter the moment I saw her picture while researching Roy Wilks’s background.

  I park my car and pull on my work gloves. I like to keep my fingerprints to myself and my hands pristine. The material is thin but strong. The back of the hands have zero grip, so nobody can try to scratch or tear my skin. That’s quite inconvenient.

  I walk toward the house, which is a disaster. If it were mine, the lawn wouldn’t be sporting tire tracks from police cars or have the mailbox knocked over and lying on the ground.

  My home would be neat. Secure. Impenetrable.

  I break out a pick and a torsion bar, stick them into the lock and work them a bit. Barely forty seconds pass before it opens with a click.

  Pathetic.

  The interior of the house is as sloppy and unkempt as the outside. Stale air. Actual dirty footprints on the non-carpeted areas. A few old pizza boxes and Chinese takeout cartons. No discarded chopsticks, though. Rick Owen doesn’t know how to use them.

  But he knows how to use his fists. And he has an excellent backhand, so long as he’s raising it against his estranged wife and their son Jason.

  His wife left him because he’s a piece of shit who kept escalating. Anger management and couples counseling didn’t help. But then, they rarely do. Most people don’t want to be helped. They want validation and understanding for their past actions.

  Rick Owen happens to be a member of that majority. So he’s going to find a way to show that he’s right and everyone else is wrong. Left unchecked, that will end in the death of his wife and child, because they’re a wall between his truth and the people whose validation and understanding he seeks. I’ve seen it more times than I can remember.

  I don’t, as a rule, intervene. Too many interventions bring unwanted attention. But Rick Owen crossed a line when he did what he did when Lizochka’s son was around and traumatized the child. Since Rick Owen is a cancer that doesn’t keep to its corner of the world, I have to do something about him before he really hurts the people I’m responsible for.

  A cat dashes across my path. It looks filthy and uncared for. And slightly too thin. Rick hates cats, but he kept it because his wife loves it. Claimed it was only fair he got the cat if she was going to take the kid.

  Why he wants to keep what he can’t bother to care for…

  Then kidnaps his own son when he knows better…

  The cops should have arrested him when they came for the child, but they didn’t. He is well connected to the right people in the city. And that buys him liberty that little people can’t have in the same circumstances.

  Life is unfair, and there’s nothing I can do about that.

  But I can do something about this cancer.

  I go to the kitchen and take a small knife. Like everything else in the house, the knife is uncared for and—I test it against the edge of a paper towel—rather dull. But it will do. It isn’t like Rick Owen is made of Kevlar.

  I walk upstairs. Loud voices come from the surround system attached to his TV. He’s laughing at some joke, sounding smug. Mr. Untouchable. Mr. Above the Law. He feels so secure in his small kingdom that he hasn’t even bothered to install a decent security system in his home.

  Which is fine. Less work for me.

  I step over the creaky spot between the master bedroom and full bathroom across the hall, having already scouted the house for this little visit. My target is facing the TV. On the giant screen, a pie flies through the air.

  I step into the bedroom, pulling out a cloth I prepped during the drive. It’s been doused with chloroform and a few other choice chemicals. I put the fabric over his mouth and nose and press. Hard.

  He spasms in surprise, and then his thick, sausagelike fingers come up, scrabbling to take my hands from his face and then gripping my wrists—but they lack force and I have an extremely strong grip. He should’ve spent more time in the gym rather than wasting it beating up his family.

  After a few moments of struggle, he goes limp. I run water into the huge tub in the master bathroom, then place a note and a black ballpoin
t pen on the little table by his BarcaLounger. Handwritten, but nobody will ever find that it wasn’t Rick Owen who wrote it, especially since his fingerprints are on the pen.

  Fuck you! Fuck you all! I’m not going into a goddam cage. He’s my fucking son! MY FUCKING SON!

  The paper tore a little over MY FUCKING SON! All in character. So much rage. So much blame. Never, ever sorry about anything he’s done.

  That done, I heft the slumped body, take it to the tub and lay him there. The chemicals are undetectable, or will be soon. Nobody will know he’s been knocked out.

