Author's note: Thank you to xxx-benedictbrothersfan-xxx, my first (and only, haha) reviewer for this story :)

So this is the first chapter where you get to see how I've involved the Benedict family and I hope you like it! Please review if you're reading xx


Striker

Her crystal blue, almost silver, eyes meet mine across the expanse of the rooftop. The sky is dark, but I can still make out her features as she pulls the black hood of her cloak up over her head, concealing herself as it hangs low over her face.

A moment later, she turns around and jumps from the edge of the tall apartment building. It doesn't worry me. I rarely ever have to worry about her if I'm being honest.

As I take my time walking over to her side of the building, I pull the hood of my own full length cloak over my head. I look over the edge of the building in time to see her land steadily on the balcony of a fourteenth floor apartment, three floors down from the rooftop we scaled up to. It always makes everything just a little bit more complicated when we can't just walk in through the front door, although in most cases we have to at least climb through a window. This particular apartment building has heavy security due to the high number of important savants residing here, so we have no choice but to break in through the patio doors this night.

I look down at her as she peers through the doors, most likely using her savant power to see how many energies, meaning how many people, are in the apartment.

Eventually she looks up at me and holds her left hand out flat, palm facing down. A lot of the time assassins work alone, stalking their targets and taking them out on their own, because they can't work together well. Her and me are an exception to this; we always have been. We were trained together and we do most of our assignments together. Over the years, as we've worked together, we've had to learn a number of hand signals to communicate in the silence on jobs seeing as she doesn't do telepathy. I know that this hand signal she is showing me now means there is more people in the apartment than just the person we are supposed to be killing, a forty-something man that works high up in the net.

I don't know how many people are in the apartment. Before I signal anything back to her, she suddenly lurches forward, clutching at her left shoulder as if in pain. When she pulls her hand away a few long seconds later, I see blood on it. It doesn't take me long to figure out what's happened: she's been shot.

Angry, I straighten up and look around, searching for what I know I will find. There, on the rooftop of the building across from this one, is a crouched dark figure holding a sniper rifle. The rifle moves up a fraction and I jump over the edge of the building just a second before a bullet goes whizzing over the top of my head, barely missing me.

I brace myself as I land next to her on the balcony, bending my knees to prevent an injury.

"You okay?" I quickly ask her, wanting to touch her but knowing that's her one top rule: no touching. She doesn't let anyone touch her, not even me and I'm the person she's probably the closest to out of everyone at the guild. I've learned the hard way not to break that rule and touch her in any way and she made sure that I got the message.

"It's just a shoulder shot," she says grimly, adjusting the strap over her shoulder that's holding her axe, her preferred weapon, on her back. "I'm fine." Her voice sounds strained and I know that she's in pain, but I also know not to push her. I force myself to push my worries for her to the back of my mind, telling myself that a gunshot to the shoulder will not kill her, as long as she gets away in time to sort it out before she loses too much blood.

Suddenly, the double doors that lead into the apartment swing open and we are pulled in by a large man. People in black surround us like a swarm of bees and we exchange a nervous glance. Using my power of reading minds, I get the hint from her that she's thinking along the same lines as me: we've been ambushed. This was all one big set up and these people are from the net or the FBI or something.

Our assignments are always kept very hush-hush, with only our leader Medea and maybe a few others in the guild knowing who our target is. So the only way for these officials to know that we would be here tonight is if somebody betrayed us.

But who?

We don't have time to dwell on these thoughts, time to figure out who on earth betrayed the two of us, however. There are guns pointed at us and we hear somebody shout out, "you are under arrest. Anything you say-"

Of course we don't let him finish speaking. Well, she doesn't. Like always, she's the first one to react. She kicks out, hitting one of the men in front of her straight in the stomach, causing him to grunt and lose his grip on his gun. She quickly grabs the gun out of his hold and aims it at him.

I roll my eyes, a giddy smile spreading across my face. I'm excited; I've been desperate for a good fight recently, something to get the pent-up anger out of my system. I start bouncing on the balls of my feet, rolling my shoulders and cracking my neck. Adrenaline pulses through my system as I prepare myself.

This is going to be fun.

Before anyone can anticipate my move, I strike at the guy to my left, my elbow hitting his nose. The impact blows him backwards and he falls to the floor, the back of his head striking the laminate with a thud.

