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Eva

As soon as I hit the hallway, I slip on my shoes and I shoulder the backpack. Not to escape a murder, but to escape a murderer.

I need to be alone. I need to think. But most of all, I need to get very far away from Jonathan. I just tried to kill him. He knows I just tried to kill him. There’s a good chance he’ll try to kill me back.

Jonathan doesn’t seem to be coming after me. In fact, he seemed downright warmed by my murder attempt, but people act crazy when they’re in shock.

I’m a little shocked myself. Not only did I completely botch my kill, but my head is spinning with his words: Oh. This is about Andrew .

What the fuck does that mean?

I follow the preplanned path I set for myself: down the stairs, through the café.

I step out the door and into the adorable village in Spain. I walk along the aqueduct-lined sidewalks. The village is not deserted anymore. Pilgrims walk past me carrying enormous backpacks. They’re all going in the same direction. I fall into step with them. It strikes me that Jonathan probably won’t try to kill me if I am surrounded by religious pilgrims. I mean, probably.

People walk this trail looking for answers, and I’m no different. Does Jonathan think that my relationship with Andrew fucked me up so badly that I’m willing to kill to avoid love? Because that would be totally believable.

But that’s not it. I’m lying to myself again because I like Jonathan. I don’t want him to be the villain that I know he is. Sherri told me that he’s a henchman for bad people, that he’s killed many times.

When Andrew was murdered, I was told it was a job gone wrong, that the bad guys got him. Jonathan is the bad guy. Jonathan killed Andrew.

I need to talk to Sherri.

I reach a wooded area and veer off the trail. I walk deep into the woods, until I can’t hear the hikers’ footfalls or their early-morning chatter. I come to a stop in a dense patch of trees. I call Sherri.

“Is everything all right?” She sounds worried. I did promise her Jonathan would be dead in an hour.

“Did he kill Andrew?” I ask.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Jonathan.” I drop against a tree. My nerves are still sparking under my skin. “This guy I’m supposed to be getting secrets from? I got secrets.”

“He told you he killed Andrew?”

“More or less.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.” What else does she not know?

“How could you not know that?” It’s a rebellious question, but I’m feeling a little rebellious, and more than a little disappointed.

“I don’t know everything, Eva.” She sounds a little deflated.

“But you said the agency does. You said they have access everywhere.” She is silent. “Do you think they knew?”

“Does it change things?” she asks. “If anything, it just proves what I’ve been telling you all along. He’s killed innocent people.”

She has a point. I shouldn’t be angry at Sherri. I should be angry at Jonathan.

My nerves are starting to settle, leaving behind a familiar feeling of emptiness. The draining of adrenaline that follows every job. Even this one, my first Fail to Kill.

“Where are you now?” she asks. “Where is he?”

I fill her in, even though I’m a little frustrated with myself. I shouldn’t have assumed his gun wasn’t loaded. I should’ve just kept shooting. If I had, Jonathan would be dead, and all this would be over.

When I finish catching Sherri up, she tells me: “If you want off the job, just say the word.” It isn’t exactly a vote of confidence.

I sag against the tree. I feel disappointed. I feel pathetic for feeling disappointed. But the thing is, all the reasons I had for killing Jonathan this morning still stand. If I don’t do it, someone else will. I need the work. I need to stand up for women’s rights, or something.

If anything, I have more reason to kill Jonathan now. He killed my fiancé. I owe it to Andrew to avenge his death.

I should hate Jonathan for what he did, but the truth is more complicated. Because I have killed people, too. People I didn’t know, with families and loved ones and lives. And I doubt it mattered to them if their loved one was a hero or a villain.

I keep waiting for anger to come. I keep waiting to hate Jonathan, but I don’t. And it just makes me mad at myself.

“I don’t want off the job,” I insist to Sherri. “I want it more than ever now.”

Killing Jonathan is the simplest way to relieve all these complicated, conflicted feelings. It’s the way I solve every problem in my life. If something makes me uncomfortable, I end it.

“Do you have a plan?” Sherri asks.

Back in the day—even days ago—Sherri and I would plan the hit together. I trusted her with my life, but now I’m not sure. I’m starting to think maybe Sherri doesn’t always know best. She doesn’t know Jonathan, but I think I do.

“Yes,” I say, pushing myself up off the tree and starting back toward the trail. I walk fast. The air is bright. The sun is rising over the trees. “I think we’ve been going about this all wrong. I don’t need to find his weakness; I need to become his weakness.”

