27. Best Laid Plans

Illumi knew that people considered him cold and unemotional. This was largely a by-product of his years of specialized training that had resulted in absolute, flawless control of all his facial muscles. With his carefully schooled neutral expression and measured reactions, he appeared to the outside world as someone completely unaffected by pleasure or pain, incapable of being angered or outraged, or of finding joy or comfort, in the actions and reactions of others. This never bothered him, in fact he could have been said to encourage it, as it gave him an air of invulnerability, at least where his feelings were concerned. But that didn't mean it was true. Illumi sometimes believed he felt things more strongly than others, and so had devised this method of concealing a potentially crippling weakness.

His fears for his younger brothers' safety, his anger at the many who would dare attack or threaten his family, his hurt at his father's rejection, his self-loathing at his own inadequacies whenever he fell short of his goals, these feelings burned inside like underground coal fires, unreachable and inextinguishable. But his life also brought him some happiness, his acceptance as a useful member of his family, his pride in his brothers' mastery of skills under his tutelage, that brief but heady buzz that came when he knew he had it in his power to kill someone, the monetary rewards that were evidence of his ability -- and something that never failed to fill him with an inner glow, the satisfied feeling when a well-crafted plan of his own devising came together and was executed perfectly.

This was not going to be one of those times. As the clock moved unconcernedly closer and closer to the time of the Press Conference, his transmitter refused to ring. Worse yet, he had discovered that the train he was tracking had arrived far earlier than expected, leaving the very real, and unsettling possibility, that his cohort had missed connecting with the target at all. It was looking more and more like the fates were conspiring to force him into direct confrontation with the one who would be targeting Lucia, a situation unlikely to result in a favorable outcome for their side.

At ten minutes before the Conference, he knew his time was up. He was now all she had as a defense. In order to protect her at all, he would have to be very close to her, and that meant he would have to be disguised. And he knew exactly the person he could counterfeit, the man who had been so injudicious as to attempt to warn her the night before, Karl Petersen. When Illumi had seen him leave, he had known that his were not the only eyes watching. He had followed to the banks of the Dentora River where the car had been abandoned. There, on the chance that he might need them for this very purpose, Illumi had divested him of his clothes, almost as adroitly as the man's assailant had divested him of his heart. And fortunately for Illumi, that had been done so skillfully as to not leave one drop of blood outside the body.

So he donned the dead man's clothes and used that sui generis ability of his to don the man's appearance as well, then positioned himself directly behind where she would be standing. Almost immediately, the door to the small adjoining room opened, and Lucia entered the hall. She wasn't smiling (this was a conference about a man's assassination after all), but her posture was elegant, her movements graceful, her light reflective hair shining bright, her crystalline eyes sparkling, her presence and persona projecting the very embodiment of the beauty and promise of youth. Illumi could sense the crowd was half enthralled by her charisma. He himself was not entirely unaffected, but he was struck more by how very alive she was, and how that condition was not likely to continue, as from the rear of the room, he felt the thrum of the flaring of an all too familiar Ren.

He was going to have to get her out of there, now. Flight was the only option. Trying to face off against that opponent would be like trying to extinguish the fires of the sun with a water bucket. It was not going to work. And if he could stay ahead of her attacker long enough, there was always the chance that his partner would arrive. Although no match, even for Illumi, in head on combat, that was more than made up for by resourcefulness and ingenuity. Together, they might be able to come up with something, even working on the fly.

Thankfully, Lucia was easy enough to maneuver out of that shooting gallery of a hall and down to the first floor. But while he was deliberating the best route for their exit, she managed to wriggle free of his hold, and took off through the scattering crowd, down an adjacent hallway. He had an awful feeling he knew where she was headed.