"Please! I'll do anything!" The man scrambled to find an exit in the basement of the chic new downtown bar he owned. Of course, the only exit was blocked by a tall woman striding toward him in an almost casually cruel manner. Oksana pinned him to the wall, placing a blade at his throat with one smooth flick of her wrist.
"Listen...," she paused, searching her mind for the man's name, then sighed and reached into her pocket for the business card she'd been given as reference. "JAR-ED. Hm, what an ugly name." She placed her attention back on the man. "It's simple, okay. You borrow money, you pay money back. See how that works? It does not go: Borrow money, stop answering calls, still keep your shitty little bar. Got it?"
As she pressed the edge of the blade firmly against his neck, she felt the instinct rise up in her - as it had with almost every job since she'd started. A quick slice, she thought, observing the terrified look in his eyes. "I said, GOT IT, JARED?"
"Yes! I swear to God I'll have the money soon!"
"You have 3 days." Oksana relaxed her grip on him and began to walk away. "And don't even think about leaving."
When she stepped out of the front door, she took the card and used a lighter to set it on fire before dropping it on the street. It burned until a breeze carried it off - just barely leaving the faint remains of a word written on the back: Lilith.
Hotel rooms and business cards: the last two months had been nothing but. After she'd snuck out that night, stuffing some clothing, her brown wig, and a bit of cash tucked inside a couch cushion into a bag, she headed north. She made a vague kind of peace with the fact that The 12 would probably send a barrage of assassins her way at some point, but it didn't affect her as much as it should've.
She didn't have to go far to reach a contact (and one-time fling) who'd previously tried to recruit her for an organization in competition with The 12. It was a similar setup: receive a card with the name of the target (usually their own, as the presence of one was never suspicious near the target's workplace or home), find the target, and either intimidate or kill them, depending on the desires of the client. To her great annoyance, an employee had to "work up" to the level of assassination. It made her feel like she had signed on for the 9 to 5 version of her other gig, especially when she damn well knew she was better at it than some of the completed jobs she heard about while traveling to assignments. The rush of adrenaline that came with the kill was denied her, replaced by a diluted sense of too easily earned dominance.
She had taken control elsewhere. Opening her eyes to see Eve still beside her, the same rush she craved from a kill had flooded her nerves. And still, she left. She remembered the first instant she saw Anna - how the image of her had electrified the withering center of her young body. She'd wanted to touch Anna right then, wanted to reach inside of her and bask in the essence of her being. When Anna betrayed her, denied what had been plainly asked for (in Oksana's mind, at least), she clung to the ghost of that essence even harder. She would lay back on her cot in prison and watch the flickering of the light in her cell, repeating, "Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna," at every flicker. The woman was a god to her, a holy mantra. Like any person so desperately elevated to the status of deity, though, Anna's own needs and experiences could not survive. They had to be burned and cast aside for the sake of Oksana's threadbare sanity those 5 years.
Konstantin gave her an out and she took it like a starving child offered scraps, but he made it clear to his "lovesick puppy" that the candle lit for this woman who wanted nothing to do with her, and, in fact, thought her dead, must be extinguished. "To love is to give control to another," he stated, his tone a threat tempered by fatherly calm. "You are useless to me if you have no control."
It was true that she continued to dream about Anna on and off. However certain she was of her new persona, her subconscious refused to be restricted. She considered it a weakness, an addiction to be kept in check...until Eve. Eve in that hospital bathroom had given her that same feeling once again, and once again, she was struck open by a single glance. The path she took from that point on toppled all that had been built, internally and externally. And she knew what Konstantin would have said to her, before he'd become a target himself. He would have shaken his head and sighed: "This is what happens when you lose control."
The name of a London-based business taunted her with its inevitability - her newest target, another idiotic man with a potentially fatal debt. If she had really decided to move on, she would have left the country. I just want to look at her.
Finding the woman was an effortless feat. Eve hadn't changed anything in regards to her identity, either a bold or a naive move (but that had always been part of her charm). She couldn't help but smile when she saw that Eve had relocated to a different side of the city, which likely meant Niko was out of the picture. A bank job? Poor baby. The thought of having to wait on the average population in order to survive made her shudder.
It was early evening when she finally saw Eve leave her apartment. She ached to touch her.
No. Only watch, she reminded herself, and then followed Eve, taking care to not be noticed in spite of the brunette's notorious obliviousness. When Eve walked into a local pub, Oksana stopped, slipping behind an adjacent building. Only watch. She gazed in the direction of the pub for what seemed like forever.
Only watch...in the pub. She nodded at her own plan and went to the door. It didn't take long for her to zero in on Eve at a table in the back. Her eyes narrowed as a woman approached the table. Are you fucking kidding me?
It made sense, someone would've made the call eventually, but it felt like a cosmic joke in the moment - that the very contact who'd brought Oksana out of the ruins of her former life now stood before the last remaining piece of it.
