The Butterfly Assassin, page 24
‘I’m with…’ She gestures in the approximate direction of the mark. He hasn’t moved from his corner, but if Nick doesn’t get out of her way, she’ll miss her opportunity. ‘People.’
‘So I can see.’ He steps out of her path. ‘Well, wouldn’t want to keep you from your “people”.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Nick shrugs. ‘For what? The disappearing, or the fact that you’re not even going to tell me where you’ve been?’
‘Both,’ she says, though ‘sorry’ is the wrong word to express this curious tangle of obligation she feels. She knows she should be sorry, that she’s wronged Nick, somehow, in the way that she disappeared and because she isn’t here to fix things, only to make them worse. She’s not sure that she is, but feelings – her own, or other people’s – remain an inaccessible mystery, as difficult to identify as they are to express. ‘Sorry’ will do. It’s all she can offer him, but she knows it’s not enough.
He’s still watching her as she pushes through the crowd, and it’s a distraction she doesn’t need. Isabel tries to shake it off. The job’s her highest priority; nothing else matters.
She finally reaches the mark and, half shouting over the music, asks him to dance. She’s rewarded with a grudging acceptance, and his friends jeer good-naturedly as he joins them on the floor. For a while, she finds herself pressed against him by the movement of bodies around them, hardly needing to move to look like she’s dancing.
The mark’s interest in her only grows the longer they’re squeezed awkwardly together. ‘Want to get some air?’ he says, gesturing towards the door that opens onto the alley by the club.
He’s practically doing Isabel’s job for her. She lets him lead her outside, his smile a teenager’s attempt at suave confidence or a wolfish grin.
‘I haven’t seen you here before,’ he says.
‘I haven’t been here before,’ she replies, trying to sound more like a teenager new to the joys of underage clubbing than a contract killer on a job. ‘It’s not what I expected.’
‘Oh yeah?’ He moves closer, and she’s struck by a sudden terror that he’s going to try to kiss her.
And then he puts his hand on her thigh and the whole charade falls apart.
Isabel’s skirt is short, her top skin-tight – there are limited hiding places for concealed weaponry, and she’s strapped her knife to her thigh. His fingers brush against the holster’s thick strap and his eyes widen, as though he knows exactly what it is and why she’s here.
They’re close enough that, if she wanted to, she could kiss him. Instead, she whispers almost directly into his mouth, ‘Don’t move.’
He freezes, a catch in his breath that she feels against her lips. ‘You came here for me, didn’t you?’
She lowers her right hand to the catch on her thigh sheath, her leg still pressed against his. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I did.’
‘I didn’t tell anyone.’ He’s panicking without moving, smart enough to keep still. ‘He made me swear – I didn’t – I’ve kept quiet.’
‘I’m just doing my job,’ she says, sliding the knife free. ‘I don’t make the decisions.’
‘Please.’
But she’s not here to listen to him beg. The knife slips easily between his ribs, and he falls towards her, his lips moist against her neck. She holds him there, feeling his breath slow and falter, until his heart stops throbbing in the bony chest pressed against her, and then she lets the body slump against the wall. Death diminishes him, makes a child of him; it strips away the pretence of maturity, and all that’s left is the corpse of a teenager and a void inside Isabel where the guilt should be.
She thought maybe it would feel different, but a death’s a death, and he died the same as anyone.
The door to the club slams open. ‘Bella?’ Nick’s voice. Shit. ‘I thought I saw you come this way. I wanted to…’ He’s seen her. ‘Bella?’
Slowly, Isabel turns. ‘You should’ve stayed inside, Nick.’
He sees the knife, the blood, the body, and his breathing becomes more laboured. ‘Shit, is he… is he dead? Did you…?’ He staggers backwards. ‘You killed him. He’s just a kid and you killed him. He must be like sixteen.’
‘Nick,’ she begins.
‘You’re guild, aren’t you?’ He’s backed up against the door now. It’s a fire exit that only opens from the inside, and she can hear him cursing under his breath as he tries to wrench it open. Eventually he gives up, pressing his back against it as though he can disappear through the wood. ‘Is that why you left school? Emma said you were sick.’
