She was so easy to trap, a young moth attracted to an innocent light. Why were they all so stupid?
He removed his mask as he prepared her body for the test. She wouldn’t wake up now for a long while. An injection in the crook of her arm before he had taken her from the apartment had transported her to the land of Morpheus for another four hours.
The choice he would give her would soon clear her head, though. A choice he would force all of them to make. The ultimate irony; they would have a choice he had never been allowed.
Until the voice spoke to him and he finally understood why he had been chosen.
He removed her shirt and skirt. Such cheap material, doused with an even cheaper perfume, fighting desperately to smother the odour of sweat and losing miserably. And then there were her partners. Those odious men, dripping charm and condescension, as they pulled their purchased dancers closer to their bodies, hugging the flat chest through the flimsy material.
How did she survive? How did she face the nightly parade of paws and stubbed toes and sweaty palms and tobacco-soaked breath?
He shuddered. ‘Needs must, I suppose.’
Just as his needs must be satisfied. But his need was on a much higher plane than hers. He must cleanse the world. That’s what Yama had told him to do.
And he must start here, today.
He took out his knife and incised the Chinese characters into the woman’s neck. She moaned and grunted through the morphine, but stayed unconscious.
He stepped back and looked at his knifework. Not bad, neatly done, just as Yama had told him.
The newspapers, with their typical appeal to the baser human emotions, had called him the Character Killer. But all that was in the past; now was the time for revenge.
He had waited so long for this moment. Hours lying on the old boat with its stench of fish, patiently biding his time as the wounds on his chest healed. The scars from Danilov’s bullets still red and vivid on the skin.
Afterwards, the slow recovery, followed by the intense pain of the cosmetic surgery to change his face. He liked his new look, the rakish moustache giving him a touch of Douglas Fairbanks’ swagger and charm.
He had a new job now. He couldn’t go back to his old profession. His previous life was dead and out of its corpse Yama had created a new being. The job was beneath him, of course, barely using a tenth of his talents. But it did allow him all the time he needed to put his plan into action.
He had laid the foundations, built the trap, created the snare. He knew Danilov, knew his weaknesses, where and what to exploit. There would be no mistakes this time. Yama had told him exactly what to do.
This woman was just the first move. The endgame was when Danilov took his own life, five days from now.
The man realised he was getting ahead of himself. Stay in the now, he cautioned himself. Concentrate on what must be done at this moment.
His old life was dead but his killer was still alive.
Not for long.
He noticed a blue vein through the transparent pale skin of her thigh. Blood pumping through the veins carrying life and energy to her soul.
It was time to give her the choice she had to make. To put her soul to the test.
She was a pawn in a game that could only end with one outcome.
The death of Danilov.