(568 words.)
Billie entered Daud's chambers silently and without knocking, as was often her way, and then stopped immediately short in the doorway, the words to announce her presence dying unspoken on her tongue as she took in the view before her.
Daud stood at the other end of the room with his back to her, hands resting on the washstand in front of him. He was stripped down to his undershirt, and a quick glance around the room showed her his whaling coat hanging from a peg on the wall and his bloodstained button shirt in a heap on the floor. She could also see his blade, already spotless and gleaming, lying across his desk, which explained why he hadn't finished washing up yet.
The day's job had been a messy one, both in the sense that much of their information had been wrong and they'd needed to do a lot of thinking on their feet, and because the target, when they finally cornered him, had jerked unexpectedly on Daud's blade, spraying him and much of the nearby floor with a burst of arterial blood.
They'd dragged themselves home in unhappy moods, and Daud had set Billie to the task of drafting a letter to the ones who had hired them, explaining in pointed detail why the Whalers would be expecting more than the agreed upon sum when it came time for coin to change hands, before going off to clean himself up.
She watched now as he picked up a cloth from the basin and dragged it over his face with both hands, scrubbing at the flecks of dried blood on his skin and letting the water run down his neck and drip off his arms. He pulled the cloth away again with a relieved sigh, tipping his head back for a moment to let the cool air of the room rush over his face. Then he shook himself, dropped the cloth back into the basin, and in one smooth movement, gripped his undershirt by the hem and pulled it over his head to toss it on the floor.
Against her better judgement, Billie continued to stare, watching with some strange enthrallment as he wrung out the cloth and ran it over his chest and arms, across the back of his neck, washing away the blood and grit and sweat of a job nearly gone wrong. Rivulets of water ran down the hard angles of his muscled back, followed along the jagged lines of scar tissue that covered so much of his body.
Daud was not what Billie would call 'handsome', and he was nothing like any of the scant few men who had ever caught her eye. But she'd been drawn to his power from the very moment she first spotted him in the street, and there was something to seeing it so clearly on display like this, not just gifts from the Void and an eye for the kill, but the real, physical strength underneath it all…
She swallowed and shifted her weight back, and it was enough to make the floorboards creak.
Daud turned his head quickly, frowned when he spotted her lingering by the door. "Lurk," he said flatly. "Is there something you need?"
She shook her head and crossed her arms, leaning against the doorjamb with all the casualness she could manage. "Just making sure not too much of that blood was yours."