‘I was.’ Why did it have to be Nick? Why did he have to follow her, when he could have stayed inside where he’d have been safe?
‘But that boy…’ He looks over her shoulder at the mark. ‘You killed him. I thought… I thought the guilds didn’t kill minors.’
‘You thought wrong.’
‘Bella…’
A stranger in his position would already be dead. No mercy, no hesitation, no witnesses: the three rules of surviving in the field. But it’s Nick. Soft-hearted Nick Larrington, who cries over the deaths of strangers. Who was kind to her even when she didn’t deserve it.
Who has seen her face, and knows what she’s done.
‘Please,’ he’s saying, ‘I won’t tell anyone what I saw. I had no idea that you—’
‘I’ll make it quick,’ she says, because that, at least, is a mercy she’s permitted. ‘You won’t even feel it.’
‘You can’t kill me. You can’t kill me. I thought we were friends.’ He’s shaking. He looks like he wants to run. ‘Fuck. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t kill me, you can’t.’
‘Nick…’
‘Don’t.’ He’s gauging exits and escape routes, as if he’s not the one who failed PE because of his asthma. ‘Don’t come any closer, Bella, I swear I—’
‘You’ll do what, Nick?’ she says, stepping forward. ‘You’ll scream? You think they’ll come for you? You think they can move faster than I can?’
He’s sobbing now. ‘Please don’t do this, Bella.’ He uses her name like he’s trying to recall her to herself, but he’s trying to bring back a ghost. There’s no point appealing to Bella Nicholls for mercy when it’s Isabel Ryans holding the knife.
‘I have to.’
‘You don’t,’ he says. ‘Whatever your guild said to you, whatever they promised, this isn’t your only choice. Bella. Please!’
Isabel moves quickly, pinning him against the locked door, knife jammed under his chin. ‘You know nothing about my choices.’
‘I know that killing me doesn’t have to be one of them. I swear I’ll keep my mouth shut. No one will know what I saw, I promise.’
‘Promises mean nothing to Comma,’ she says. ‘You’ll slip up eventually. Next week, next month, next year. You’ll open your mouth and they’ll take you out anyway. It’s easier this way.’
‘Is that what happened to Emma?’
If he’d punched her, she’d have flinched less. ‘What?’
He takes advantage of her distraction to twist free of her grip, slipping out from under her arm faster than she’d thought he could move. ‘Is that why Emma hasn’t been at school?’ he says. ‘Did you kill her too? And the librarian, she died – was that because of you as well? Are they dead because of you? Or are—’
He stumbles, looks down, and seems dimly surprised to see her knife in his chest and blood spreading rapidly across his shirt.
‘You…’ he begins.
‘I’m sorry.’ Still not the right word. Still the only one she’s got.
Nick stares at her, crumpling to his knees. ‘Bella,’ he begins, but whatever he was going to say is lost as he dies.
She retrieves her knife, wiping it clean on his shirt; her own top’s sticky with the mark’s blood. With one bloody finger, she draws the guild symbol on the mark’s forehead: a comma for a body and three curved lines forming the outline of wings, the warped silhouette of a butterfly. After a moment’s hesitation, she draws the same symbol on Nick’s cheek.
And now she has to go.
If not for the blood, she’d wait until a group left the club and try to blend in, but after the mess she’s made, she needs to leave as discreetly as possible before the boys’ friends come looking for them. She sticks to the shadows, avoiding main roads, and by some miracle gets back to the hospital without being stopped, despite the blood on her outfit.
The lobby’s empty. She leaves signing off on the hit until the morning and heads to her room, stripping off her bloodstained clothes and throwing away the ones she knows she’ll never wear again. She takes a shower, washing away the traces of the mark’s dying kiss against her throat. The job’s done, but the encounter with Nick has unsettled her.
Is that what happened to Emma? She’s not going to be able to hide this. Emma will join the dots, realise Isabel’s killing again, and everything that hasn’t already been taken from her will come crumbling down.
