She had killed would kill again. But staring at the child huddled in the corner, trying to hide behind the cases of wine, something inside of her shifted. She raised the gun and lined up her mark, closed her eyes, and took the shot. A short lived wail echoed with the sound of the shotgun casing falling to the floor as she opened her eyes again. Just another stain on her red hands.
She picked up the casing and knocked a stack of the wine bottles over, threw a single match into the puddle leaking across the floor, and turned away as the sudden outflux of heat reached her face.
She wrapped the scarf more tightly around herself and trudged through the snow back to the car where her instructor would be waiting for her to deliver the evidence of her kill. Around the corner, she could her a distant wail from the neighbor of the shop-owner, and the yells for help from her son. Pulling open the door she risked one last glance back and watched the red flames climb high into the sky.
Inside the car, on the way back to the red room, and to the other girls, her instructor took the shell and the personal affect from her. A wrinkled photo, faded with age and fingerprint smudges, was her evidence. It was of a large family, three women, three men, and an abundance of children all smushed together outside of the freshly painted shop. It had been hanging above the door to the cellar, where the oldest man and girl had tried to hide. The instructor was commending her on a quickly executed job, and maybe you'll make it Natalia, if you perform like that everytime, but she was focused on the last look that child had ever given her. Given anyone. It was a look she'd seen countless times, on many children, but something about the terror in the blonde child's eyes, reflected a million upon a million times in the surrounding bottles, would not leave her.
Nothing else about this job had been off; she had gone in under the guise of an orphan looking for a meal and had dispatched the three oldest women and a boy in the kitchen, had taken down the other boy and his twin sister in the hallway branching out, and had killed both middle-aged men in their adjoining bedrooms before finding the old man in the cellar, parkinson's filled limbs shaking an old rifle so badly he couldn't have hit her on her worst day, nor fight her off today. She'd then taken the rifle from the corpse of the man and found the littlest girl by her shuddering gasps, hiding amongst backstock of wine and other alcohols. the girl had begged and pleaded with her not to kill her, had tried to make deals even, but Natalia had just shaken her head once and gave her a grim look before finishing her assignment. not her hardest job at all, but those wide green eyes, and the shrill dread-filled voice stayed with her well into the night.