My father always said that I was like a mirage. One moment I was there the next I was gone, like an illusion, a trick of the eye. There was never a doubt in my mind that he was a caring man, at least when it came to me. He was as doting, protective and caring as an ordinary father would be of his daughter, but he was not an ordinary father. My father was barely ever around, and when he was I wasn't. After all, he was Rajan of the Klaww Gang. He never had time for much of anything. It was hard growing up when your father was a member of a world renowned crime ring. Even harder, was it, to stay out of that same sort of life of crime. And so, I became the runner for the organization that my father belonged to.
I was not an official member, but they found me useful when it came to protecting loot or keeping an eye on important matters. Not having ties in any one particular place and having a father willing to loan me out to help other members, I was the most mobile individual that they had at their disposal. I could be anywhere at any time, with nothing more important happening in my life than what the Klaww Gang had assigned to me. With the proper training all my life, I grew to be an excellent fighter, and even more excellent at thieving. I lived up to what my father had said of me, even to the point where others adopted the idea as my name and forgot my real name in the process.
My father had spent every moment that he had free with me making me the perfect heir for his operation. He wanted me to be successful, but he wanted it to be successful as well once he was gone. I got my demeanor from him. Minus the spice-induced rage I had his temper, and while I could be nice to the people I liked, if I didn't like you I was scary and I wasn't afraid to hurt you or knock you around within an inch of your life and those who met me quickly came to know it. On the other hand, I got my best qualities from my mother.
Her name was Savitri Sekhar, and, like my father, she grew up in the streets of Calcutta, but unlike him she came from a wealthy family. She died a few years after I was born, so I remember very little of her, if anything at all. My father told me that I inherited her lovely white fur and black stripes that have a purple shine in the sun. I also got her eyes, a sky blue, and her black hair. Actually, other than being a tiger, I inherited nothing physically from my father and even then I could have inherited that from her as well. We were all of the same general breed: tiger. Father said that I was the spitting image of my mom.
I remember her being a very kind and loving mother, and often others wondered how she had ended up with a criminal like my father. He always told me that they had met by the one kind deed he could ever remember doing in his life. Being from a rich family, it was sad to say that he, at first, saw my mother as sheltered and naïve. She had been walking down a busy street where he was selling spice and at the time he had only seen her in passing, her beautiful fur and expensive jewels catching his eye, and he thought that she would be worth robbing but never saving. Here she was, a beautiful young woman with all those riches and no obvious means of protecting herself. Of course she was asking for trouble.
He tells it like this:
"She was beautiful, but not so beautiful as the precious gems that hung from her ears and collar. Still, I had more important things to attend to. My spice business was just beginning to take off and I had no time to rob young women that day, as I was meeting an important buyer in that market and in a short time. I knew it was more than just her gems that had caught my eye, but I had to look at her the way that a thief did. She was nothing special, just another victim. A faceless body with jewels strung upon it waiting to be taken from an owner who probably had far too many of them. I would have forgotten her… if she hadn't turned my way and met my gaze. Her stunning blue eyes were too much to be forgotten and at that moment she was the first face I had ever truly seen on a person and I felt foolish for letting myself think such things. When she realized that she was staring, she broke eye contact and made a quick exit.
My day went on, my buyer came and went successfully, and a few of my individual buyers gave me quite a profit on the day, but still that woman would not leave my mind. I moved silently through the afternoon streets on my way back to my residence and hide-out when I heard a scream pierce the air. These things were not abnormal for this part of the city. There were rapes and killings nearly every night, with all of the criminal activity that happened in that area. Normally I wouldn't have so much as batted an eye at a scream like that, but my curiosity got the better of me and did the better for me, as I would later discover.
The sight that I set my eyes on actually sickened me. A group of monkeys had gotten a hold on someone and was beating them senseless while taking their possessions. It wasn't until they ran over to the river's edge to dump the body that I saw the one thing that I realized all too late I never wanted to see. The body that they had been beating and stripping of jewels had been none other than the beautiful white tiger I had seen at the market earlier that day. I chose not to confront them, but instead when they ran right after dumping her body into the Hooghly River, I ran to it and dove in to save her. At the time I didn't know why I had done it. I pulled her out of the water, her clothes were torn and she was badly beaten, but it was probably the only time in my life that I didn't look at a woman when given the chance. There was just something pure and divine about her and I didn't want to do anything that would dishonor that. Instead, I stole a blanket from a nearby market stall and wrapped her in it, doing the only thing I could think to do at the time and taking her back to my place. I didn't know who she was or where she lived, and so I did what I could.