And the worst part is how easy it feels. When did you stop running, Isabel? She wonders what Michael would have made of her there in the alleyway, the mark pressing against her, greedy for something she wasn’t offering. She wonders what he’ll think when he learns she killed two teenagers in the space of minutes. If he’ll be repulsed by her, or if he knows how it feels not to have to pretend you care just to be able to live with yourself.
It should be harder than this, to live with herself.
She pulls on her pyjamas and crawls into bed, trying not to think about the evening’s work. She killed Nick. The mark – Oliver, he was a person and his name was Oliver – was a job, but Nick Larrington tried to be her friend. He cared about her. And when Emma knows about that…
He’s just a kid, Nick said, and she imagines tomorrow’s headlines, screaming that Comma killed a minor. Just a child, just a child, just a child.
But as her dreams drag her away from wakefulness, all Isabel can think is, So was I.
30 HOMŜTELO (KIDNAPPING)
‘You were dreaming,’ says Daragh, when Isabel opens her eyes. Her cheeks are wet with tears, and she wonders if she cried out. ‘Was it about last night?’
Isabel struggles into an upright position, only half awake, and sees him standing by the window with his back to her. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Are you sure?’ That’s the tone of voice she calls his ‘therapist voice’. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
‘Not really.’ Telling Daragh about it means thinking about it, and thinking about it is dangerously close to letting herself feel any of the emotions that haunt her at night, when the walls she builds so carefully by day come crumbling down in her dreams. There’s only one way Isabel knows how to survive, and it isn’t by getting in touch with her feelings.
‘It was your first voluntary assignment,’ he says. ‘And you killed a child. Each of those on its own would be—’
‘Let me revise my answer,’ she interrupts, since he doesn’t seem to be getting the message. ‘I definitely don’t want to talk about it. Please stop attempting therapy on me when I’ve only just woken up.’
‘It’s almost noon, and you need to get up. Ronan wants to talk to you.’
Abruptly, the weight of what she did last night hits Isabel. ‘Oh, shit.’
‘Oh, and you made the front page.’ Daragh tosses a newspaper onto the bed. She pushes it away without looking at it. ‘They’re speculating about you, you know. Well, about Comma’s newest. No calling card means no pseudonym to claim the kill.’
She doesn’t want to put her name on this, to give the city a target for its condemnation. Only La Revuo publishes pseudonyms alongside obits, but somehow word spreads beyond the pages of the guild newspaper and across the rest of Espera. Three Swallowtail kills this month, people say, if they’re the kind to keep track of that. Or: Nothing from Skipper in a while. Do you think they’ve retired? Those kinds of comments are made with relief, or fear: an older agent off the circuit, no longer a threat, means a new one coming to take their place and their name.
Isabel doesn’t need a recycled nickname. She has her own: Moth. A name for a butterfly that strikes at night.
She pushes aside the duvet and climbs out of bed. ‘I don’t get why they care so much,’ she says, hunting for clothes.
‘The mark was young,’ says Daragh. ‘It makes a difference.’
She could do without his disapproval on top of everything else. ‘How long until Ronan gets here?’
‘Half an hour, tops. You should probably figure out what you’re going to say to him.’
But when it comes to it, she has no excuses.
‘So,’ says Ronan. ‘You fucked it up.’
‘The mark’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘You killed a witness.’
‘I didn’t think you’d want him alive.’
‘There shouldn’t have been a witness in the first place. Let alone another teenager.’ He pauses, as if she didn’t already know how disappointed he is. ‘I understand you knew Nicholas Larrington in some way.’
‘He went to my school.’ He was my friend. No. She can’t think about that. Nick stopped being her friend the moment he saw her with the mark. ‘He recognised me in the club and again in the alleyway. It was a clear identification and I was compromised, so I eliminated the threat the only way I could.’
‘Which would be admirable, in a case less controversial than this one.’
‘Controversial?’
‘The mark was a minor, Isabel. And the motive was… personal. Some weren’t sure we should have taken the job in the first place.’
