Lee sat at the side of the pub, at the same small table she’d sat at three days before, telling herself she was being ridiculous. The evening after she’d met Drew she’d returned here, eating dinner alone and spending an hour waiting idly while locals came and went, her evening ultimately a waste of time when Drew had failed to show up. Last night, she hadn’t been here, spending the night examining the wolves’ notorious wall in more detail, relatively secure in the knowledge that her targets were all sleeping safely inside the manor.
And now, here she was again, despite having given herself a lengthy lecture on the futility of expecting one random man to show up in the same pub again. It was an absurd fantasy to think he had nothing better to do on a Saturday night than search for her in pubs, and she had no reason to believe he even wanted to see her again!
This behaviour was unacceptable, Li Khuli told herself sharply. There would be no more of this indulgent nonsense! No more sleeping on the bed, no more hot showers, no more tasting English beers, no more mooning over handsome young men with charmingly proper British accents. She was here to kill a pair of wolves, and her time would be far better spent on devising a plan for how to -
Lee’s thoughts ground to a sudden halt as the door to the pub opened and the subject of her wayward thoughts walked through it. Oh. Well, then...
Drew didn’t look her way, though, and Lee considered whether she should get up and go to him. Would that make it look like she’d been waiting for him? As things stood, she could simply pretend she’d been enjoying a drink after dinner, a totally innocuous thing since her room was on the floor just above them. Would he think her silly if he knew she’d been waiting? Would he be pleased, or defensive about her wanting to see him again?
He went to the bar and ordered a drink, then took an idle glance around the pub. Checking for his friends, no doubt, as he eyed the table they’d been sitting at last time he was here. But he didn’t get as far as looking over into her corner. The bartender gave him his drink and took the payment, making idle conversation along the way, and Lee watched as he took a sip. She forced herself to look down at her drink, not wanting him to catch her staring if he happened to look over. He clearly hadn’t come here looking for her, and she deliberately filled her mind with the image of a man she had once killed. He’d been a wealthy business man, fat and old, and the drug she had slipped into his drink had caused him to have a heart attack. At his age, and with the health problems he had had, no one had suspected foul play, and then she’d slipped away into the night like she’d never existed.
Lee frowned at her beer. Odd. Usually, the knowledge that she’d completed an assignment brought her a sense of satisfaction, of completeness as the incessant tension of tracking and watching and following came to a sudden end, and she’d expected the recollection to soothe her.
But instead, she felt... well, she wasn’t sure what, really. Uneasy was the only real way she could describe it. Anxious was too strong a word for the odd flicker of emotion. Guilty was a ridiculous notion. Li Khuli did not feel guilt. But in that quiet moment in the pub, she had the odd thought that Drew would not have approved of her actions.
How strange.
“You don’t seem to be enjoying that very much,” a voice said suddenly, and Lee looked up with a start, halfway out of her seat and reflexively reaching for the knife concealed at her waist before she’d even realised it.
“Drew! I... I didn’t... Um... What are you...?”
“I wasn’t expecting to see you here again,” Drew said, reaching out a hand to steady her. Though in reality, she wasn’t the slightest bit off balance, despite the way she’d leapt out of her seat.
Lee sat down again, forcing herself to relax, gesturing vaguely to the seat opposite her. “No, neither was I.”
“You decided you like this place, did you?” Drew sat down, reaching over to an adjoining table to snag a mat to put his beer on.
Lee hesitated a moment. Letting people know where she was sleeping was against protocol... but then again, the owners of the pub knew she was staying here, as did the bartender, and the waitress, and the cleaning maid. Drew was just another random person with no reason to suspect her of any malicious intentions. “I’m renting a room here,” she told him, easing her own nerves by reminding herself that he had no idea which room she was staying in. “I didn’t really feel like wandering the town by myself just to find somewhere to eat.” She didn’t ask why he’d come here again. There was no point in setting herself up to be disappointed if she didn’t like the answer. And then she stomped hard on the niggling part of herself that was insisting it was inappropriate for her to be so pleased to see Drew again. He was a source of information and an impromptu tutor in English culture. That was all.
“Well, I’m rather glad to hear that,” Drew told her with a wink. “My usual crowd hasn’t shown up, and I wasn’t looking forward to spending the evening alone.”
