“Please, do him this favor.”
“I’m done, Angel,” she murmured. “We’ve spoken of this. The family has no right to ask me.”
“Father knows that. Believe me, he wouldn’t request this of you unless the need was dire.”
She said nothing. Angel, while diplomatic, suffered from an eloquent man’s malady—faced with silence, he felt compelled to fill it, even when it was in his best interests to keep his mouth shut.
Moments dripped by. Angel cleared his throat.
“Raban, Incorporated has dropped the price of the condenser units to below fifteen thousand standard dollars. It’s a calculated move to edge out the competition. The condenser production is still the main source of our revenue. We can’t underbid them. We can’t even match them. The profit margin is too narrow for us to survive. They can take a loss, but we don’t have the reserves to ride it out. We’re a small family. We’ll go bankrupt. And you know what happens to families that go bankrupt.”
Without funds, a family couldn’t pay its soldiers. The competition in New Delphi was too cut-throat for the family without soldiers to survive for long. The city housed twenty-one kinsman families of note, metropolis divided between them like slices of a pie, in both economic and geographic sense. The Galdes’ slice was rather small, but their soldiers were renowned for their expertise and loyalty. Their martial prowess was what had kept the family afloat this long.
“Please, Meli. You’re still a Galdes. Even if you did retire.”
Why did she feel guilt? She owed them nothing. She’d spent twelve years murdering on their behalf. She just wanted to be free now. Free and alone. Her father knew this. She’d made it abundantly clear during their last communication.
She didn’t bend her rules, as the family learned the first time they tried to force her to kill a target without a sufficient reason. This job had to be special. Something she could refuse.
The curiosity got the better of her. “Who is the target?”
“Does this mean it’s a yes?”
Meli sighed softly. “The target, Angel.”
She supposed it had something to do with Raban, Inc., but she had excised herself from Galdes family years ago. Their business dealings remained a mystery to her. She had no idea who owned Raban, Inc.
She heard the barely audible click as Angel tapped the keys on his end of the screen.
A faint tug on her senses from the left. She didn’t hear it, didn’t see it, but felt it with some innate sixth sense, or perhaps an imperceptible combination of all five.
Meli struck.
Her eyes were still closed, but in her mind she clearly saw a ribbon of transparent green snapping from the bracelet on her hand. She felt the energy sear the target and smelled fried electronics.
“Good God,” Angel said.
She opened her eyes in time to see the manta ray shaped disk of interceptor crash to the floor in a smoking ruin. Quiet and equipped with small caliber cannon, robotic interceptor units had long become a favorite in security. Their state of the art sensory systems ensured that they located intruders quickly and the absolute silence of their flight made their detection nearly impossible until their ammunition bit the back of the target’s neck. She made it a point to kill at least one a month, to relieve tension and practice her strike on a moving target. It helped her stay sharp.
“It always rattles me when you do that,” Angel said. “Here is the file.”
A small icon ignited in the corner of the screen, indicating a downloaded file available for viewing. He hesitated. “I think you might enjoy this one. A bit of poetic justice, one might say. Give it a thought, Meli. Please. For me.”
Angel touched his fingertips to his mouth, pressed them to his forehead, and bowed his head. The screen turned neutral grey, signaling the end of transmission.
Meli sighed. “Open file.”
The icon grew to fill the screen with a facsimile of a manila folder. The folder opened. A picture of a man looked at her. Ice burst at the base of her neck and slid down her spine.
Celino Carvanna.
Two hours later Meli sat in the garden. Around her, dahlias bloomed in a dazzling display of a hundred shades. The delicate pink of Adelaide Fontane, the white frilly Aspen, the gaudy riot of orange that was Bodacious and her favorite, the Arabian Night, its sharpened petals a deep intense red of a Burgundy wine.
Beyond the small plot lay a narrow street, typical to Old Town, where streets were narrow, houses old, property values low, and residents still kept an occasional garden. Beyond the street lay a throughway. If she rose and approached the fence, she would see the steady current of aerials gliding through the air. A left turn on the throughway would bring her to the heart of New Delphi’s financial district. A right would take her to the Terraces, where tourist shops and cafes catered to the upscale clientele eager for a touch of the “old planet” and the memories of provinces that lay beyond the city.
The city was the center of the South, the technological and economical hub of the subcontinent. Divided into territories between kinsmen, it served as their battleground. But those who had grown up in the provinces surrounding New Delphi never forgot their true home.
Meli had bought the house for the garden and filled it with dahlias, permitting only a few brugmansias and two pink silk trees for fragrance. It was her bright, cheerful haven, her little celebration of life and color, and affirmation of her own humanity. Her proof that she could nurture life as well as take it.
The file lay on her lap, downloaded into her notebook. She had read it, committing every word to memory. She had printed Celino’s photograph. His face was a glossy smoothness underneath her fingertips.
She moved her hand and looked down on the god of her adolescence. He hadn’t changed as much as she expected. The years had sharpened his face, honing his features with a lethal precision. A perfectly carved square jaw. A crisply defined nose with a small bump. His cheekbones protruded, the cheeks beneath them hollowed, making the contours of his face more pronounced. His eyebrows, two thick black lines, combined with the stubborn set of his wide, narrow-lipped mouth, gave his face a grim, menacing air. But it was the eyes that elevated his appearance from merely harsh to dangerous.
Dark grey, they matched the fabled bluish steel of Ravager firearms. Perceptive, powerful, they betrayed an intellect sharp enough to draw blood but revealed no emotion. Not even a minute glimpse of his inner self. She vividly remembered staring into their depths, trying to gauge what he felt for her, if anything, and finding only a hard opaque wall.
Every time she looked into those eyes, a jolt of adrenaline tore through her.
Meli forced herself to look at him again, trying to separate herself from the adolescent flutter of her pulse. That flutter, the slight pain in her chest, the rapid chill, all that was but a bitter memory of a little foolish girl, hardly more than a child. Her little foolish hopes and dreams had long turned to dust.
She had to evaluate him for what he was—a target.
In her mind a younger Celino sprang from her memories: handsome, tall, with a lazy, self-indulgent smile, standing on a verandah with a short blade in his hand, inviting the party guests to throw polymer drink cans at him. He was barely seventeen then. He looked incredible poised against the backdrop of the flower beds that gave the province of Dahlia its name. As a barrage of the multicolored containers hit him, he sliced at them in a blur, severing them with his blade. When he was done, the tile around him was drenched. Celino, on the other hand, remained perfectly dry.
Carvannas had a reputation for their knife skills, superb even among the kinsmen.