—

In Espinal I call a cab to a train station, then catch a train to Barcelona. Jonathan’s driving a fucking Bugatti, so no doubt he will beat me there, but at least I have some time to think. Some time away from him, when I can think clearly.

The train is almost empty. I’ve been on many trains since that sleeper train, and on all those trains I thought about Jonathan. Or who I thought he was.

He killed Andrew.

I can hardly get my head around it. It’s wild that a complete stranger—someone I was so strangely attracted to—changed my life in such a major way.

I think back to that last night with Andrew. I had convinced myself that his death was inevitable, but really, it took me by surprise.

We had been fighting a lot. Andrew thought I was working too much, getting lost in the job. I had—a little bit arrogantly, I can admit now—thought that he was jealous. I was better at killing than he was. I had better aim. I was faster. More efficient.

I remember the night I surpassed his kill number. I came back to his apartment expecting congratulations. He was the closest thing I had to family. I wanted him to be proud of me. But instead, he said, “Don’t you think maybe you’re taking this too far?” And later, “It just seems like you’re a bit obsessed.” When he was the one who got me into the job in the first place.

It was like the better I got, the more the job became a bad thing. I couldn’t help thinking that it was about me.

The night before Andrew died, we had a big blowup. He wanted me to leave the agency.

“I don’t think it’s good for you,” he said. “I think it’s trapping you in your childhood trauma.” I honestly thought that was a low blow.

“This has nothing to do with my past,” I said back. “It has nothing to do with me. This is about you . You want to control me. You want to tell me what to do.”

That made him laugh. “When have I ever had the least control over you?”

That annoyed me, too. “You got me into this. You trained me. You made me. And now I’m better than you, and you don’t like it.”

“You were always better than me,” he insisted, trying to pull the nice card, trying to make me the bad guy.

I stormed out. I wandered the city for hours, walked across Ponte Vecchio, to the Palazzo Pitti, all the way to Piazzale Michelangelo.

The thing is, I knew Andrew was kind of right. My childhood trauma had propelled me into this job. I couldn’t go back and change my past. I tried not to even think about it. I rarely ever talked about it. But it was the reason for almost every major life choice I made. Every time I killed a bad guy, I felt a surge of power. I felt like a hero. I felt like I had saved the world from becoming me.

But it wasn’t just that. I created new chaotic memories to burn over the old ones. Like I thought I could drown my past trauma in violence and adrenaline.

The morning after our big fight, Sherri called me and told me Andrew had been killed. She said that he had been taken out while on a job. I was a little confused, because Andrew hadn’t mentioned a job the night before, but then I just figured he might not want to share his hypocrisy.

I didn’t know what to do. We were engaged, but I had no legal claim to him. I hoped his estranged family would take over the funeral arrangements. I left Florence. I asked Sherri for another job, as soon as possible, so I could bury the trauma of that loss, too.

Andrew became just another thing not to think about. Another piece of my past to erase. And now here he was, at the worst possible time, in the worst possible place, mind-fucking me during the hardest job I’ve ever had to do.

Sherri had told me Andrew was killed on a job. What if the job was Jonathan? The implications of that were a little scary. It would mean that the agency was sending me to kill the guy Andrew—a pretty competent assassin—had failed to kill. But worst of all, that would mean the agency has been trying to kill Jonathan for years.

That can’t be true. The agency might believe in me, but there’s no way they believe in me that much. This is starting to sound like a suicide mission.

You would think all this would make me want to quit. You would think it would make me want to turn around. Give up. You would think. But Andrew was right. I use violence and adrenaline and the challenge of a kill to bury my past, and this thing with Jonathan is the most adrenaline and the most challenge and it’s about to be the most violence. I don’t want to stop.

I’m gunning for Barcelona on a rickety train. I’m tracking Jonathan down to kill him. That’s one way to put all these complicated emotions to bed.

That’s one thing that has always dragged me from my darkest thoughts: a plan to kill.

Jonathan thinks I wanted to kill him to get revenge for Andrew. He doesn’t know I’m an assassin. I have to make sure that he doesn’t even suspect it. I have to get close to him again. A seemingly impossible task now that he knows I tried to kill him. He might not want to hang out after that. Unless he’s like me.

Unless he’s a little addicted to the thrill of the game.