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Kira

Eight years ago

“ Y ou want more time?” Giorgio Morelli’s cigar dangled from his lip. “You know what you need to do.”

He leered at me, his blunt fingers tracing down his dress shirt, crawling over the buttons until they rested at the zipper of his fly.

My father was dead. I buried him in a quiet ceremony, attended by one: Me. Being poor and dying made it hard to keep friends. Being poor, in general, made the loneliness even more stark.

The loans hadn’t saved him. Everything I had done, every humiliation I had endured, was all for nothing.

I had sacrificed my body, my pride… and my only family still took his last breath in misery and pain.

I’d held my father’s hand as the cancer filled his body. I’d watched him close his eyes, leaving me alone in this cruel city.

And still, this devil wanted more. He wanted his pound of flesh.

This city wasn’t made for people like me. I was prey. I was entertainment for these men—like an ant burning under a magnifying glass.

“No.” I was done. The shock had faded, replaced by a shooting anger that made my hands shake.

Giorgio must have thought it was fear, or compliance, that made me vibrate with barely controlled emotions. He unzipped his fly and smirked down at me like the pervert he was.

I couldn’t pay my debts. I would never be out from under his thumb. The system wasn’t created to allow it. I was meant to be on my knees before this bastard until the end of time because of one misfortune. One.

Because my father got cancer.

“No?” Giorgio said with a sneering sense of invincibility that all these evil men had.

When the system failed, when insurance was denied, what was I supposed to do? When the charities turned their backs, and even lenders wouldn’t approve us because we were nothing but mere artists… I had no choice.

I was left here, suffering, even after my father’s body went cold.

“No.” I wouldn’t get on my knees again. I would not sacrifice my dignity again.

I couldn’t do this anymore.

My father didn’t want this for me. He’d chosen to die so that I wouldn’t have to.

Did he know the full extent of it? Of course not. But he had decided that dying was better than watching his only child break herself in two to save his life. A choice I couldn’t talk him out of. A choice I had wanted him to take back until he embraced me and said that he needed to do this. To die.

For me.

Living wouldn’t be worth it if he watched me wither and break. How could I tell him that I was already a husk of a human, so broken, I barely existed anymore?

“Open wide.” Giorgio’s mocking tone sent a shiver down my spine. Bile rose up my throat.

I turned away from him, ready to walk out of this room, this building, this entire fucking city.

What would he do? Sue me? Ha!

The Mafia were strong in cities like New York, but they weren’t omnipotent.

Maybe I’d head south, to warmer climates, where people had skin as dark as mine. Or maybe even further, to some remote land where no one would ever know the empty shell called Kira Kekoa.

I had nothing to lose, but I’d have everything to gain if—

His hand clutched my bicep, and he threw me onto his desk, the knick-knacks, paperweights, and pens flying as I slid across the surface.

“Filthy putana !” he said in that pathetic New Yorker accent.

He knew as much Italian as I did.

In fact, he probably knew less. Years of art history had taught me plenty of Italian, the way an opera singer may know a language without fully speaking it.

He had no business being placed over me. He had no business thinking he could treat me this way. We were equals save for a bit of bad luck, and without the tether of my father’s existence, I didn’t give a fuck.

His hands gripped my hips, and I knew what he would do. I knew what he thought was his right to do.

I groped for anything I could find. A pen, a fucking snow globe… anything!

My hands clasped on something gold and metal. Giorgio Morelli tore off my underwear and ripped my skirt over my hips.

I didn’t think, I just… acted.

I turned, swinging my arm wide, as the object in my hand embedded into his jugular.

I let it go, gasping, as Giorgio grasped for his throat. The pulse at his neck throbbed and blood squirted out of the sides, like a gash in a water house. He gurgled, his throat clicking and gasping like a broken valve.

I stared, fascinated as his fake-tanned skin paled, his mouth opening and shutting. His tongue darted out as if to speak.

Would he ask me for help? I would rather see us both burn, than have him live another second!

I reached out my hand, as his fingers trembled on the letter opener shaped like a tiny sword. I whispered, “Shh! Shh! It’s okay!”

But it wasn’t. I knew that. I took joy in the way his eyes looked relieved.

He thought I was going to help him. The folly of humanity was that in distress, we’d accept help from anyone.

I got help from a mafia loan shark. He thought he was going to get help from a woman he had tortured and assaulted again and again, and again.