She doesn’t see how that’s her problem. ‘And yet you did.’
‘And you killed two teenagers and marked them in blood.’ He raises his eyebrow. ‘That’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?’
What she wants to say is: I didn’t have a pen. What she says is: ‘I wouldn’t have killed Nick if I thought there was another way. He saw me. I couldn’t let him walk away.’
‘That wasn’t your decision to make.’
So many rules about murder. She doesn’t see the point – either you’re a killer or you’re not, and she’s way past the point where the details matter. ‘I didn’t exactly have time for a consultation.’
She waits for the inevitable punishment, using all of her willpower to sit firm in her chair and not let him see that she’s afraid. Finally, Ronan says, ‘Don’t let it happen again.’
She stares at him. ‘That’s it?’
‘You’re right. He had to die. But that’s not up to you. You’re not judge and jury, Isabel Ryans – you’re the executioner, nothing more.’
So who does make those decisions – Ronan? Who decides which commissions they’ll take, which motives are good enough, what price is high enough? She’s never given it much thought. It’s easier to follow orders than consider who makes them.
‘Got it,’ she says. ‘Don’t kill anyone without making somebody else do paperwork about it first.’
Ronan’s mouth twitches in a barely suppressed smile, and she feels a tiny thrill of victory. He holds out a metal business card case. ‘Here. This is for you.’
Isabel opens it gingerly. When it doesn’t explode or release a cloud of toxin, she takes out one of the cards inside. It’s made of good-quality cream cardstock, a simple black border a few millimetres from the edge. In the centre, in crisp, red ink, is Comma’s symbol: a comma for a body and three curved lines in the shape of wings.
‘You got calling cards printed? Already?’
He shrugs. ‘I saw no reason to delay.’
She turns the card over. There, in the middle, in small sans-serif letters:
noktopapilio | moth
‘I know that’s what they used to call you,’ he says. ‘The butterfly of night.’
‘Did they tell you why?’ She runs her thumb along the edge of the card, feeling the bite of it against her skin.
‘It doesn’t matter why,’ he says, so either he knows and doesn’t like it, or he’s got less access to Cocoon records than she thought but won’t admit it. ‘The city needs a name. To know there’s a new player in the game.’
She puts the card back in the case and slips it into her pocket. It’s not like there’s another name she’d have chosen, if they’d asked, but the nickname still makes her uneasy. And they didn’t ask.
‘It suits you,’ says Ronan, watching her.
‘Being a dick suits you,’ she retorts.
A fleeting glimpse of a smile. ‘Must be why I do it,’ he says. ‘While I’m here, let me give you this.’ He hands her a phone, a sleek, black handset that makes her old phone look like the cheap crap it was. ‘The encryption means you don’t need to code your messages, but I’d be careful what you say, and to whom.’
For the first time since she arrived in hospital, Isabel has a line to the outside world. And all it cost her was two people’s lives. ‘Thanks,’ she says uncertainly.
‘You’re welcome,’ says Ronan. ‘You earned it.’
Knowing it was paid for in blood makes her never want to touch the phone again, but she puts it in her pocket anyway. ‘This doesn’t make me like you,’ she tells him. ‘Daragh might think you’re not so bad, but I’m beginning to think he’d see the goodness in a machine gun.’
‘It’s always been one of his endearing qualities. Fortunately, I don’t need you to like me. Only kill for me.’
‘I’ll kill for you. I won’t die for you.’
‘That sounds fair.’ Ronan holds out his hand. It’s papery and dry, but his grip is firm. ‘Welcome to Comma, Isabel Ryans.’
So this is it. The end of the road she set herself on when she ran away from home. Did she really think it would take her anywhere else?
Ronan makes for the door, then pauses. ‘If Nick Larrington was a pupil at your school, I assume your friend Emma also knew him.’
Isabel’s mouth goes dry. ‘A little.’
‘Somebody will need to tell her that he’s dead.’
Did you kill her too? Are they dead because of you? Isabel’s ruined everything. Destroyed any hope of this friendship surviving. And she has no idea how to fix this.