It took her three days to wake up, all of which were spent under my inexperienced care, but when she did I felt relief. She introduced herself and thanked me, soon recognizing me as the man she had seen in the market. When she told me that she came from a high family, I told her that she should leave as soon as she felt well, that I would even escort her for her protection, but they were probably fearful for her. She left later that day, thanking me again for all I had done. Something about her warmed my heart, but I knew that I would never see her again so I let her memory go slowly.
Weeks passed and life returned to normal. I forgot about the tigeress with the beautiful white fur and blue eyes and continued developing my spice business. Not a thought of her passed my mind until the day that she herself came to me as a buyer. As it was, she was really there to see me and she had found herself having an insatiable curiosity when it came to who I was. She had seen me selling spice and in her best attempt to seem like an addict, she had talked to all of the local buyers, finally finding one who believed her in her lie, and he pointed her in my direction. I shooed her away. This was no place for a woman of her stature. She left discontented, but I thought that perhaps she would understand that I was making her leave for her protection.
After that day a week passed and then suddenly her appearances became persistent and even annoying on a larger scale. Some days I caught her staring at me from across the market, others I found that she would sit about right near the places that I met my buyers and after a while she seemed to know my route and locations as well as I did. Finally, when I could bear it no longer, I confronted her in an alleyway, trying my best to scare her, but failing as she knew that I had no intention of actually hurting her. She told me that she had fallen in love with me. I was her savior and without me she would have died. Not only that, but she found me handsome and somewhere in her heart she found a way to ignore what I did for a living, saying that someone who saved her could not be completely bad. As much as I wanted to be rid of the distraction there and then, I found myself captivated by her eyes again as she told me her truth and I finally placed the things I had been feeling in the category of attraction. She was beautiful, she was rich, and she didn't care where I had come from.
We courted for many years before she told her parents of me. She came out to them with the whole truth and told them what I was, but hoped that they would understand that she was in love and wanted to be with me no matter what kind of trouble I got into. They obviously disapproved, blaming me for her strange behavior those few years and saying that they would find her a proper husband, one who could support her and wouldn't put her life in danger, but she would hear nothing of it. She begged me to take her away, and I did. By then, she was the only person I thought I would ever love and being a criminal, I didn't mind stealing her away. I also knew that there was nothing left to say that would make her realize that I was not the one for her. If I insisted, then she insisted that I was because I realized that I had faults and I was willing to worry for her because of them. She felt I would protect her forever and she would be happy, and she was.
We eloped, getting married a year after we had run from the city that we grew up in. She was pregnant the next year with what was to be our beautiful baby girl. We thought that we would be a family, albeit a dysfunctional one, but a family as far as we could put effort into being. My spice operation grew larger and larger, until I could give the women I loved a home that was worthy of them, and we shared many happy years together. We never thought those happy years would be so very short. Only four years after the birth of our daughter, she became very quickly ill and died. I later was to discover that she had been killed by a slow acting poison that had been meant for me. Of all the people to come between us, her parents had hired an assassin to kill me, thinking that if I was dead she would have no choice but to come home, but she had seen the assassin slipping poison into my food when the servants prepared it, and at the last moment when no one had been around she had switched my plate with her own and taken her last meal to protect me.
Then there I was, a single father with a booming spice business and an illegal operation, and my daughter who didn't yet understand what had happened to her mother. I decided then that I would raise her as best as I could, and many years later she showed the affinity to do the very things that I did, and I knew that her mother would take no issue with her learning these things, as she had never taken issue with me knowing them. When she was old enough she took her mother's last name, and began to take on the beauty that her mother once had. I knew then that I could only raise her in the best way that I could and give her all the love that she would never have from a mother who was stolen from her."
It was true that I never grew up knowing the full love of a mother, but I loved my father all the same. In time I came to understand that her actions had been out of love and she never would have let her parents come between her and the one that she loved. She died being the woman that she wanted to be and loving the man that she wanted to love. The one thing that I can still hear her saying to me, one of the few memories I have of her, is her holding me close to her one night before dinner and saying "Never let anyone tell you who or what to be. Do what you love and do it for yourself." The gravity of those words never struck me until years later when I was finally old enough to understand how and why she had died.
I made a vow to her, then, to not even let my father tell me who I would be. Even so, I had spent all of these years allowing him to prep me for being the perfect little heiress. Sometimes I didn't know my thoughts from those of the Klaww Gang anymore, and sometimes I wondered if my father was even bothered anymore by the way that they pushed me back and forth like some kind of toy. I lost sight of what my mother had wanted of me in the blind devotion that I showed to my father and the constant effort I put into making him proud of me, even if it meant being the Klaww Gang's puppet. As of late, I felt like I was beginning to lose my father. The spice and power had changed him. He was still my father, but he was different somehow in a way that wasn't good for either of us. Even when acknowledging this, though, I allowed myself to be molded and pushed and shoved because I wanted nothing more than for him to not stop loving me, as he was all I had.
