What those men with empty eyes failed to understand was that each career had its addictions and contained a thrill for Natalya not easily dismissed. Both made her feel like a god who held beating hearts and quivering minds in her hands. The mistake was in ever seeing her as two different people. Assassin or cellist. Requiem or Natalya.
She had always been both. For her it was so simple—the dominant strengths required to face any given situation leapt to the fore, with an attitude to match. No different from choosing different shoes for a change of event. You put them away again when unneeded.
Such philosophical meanderings were usually left in the past these days. Natalya was forty-five and a world away from Victoria’s seedy underbelly. Nowadays she only ever stirred the human soul instead of destroying it. She’d made her choice. She had few regrets. It was the price she’d paid to have a little mouse in her life. She’d paid it willingly, once she’d understood.
Natalya closed her eyes, wondering what Alison was doing. She’d said something about going to a farmer’s market close to their apartment in Neubau before lunch. She was doing cooking lessons, between taking some violin masterclasses and teaching English as a second language to refugees in a Public Learning Centre in the nearby Fifteenth District. Her enthusiasm for each of these activities was unabated.
It had been unnerving at first, being with someone so different from Natalya. Meshing her existence had been difficult with one so filled with life, love, and empathy, and especially with emotions brimming so close to the surface. Many a time Natalya had questioned her sanity at allowing anyone inside. Not to mention the chaotic way Alison never once lined up her shoes, or always threw her clothes over the back of a chair when a perfectly good hanger was available.
But Alison would smile at her appalled expression and tease her until she decided to overlook the disarray. It turned out the woman had been like the mouse she’d dubbed her four years ago—she’d curled up, small and soft, close to Natalya’s heart, and stubbornly refused to move.
What defense did a world-class assassin have against that?
The massage room’s door opened and clicked shut. Natalya felt her back cool as the towel was slid down to her thighs. The slippery noise of massage oil being rubbed into hands filled the air before she felt Christiane’s fingers on her back.
The masseuse began slowly, mapping Natalya’s contours. As she progressed, Christiane became far more forceful than usual, and twice Natalya swallowed a grunt. She hadn’t realised the woman had it in her.
The sound of wet, slapped flesh, and the heat of hands near her neck took Natalya back. It reminded her of the first kill she’d witnessed as a sixteen-year-old. It was an execution for one of the crime family’s own, a man caught in the act of betrayal. She could still feel Lola’s open hand at the back of her neck, the press of her warm skin against the collar of her school uniform, forcing her to watch.
“Orientation”, her stepmother had called it. For what was to come, after Natalya returned from Vienna, once her scholarship was complete and her duties to the crime family began. It was grooming. Ensuring she understood what she was in for.
Natalya had forgotten most of the faces in those lessons. But what she did remember from that first time was the man’s eyes. Bleak, black, and terrified, they had made her want to crawl into a hole and hide.
And she also remembered her perfume. Sensual, exotic, and arousing.
Natalya’s verdict was not unique, judging by the furtive, lust-filled looks the men gave Lola when she wasn’t watching.
The accompaniment to the scene was the satisfied grunts of those standing witness when the battered betrayer took his last breath. Their way of saying it was done. Over. The grunts were a ritual to disguise the horror. Natalya understood more than most the need for ritual. Her entire life was ritualistic, from the way she stretched each day, to the way she straightened her possessions, turned on her MP3 player, and held her bow.
After the chilling deed was done, no one had met her eyes. Not even Lola. Natalya had been sent to do her homework.
The wet slap of flesh—pleasure and pain—it all sounded the same. Natalya had learned that lesson often over the years.
Christiane’s blows became harder, stronger. Punishing. Like…hatred. Wariness curled through Natalya, her eyes sliding open as she processed the unexpected sensations.
A lone, oiled finger slid up the scar next to her spine and dug in viciously. She gritted her teeth at the pain and stared at the woman’s feet. White socks covered them, bisected by the black silk of the sandals.
“The plant outside needs watering,” Natalya said softly in German. “It is in terrible condition.”
Christiane merely hummed evenly and gave no reply. As if she didn’t understand her words. Those telltale toes in the white socks, however, briefly clenched.
Natalya shifted her hands up to sit flat under her chin, lifting her face just a few inches out of the headrest.
“What part of Melbourne are you from?” she said in English, taking a guess. She used her friendliest tone. Her hands slowly edged apart, feeling the roughness of the white towel beneath her fingertips, as she mentally mapped the edges of the massage table.
“Prah…” The word, begun reflexively as a thoughtless reply to small talk, stopped halfway through “Prahran”, a distinctively Melbourne suburb.
The masseuse’s toes clenched just as the hands on Natalya’s back froze. Natalya’s narrowed eyes flew open at the confirmation, the knowledge of imminent danger filling her with an electricity she’d not felt in three years, eleven months, twelve days. The numbers came to her without conscious calculation. She knew them each day the moment she woke. The days since she’d hunted as Requiem.
She felt her alter ego slapped from her slumber, unleashed, burning, alive—like molten metal coursing through her veins. In her mind, she could hear the thrumming, primal drum beat of Two Steps From Hell’s Protectors of Earth shaking her.
Alertness and adrenaline ripped through her with the familiarity of an old friend. She had not felt this sensation since the night she’d ended a corrupt, killer cop—a man she’d choked and drowned in pig swill. Even almost four years on, she could still taste the twisted jubilation mingled with ice-cold rage over what he’d done to the woman Requiem had claimed as hers. Over what he’d done to Alison’s family.
Without warning, Requiem flung herself from the table, smashing the masseuse to the floor with her bent elbow and snatching up the towel she’d been lying on.
She stood above the groggy woman, bouncing on her heels while she spun the towel into a twisted rope and tested the ends threateningly. Requiem studied the crumpled form on the floor—small, lean, and most definitely not the Austrian woman she knew.
“Unless Christiane’s had a lot of work done in the past twenty minutes, you aren’t her,” Requiem said, voice cold. “Who are you?”
The woman offered her a mutinous look but didn’t answer.
Requiem kicked her solidly in the ribs. “Speak up.”
The intruder was a short, wiry-looking Asian woman, with brooding, dark eyes, and an appraising stare. She didn’t seem alarmed by Natalya’s reaction. Rather, she appeared to have been expecting it.
“Where’s Christiane?” Requiem demanded.