  I hold the man’s kitchen knife and examine it in the better light of the bathroom. Still dull, but one works with what one must. Rick Owen’s skin is soft. Given sufficient force, the knife will slice it like a block of tofu.

  Time to say goodbye, little cancer.

  Chapter Seven

  Angelika

  Not even half an hour later, Tolyan walks out of the house. The streetlight hits his face just so. I squint. Is that a smile?

  Yes, it is. The corners of his mouth are curved upward. If he exuded casual confidence when he walked in, now he reminds me of a lion after a quick and easy hunt.

  God, why do I keep having the most disturbing imagery? He might’ve been visiting his friend. People totally do that.

  But then he pulls off his gloves. People don’t put on gloves before visiting a friend.

  Maybe the friend’s obsessive-compulsive and can’t stand it when people touch their things with their bare hands. It’s possible. My first and only roommate was like that. She was constantly washing her hands with antibacterial wipes and gel.

  But she kept her part of the apartment meticulously clean. The state of disrepair this place has says the friend isn’t obsessive-compulsive enough to demand Tolyan wear gloves when he comes over.

  Tolyan starts to climb into his car. This is my chance to talk to him, but I can’t move. My internal alarm is blaring danger. He’s no Roy, but that doesn’t mean…

  He might not be the safe harbor I’ve been seeking. Sure, he drove away the flasher. And blocked a drunken guy from stumbling into me in the ballroom. He also fed me dinner when he realized I was hungry.

  But ticking those things off doesn’t silence my alarm.

  Roy is a consistent monster. He wanted to rape me, but failed. Got caught. Got kicked out of the family. Paid the price and now hates me for that. He blames me for not spreading my legs when he wanted it, for “acting like I’m too good for him.” He has one unchanging motto: I take what I want, no matter what.

  But Tolyan… He seems all over the place. Nice, then mean—albeit not to me. Back and forth, back and forth.

  Unpredictability is dangerous.

  But is it more dangerous than Roy?

  Indecision gnaws at me. If I’m going to talk to Tolyan, I have to do it now…

  The lights on Tolyan’s car come on, and he’s off. The sedan makes a left turn and vanishes from my view. Cursing under my breath, I follow, but his car blends into the traffic and I lose him.

  Shit! I smack my steering wheel. I didn’t make up my mind in time, so this is what I get.

  Gave you plenty of chances, Angelika. The universe sounds particularly mocking this evening.

  Fine. Tomorrow, then. I’m going to be out jogging, and hopefully I’ll run into him and his Dobermans again.

  But the next morning, he and his dogs are nowhere to be seen. I jog slowly, then make an extra loop just to be sure. Don’t dogs have to be walked every day?

  Thankfully, the flasher isn’t around either, but maybe he isn’t going to be coming back after what happened. Bet it isn’t every day he has a large dog snapping at his penis.

  I jog until I can’t dither anymore without being late for my shift at the café. Maybe Tolyan’s sick. He could be sleeping in. Or maybe he has somebody else deal with his dogs today. It is Saturday, after all.

  When I’m back home, I shower, then thumb through my phone while munching on the leftover sandwich from yesterday. I can’t help noting that even though we haven’t run into each other today, he’s taking care of me. If this isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is. I need to quit overthinking what I saw after work.

  A headline catches my eyes, and I stop scrolling.

  MAN DEAD IN APPARENT SUICIDE.

  I start to thumb down, then pause again. The street…and the house… The mailbox in front lying on the ground, the totally wrecked lawn…

  It’s the place Tolyan went to last night.

  I click on the headline. My hands shake as the implications hit me.

  According to the article, someone named Rick Owen died in an apparent suicide. His body was found in a bathtub, which probably means he either tried to electrocute himself or slashed his wrists. No signs of struggle or forced entry. A new mother in the neighborhood found him because his car alarm started blaring endlessly in the morning, which woke her baby up, and Rick Owen didn’t come out to do anything about the noise.

  He appeared to be upset over the impending divorce and the possible loss of custody of his son. He even kidnapped his own child two days ago, but the police didn’t arrest him because he seemed distraught rather than dangerous.