My action is what gets the game rolling. They charge at us, guns ablaze, but I know they can't shoot us without the risk of shooting one of their own – they're in too close proximity for their guns to be useful which plays in our favour.

She and I aren't quite that concerned and we aren't afraid to do some damage with our weapons. She drops the gun she stole and pulls her axe from its holding strap over her back, swinging it in a figure eight in front of her menacingly. The axe is heavy – which is one of the reasons she is the only one in the guild who prefers it over the other weapons – and she's more comfortable with it in her other hand seeing as she's left-handed, but she can still do damage with her right hand too. We are all trained to be equally strong with both hands.

For now, I choose to participate in hand-to-hand combat rather than using my weapons. The only thing I am focused on is fighting. As they charge at me, I throw punches left, right and centre, kicks and elbows and even a head-butt or two. All those fighting lessons and training sure do come in handy. I don't manage to knock any of the men unconscious, showing they are just as well trained as I am, but I am tiring them out a little.

One of them manages to get a good punch at my face and I feel the familiar warmth of a nosebleed, the blood trickling down over my mouth. I ignore it and swing back at the guy, knocking him into another person. They both topple down to the floor like dominoes.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see her swinging the axe at any who come too close to her, blood spattering the darkened room and bodies dropping to the floor. There are about twenty people in here altogether and she has already caused six to be no threat. She holds her axe in front of her, facing the rest of them in a stance that suggests she's almost daring them to approach her and try anything.

I lurch forward a few steps when somebody roughly kicks my back but quickly steady myself, hands already moving towards my belt. My own preferred weapon is a dagger – easy to use, light, and many possible ways to inflict damage with. My belt holds numerous daggers dangling around my waist and I grab two, flinging them outwards. One hits a man squarely in the chest, the other embeds itself in a man's arm.

I pull a third dagger out, clutching it in my hands as I move to stand beside her, the two of us against the rest of them. We are heavily outnumbered and ordinarily that wouldn't even be a problem for us when we're working together; we've been in this sort of situation before.

But one quick glance sideways at her and I know we're in trouble. To them, she may look steady and strong like the act she is giving them. But I know that tonight she is not steady and strong. I notice the grip on her axe is just a little bit too tight which won't give her the freedom to move it around in a fight as easily as she will need. The hood of her cloak has fallen down and I notice her breathing is laboured and her skin is pale and clammy. Beads of sweat stick to her forehead. There's no way she can continue fighting and get out of here alive. She's lost too much blood from the gunshot wound.

"Art," I whisper quietly, my eyes not leaving the men in front of us but my words still directed to her. "You need to get out of here."

In my peripheral vision I see her head flip to mine. This just proves how exhausted she is: on a good day, there is not a chance in hell that Art would take her eyes off an enemy. "Striker, what the hell?" She hisses at me, and I hear anger and confusion in her voice. "We're in this together."

"You won't survive this with your shoulder like that, you look like you could pass out at any second," I point out to her through clenched teeth. The officials are all tense, staring at us. They can't hear our conversation but a quick delve into their minds lets me know they think we're planning something and they're preparing themselves for reacting quickly. "You go; I'll fight them."

"You don't stand a chance on your own."

"Well at least I can distract them long enough for you to get out of here. I'm not afraid." I'm not lying to her either. I'm not afraid. I haven't been afraid of anything for a long, long time. But that's just part of the trade, I guess. Assassins have to be fearless. We have to be heartless and emotionless on our assignments. We have to be sure of ourselves and our strength. I am all of these things, and so is she, and I care about her even though we're not supposed to care about anybody, and I want her to get out of here alive. I cannot let her stay here fighting when I know it won't end well.

"Medea always says that we should put ourselves first," she whispers in a reply to me, sadness in her tone. That doesn't surprise me – she's sad a lot of the time. "So technically, you shouldn't do this. You should be focusing more on getting yourself out of here instead of helping me out."

"Yeah well," I quickly flash her a smile before returning my eyes to the enemy, "I never really was one for following the rules."

Without waiting for a reply from her, I bend down to grab a gun from one of the fallen men and shoot the first person I see. I moved in a hurry, too fast for their response to be quick, and the man I shot is on the floor in less than a second.

I charge forward, shooting the gun aimlessly. I drop it and start pulling daggers from my belt, throwing them and cutting skin whenever I get a chance to.