“It’s okay,” I repeated, “You’re going to be okay.”

I absolutely relished the look of relief in his eyes—the pleading hope that I could be his salvation.

I placed my hands on the letter opener, as if trying to help staunch the leak, before I sneered, “Fuck you, Giorgio.”

I yanked the golden letter opener out of his throat. Blood splashed across my face, turning my vision a vibrant crimson. I stepped back as the fountain of blood spurted out of his neck as he fell to his knees.

He clutched at his throat. His silent scream filled me with satisfaction as his face fell to the floor, his ass up in the air. He keeled over, hands still at his neck. Dead.

His ornate, Persian-looking rug stained scarlet, as the pool blossomed around him.

He’d bled everywhere—lines of it splashed on the walls, the desk, and even the ceiling.

It was a bloodbath. Something right out of a horror film. And it was completely delicious.

Warm, wet, and sticky, I was covered in it. It was on my hands, my feet, my face. I could taste the copper of it on my tongue. I delighted in it, feeling the weight lift from my shoulders that he would never harm me again. But the joy didn’t last long.

Despair was slower to creep into my soul.

Fuck!

I had just killed Giorgio Morelli.

I had killed a made man.

The door opened, and I whirled around, the gold letter opener still in my hand. I brandished it in front of me. I shook with fear, and I knew that I was probably facing my death. I just refused to go down without a fight. If there was nothing else, I would spend my last moments fighting.

“Bollocks,” a voice said in a deep British accent. “What a mess.”

The stranger looked like an undertaker. A very well-dressed one. My deluded, panicked mind wondered if he was Death himself, coming to take Giorgio’s soul. Or maybe I had died as well, and he was here to take me to the afterlife.

“My name is Andres Lutkus.” He pulled black medical gloves from his pocket and began putting them on. “We’re about to become very good friends.”

Getting rid of a body is unscrupulously easy for those who know what they’re doing.

“Adieu Giorgio Morelli,” was all Andres said as we watched his body burn to ash at a crematorium that, according to him, was “owned by a friend.”

Some friend…

I lived in fear for days—fear of retaliation.

From Giovanni Morelli, the number two man in the New York City Mafia, or even the police.

In my nightmares, men in black uniforms swept down my darkened apartment until the red laser dots of their rifles converged right on my forehead.

In a synchronized, thunderous moment, they’d shoot, killing me with the precision of a firing squad.

I’d wake up screaming.

Each day, Andres was there, knocking at the door with a bagel and coffee in hand. “You can’t stay in bed all day.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I would say, agitated, tired, and aching from the loss of my father. “You said that yesterday.”

Andres irritated me because I felt both safe, and un safe, with him all at once. Each morning, he arrived and forced me to have breakfast with him. Then he left, on his merry way, leaving me to wallow under the covers, that bagel my only meal.

After a week, I finally said, “I killed someone.”

He didn’t even blink as he replied, “So?”

Thus began my long training with Andres “Blink” Lutkus. First, we talked about morality. Death. Killing. Organized Crime. Oppression.

My situation with my father. The bastards who made that a reality for thousands, if not millions, of heartbroken people each and every year.

Andres was a master at leading you to his conclusion, and after a while, I was a convert to his cause—a blind follower to the clandestine business of Paradigm.

It seemed natural that I was in the woods of Mourningkill, at a hidden shooting range, buried in the woods of the Catskill Mountains. It all felt right. Like it was fate.

Pistol in hand, I tried to hit a target that popped up for less than two seconds. For what felt like the eighteenth time that sweltering afternoon, I missed, hitting dirt, as the target flattened out of view.

“I can't do this,” I said, with an exasperated sigh.

“Of course you can,” Blink whispered, kneading his temples with his long fingers. “You just need to find a way.”

“You want me to forge paintings and sell them to fund operations,” I said, feeling the weight of the 9mm Glock in my hand. “Not go all Jason Bourne on people.”

For days he had drilled me with weapons. How to break down a Dragonov, fire an assault rifle, and even how to 3D print a ghost gun. He’d used that to teach me the mechanics of the weapon, before taking me to the range and finding out what a terrible, terrible marksman I was.

The facility was what convinced me this was a bona fide operation. I suppose it could have been a sophisticated terrorist operation, but I was pretty sure that Al Qaeda didn’t hand out W-2s under Paradigm, LLC, with an office address in Delaware.