  I shake my head. Harmless men do not kidnap their own children. Something about the way the cops treated him feels wrong, but then, these are the same people who said their hands were tied when it came to Roy’s threats against me. Apparently, unless and until he actually physically harms me, there’s nothing they can do. So it could’ve been the same with this guy who committed suicide.

  Although…my gut says different. Tolyan was in that house for about half an hour. If the man was already dead, why didn’t he call the police?

  Apprehension runs its chilly fingers down my spine. But how could Tolyan have had anything to do with the man’s death? And how could he have killed this Rick Owen without leaving any marks on him?

  I realize my teeth are chattering and clamp my mouth shut. I’m being ridiculous. Tolyan couldn’t have killed the man. I might even be wrong about the house. It isn’t like there’s only one house in this entire huge city with a mailbox knocked on the ground and a messy yard.

  Because it’s one thing to give off a danger vibe, quite another to actually kill a human being, especially so up close and personal. The article makes it clear that if this was a murder, the killer had been close to the victim.

  I Google for more articles. But it’s like they were all written by the same reporter, because they repeat the same facts.

  “Argh!” Frustrated, I drop the phone next to the sandwich.

  What I wanted to know was how that man supposedly killed himself. I want proof that Tolyan wasn’t involved in his death. The man was found in his bathtub. Tolyan’s clothes were dry last night…I think. But it was dark and I couldn’t see that well.

  And if there was blood…

  Tolyan’s outfit was all black, which means it wouldn’t have shown, not in the dark. It’s like he knew he’d need the camouflage.

  Stop it! You’re being paranoid.

  But I can’t stop. Paranoid has been my middle name since my parents died. And paranoia is what’s kept me alive for eight years.

  I go back through the articles, looking for the dead man’s address. One has it. I look it up…and realize it’s the place I followed Tolyan to. There’s no question about it.

  I suck in air. This is the kind of stuff I’m supposed to call the cops about. That’s what society says is the right thing to do.

  But if I do the right thing, are they going to keep me safe from Roy?

  The fact that I’m even asking that question—like doing the right thing is a matter of tit for tat—makes me want to smack myself. It’s selfish and terrible and a whole bunch of other very bad adjectives. But for God’s sake, whose fault is it that I’ve become this awful? Why should I do the right thing when the world doesn’t want to do the right thing back in return? All I want is to feel safe.

  Contradic
tory and shameful thoughts swirl in my head. My temples throb, and my skull hurts, like someone’s got it in a vise.

  After swallowing four ibuprofen, I go to Coffee Heaven for my shift. Eric and Sean are already there. Sean waves, but Eric barely glances my way as he tilts his chin in an arrogant, half-assed greeting. I smile like nothing’s wrong, but know I failed when Sean gives me a weird “what’s up with you?” look.

  Nothing. Everything. I don’t even know anymore.

  My insides are wound so tight I feel like I’m about to snap. The universe is no longer satisfied with throwing rotten lemons at me. Now it wants to play mind games. How long will it take before Angelika goes insane?

  Never, bitch. Never. Never giving you the satisfaction.

  When I put on my apron and come out of the locker room, the door chimes, signaling a new customer. I lift my head as I walk toward the register and every cell in my body freezes.

  Tolyan.

  Today he’s in a navy suit with a white shirt and no tie. Everything about him is pristine and crisp, like he has a business meeting to attend. I realize he wasn’t on the jogging trail just because he didn’t feel like coming by, not because he slept in or whatever. I glance at his hands. He must’ve used them to kill the man last night. I stare at them more closely. I have no idea what I’m looking for. Bloodstains under his fingernails? Scratch marks from the man’s struggle?

  But Tolyan’s hands are scratch-free and clean enough to perform surgery. Then I remember the gloves he was wearing when he went to the house, plunging me deep into a massive wave of doubt.

  The article didn’t say what he did. Just that the man died. A suicide. It’s probably a suicide, I tell myself, although my silent reassurance seems hollow. The cops would’ve known if it weren’t…wouldn’t they?

  But maybe cops didn’t look too hard. Or maybe it’s still too early to tell.