It doesn't take long for them to overpower me. Somebody hits me hard across the face, stunning me. Before I can get my bearings again, I'm roughly pushed to the floor and I feel a foot on my back, holding me down. Handcuffs are secured around my wrists and I hear the words of an arrest being spoken.

I'm not listening though.

Looking around the room, I don't see her anywhere. She isn't on the floor, collapsed or dead, and she isn't being arrested or restrained anywhere that I can see. A breeze blows in through the open doors, ruffling the curtains.

I use my power to get into the mind of one of the men surrounding me and hear his thoughts: "can't believe we let the other one get away. How the hell did she even manage that?" I see an image in his mind of Art disappearing over the edge of the balcony. Despite being on the fourteenth floor, I'm not afraid or worried for her. She'll have gotten to the ground safely. It's part of our training to be able to scale a building of any height. Hell, we could probably do it blindfolded we're that good at it.

I breathe a sigh of relief at the thought that she's safe, that my distraction worked and she escaped, and I allow myself to be pulled to my feet and out of the apartment, accepting whatever fate lays in store for me.


Striker

I've been locked in this office for an hour, according to the clock on the wall. It's a standard issue office, nothing special about it, and I am handcuffed to the table. It's not a comfortable position to be in, I have to be honest, and the handcuffs are on too tight and making my wrists feel sore.

I won't tell them that though. Them being the FBI, the people who ambushed Art and I at the apartment. I want to ask them how they knew we would be there, who tipped them off and betrayed us, but I know that it was probably an anonymous tip and even if it weren't they wouldn't tell me.

They've barely told me anything other than the usual 'you're in a lot of trouble and it's just going to be worse for you if you don't co-operate with us', blah blah blah. All that malarkey means nothing to me. If us assassins get caught, we get punished. Sometimes that punishment goes as far as the death penalty but that's only if they know the extent of the individual's crimes. Most of the time the punishment is prison, which I know for a fact is what's going to happen to me no matter how well I co-operate with them.

I think they're expecting me to tell them assassin secrets, tell them where we are all living or something. They don't normally track us down, they leave us to it seeing as they have more stuff to deal with in the aftermath of the great war. But I bet they would focus on us if they knew where to look.

Despite being here because I was betrayed, I'm not going to betray anyone myself. I have better morals than that.

The silence in the room is broken by the sound of the lock clicking open and the door swings open. Agent Benedict, the FBI agent who was lucky enough to question me earlier, enters and locks the door behind him. He strides over to the chair across from me and takes a seat.

Agent Benedict is a tall man with wide shoulders and a strong body. His skin colouring is similar to my own, a light brown almost golden colour, and his dark hair is scraped back into a low ponytail. Earlier, when he questioned me, his large brown eyes were hard and his whole being screamed at me that he wouldn't put up with any cockiness or back talk from my end. He'd been harsh and brunt with me, his face angry.

Now however, he looks... Nervous. Why would he be nervous? He has nothing to be nervous of, it's not like I can hurt him or anything in the position that I'm currently in.

Agent Benedict opens the case file he'd placed on the table in front of him and clears his throat, his eyes looking up to meet my own. He shakes his head as if in wonder. "As you know," he starts the conversation. "We need to know your identity to get things rolling. Since you aren't speaking to us, we took your fingerprints and a DNA sample." I smirk at him. He got so frustrated earlier when I just sat back and stared at him, not saying a single word to answer any of his questions. The DNA sample and fingerprints won't matter. I never registered as a savant and my name is not on any database that I know of.

"We ran your DNA and prints through our database and we got a match." This surprises me although I try not to let it show. How is that even possible? "Your data matches that of a boy that went missing during the war. The boy's parents – your parents – reported that you had been kidnapped from your bedroom in the middle of the night when you were three years old. There have been no reports or sightings since then, leaving the family with no answers as to what happened to you. Until now."

"I don't understand," I blurt out. I silently chastise myself for breaking my silence, but I couldn't help myself from saying those words. This doesn't make any sense! I don't remember anything about being kidnapped, about having an actual family. Medea never mentioned any of this to me.

"I'm presuming by that response that you know nothing about this?" Agent Benedict speaks, interrupting my inner monologue. "Well..." He shifts awkwardly in his seat. "It isn't uncommon for a victim of a young kidnapping to not know their real identity. Whoever kidnapped you must have given you a different name, right? I don't know what they called you, but your real identity is that of the boy that was kidnapped. Your DNA proves that.

"Your real name, your birth name, is Zed Benedict."