This all would be how I got to where I happened to be at the moment. Maybe not the exact events before I got here, but it was what set up the situation to allow my current dilemma to even exist.
After the heist that I pulled for the gang at the Cairo Museum, I was the primary guard for the Clockwerk parts that were now scattered around the world by the Klaww Gang. This job, of course, was what landed me in the care of Dimitri Lousteau, though many could argue that it was the other way around and without me the stupid lizard couldn't find his own tail. I had been sent with him with the instructions to keep an eye on the parts and on him. Even though I was supposed to be shifting between hideouts every week or so to check on the parts, they had told me to stay with Dimitri, because they considered him the least competent when it came to actually keeping things that were important safe. He was too busy trying to turn everything into a party.
Dimitri made me feel gross every time he spoke. It was as if he couldn't even form a coherent sentence. On top of everything else, I hated the room he gave me and I especially hated his dance club, which it was in. He liked to keep the music up as loud as the police would allow him to before he got complaints, and there wasn't even anyone there! I hadn't slept in days; the music was just too loud and irritating for my sensitive ears. All I really wanted at this point was a good night's sleep, but I knew it wasn't coming to me any time soon, so I was sitting in a lounge chair of red velvet overlooking the vacant dance floor. I was on my computer researching the different parties that would be interested in the Clockwerk parts so that I would know who would be most likely to show up and try to take them.
"You look down in your groove" a male voice said behind me suddenly, causing me to jump a bit before I realized it was just Dimitri.
"I haven't slept in days" I growled as I shut my laptop and set it on my tiny side table. "Maybe you could turn the music off and I would be in a better mood."
"Ah, this music is greasy sweet. It sauces up your spicy mood. Let it flow and catch some Z's" he replied.
I was at my breaking point and Dimitri was far from being one of my favorite people. On top of that, there was nothing he could say that didn't make him sound like a total idiot. "I can't live like this!" I finally exploded. My claws ripped the fabric of the chair arms as I stood quickly and bore my teeth at him. "If my father hadn't agreed with the rest that I should be here to guard the tail feathers, I would have been gone the day before I got here!"
"Whoa, Tiger Girl, cool your steamy jets. If you want a new pad then we will provide" he said, backing up to keep his distance from me. I knew he was afraid of me and I loved it because it kept him from bothering me most of the time.
"Just put me anywhere quiet."
It was less than an hour before they had me moved into my new room. I really wasn't surprised at the speed with which they did it. They moved me to a building next door to the nightclub but the walls were amazingly soundproof. The old tenants probably hated the noise as much as I did. Dimitri had bought it since the land lord put it up for sale after having an incredibly, but not really all that surprisingly, hard time renting it out. After he bought it, he made the bottom floor and basement into room for his guards, while the top floor was a "guest pad" but he hadn't thought of putting me there because the Klaww Gang wanted me close to the tail feathers. It was a small one room apartment on the second floor of the building with a separate bathroom and a large round bed. The walls were practically made of windows. Not only did that make it nice and open but it also gave me the ability to watch the nightclub over the tops of the other buildings, not that I wanted to.
"Do you need anything else?" a warthog flashlight guard asked me.
"No" I replied as I turned away and looked out my window.
"We'll be outside, then" he said as he headed for the door.
"No" I repeated. "Do your rounds. I don't need a guard."
"Yes Ma'am" he said as he exited.
"Alone and quiet" I said to myself as I lay down on the bed. It was soft, the perfect place for a cat nap, which is exactly what I intended to do. There wasn't even enough energy in me to change out of my clothes, which were comfortable enough anyway because I wore a simple bikini halter top in which supported my somewhat average bust quite well and a wrap skirt that I tied over my left hip and the fabric was cut at an angle in the front so the hem rose up from just above my right knee to where it was tied. There was a thin decorative belt, tied into the skirt's knot, draped around my hips and had coin-like sequins dangling from it every inch or so. The entire outfit was comfortable midnight blue cotton and I honestly loved it more than anything else in my closet. I had never liked dressing the way my father wanted me to, the whole Indian traditional sari and all, but I stuck to the fashion trends I inherited in the most minimal way possible. Besides, I never cared if I was a bit more exposed than he approved of when I was young, and it was so easy to move around in this outfit that it had never bothered me before.
I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, tucking myself into a ball. Not even the sound of quiet footsteps on the roof could disturb me now… until a quiet "thunk" joined them and brought me out of the haze that I was trying to fall into. Now there was something up and seeing as the guards hadn't all started shooting like the morons they were, they probably either didn't hear or the guard on my roof was taken out. I checked the pouch I kept on my inner thigh to make sure the knife was still in it before I very slowly pulled open my window and got ready to jump to the roof.