Two hours later, Alistair glanced at the clock, slightly amazed to see how quickly the time had flown. At the time he’d walked in the door, he’d just about convinced himself that he must have imagined how easy it was to talk to Lee. It had been a long day and he’d been tired; a couple of people around the estate had pissed him off... he’d come up with every excuse under the sun as to why he’d been unexpectedly captivated by a dark-haired sprite from a foreign land. But now, after a couple of hours of idle chat, there was no more denying it. Lee was fascinating. Shy, cynical, educated, naive, seductive and utterly guileless, she kept him guessing every step of the way.
But then she’d dropped an innocent question about his family, of whether or not his parents approved of his career as a journalist, and time seemed to grind to a halt as the question settled like snow on a frosty morning.
“I’m sorry,” Lee said, realising her mistake. “We said before that we wouldn’t talk about family...”
“My parents died when I was nineteen,” Alistair told her, a snippet of information that was a part of his official cover story as Drew Flemington, freelance journalist, and which also happened to be true.
“Oh,” Lee said, suddenly avoiding his gaze. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have -”
“It’s okay,” Alistair assured her quickly. “It was a long time ago.” He swirled the last of the beer in his glass, then downed it quickly. “I was halfway through my journalism degree. They went out to celebrate their twenty-first wedding anniversary and never came home. Their car was hit by a truck. Neither of them survived.” That was the bare bones of the story, again, the truth in this case. As someone who spent the majority of his time lying to people, Alistair knew that lies were easier to remember if they were based on truth. But as far as his family was concerned, the full truth was something he never spoke of, and hadn’t done since Baron had found him on the edge of a cliff. He’d been preparing to jump, and Baron had talked him down and then spent the next four hours coaxing the story out of him bit by bit. A truck had crossed onto the wrong side of the road and slammed head-on into his parents’ car. Both of them had died instantly, but the sheer force of the impact meant that there hadn’t been much left afterwards. His mother had eventually been extracted from the wreck in pieces, grotesque to think about, but at least it had given him something to bury. His father hadn’t even made it that far, body parts scraped off the road, rather than picked up.
But despite the black despair he’d descended into, Baron had recognised the potential in him, and now, Alistair was one of the rare shifters who was free to maintain something of an everyday life in the real world. He’d finished his journalism degree, at Baron’s request, then set about building a reputation for himself and developing a wide array of contacts.
“You miss them,” Lee said softly, and Alistair looked up with a start.
“I’m sorry. I was just... My mind was wandering.”
“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have asked. Do you enjoy being a journalist?” It wasn’t the smoothest change of topic ever, but he appreciated her attempt at tact, even if she had nothing to be apologising for.
“I love it,” Alistair said honestly. “You get to meet so many interesting people. I’ve had dinner with politicians and homeless people. I’ve interviewed business owners and chronic gamblers. I’ve met horse trainers, criminals, police officers, prostitutes... you name it. And the interesting thing I’ve learned along the way,” he said, leaning towards her in a conspiratorial way, “is that everyone has a deeper side to themselves beneath the surface. The worst criminals are still capable of caring about their families. Some of them feel overwhelmingly guilty about what they’ve done, but they don’t know any other way. But then you’ve got the other side as well, the ‘good’ people who are cheating on their partners, or robbing their employers behind their backs. I stopped believing in good and evil a long time ago, because even the most pious person can be a selfish shit at times, and the most evil villain can surprise you by doing something kind. So how is it possible to measure whether a person is truly good or evil? Is it only about what they’ve done in their life, or about what they’re capable of doing? I don’t know, and I’d willingly challenge anyone who thinks they have all the answers.”
Lee was watching him intently, questions dancing in her eyes, an expression on her face as though she were trying to calculate the mysteries of the universe. “You are so different from anyone else I’ve met,” she said earnestly. “You think about so many unusual things. You don’t just accept the world as it appears to be. That’s so different from the way I was raised.” She sat back suddenly, seeming to be genuinely upset about the idea. “Perhaps I’ll get another drink,” she said abruptly, standing up. “Do you want one?”
“Just a coke,” Alistair said, smoothly accepting her sudden withdrawal. “I have to drive home later.” There was no point pushing her just at the moment. Let her get her mind around things while she got her drink, then pick up the conversation later.
She took her time over it, spending a few minutes talking to the bartender, before returning with a coke for Alistair and something pink and fizzy in a tall glass for herself. Another experiment, he surmised, having watched her taste first a glass of white wine, then a white Russian. But she was taking it slowly; three drinks in as many hours weren’t likely to do her too much harm, even if she wasn’t used to alcohol.
“So, tell me about where you live,” Lee said, when she returned to the table. “I don’t mean your address,” she clarified quickly. “I mean, do you live in a house, or in a flat? Alone or with someone? Do you have any pets? Do you like to cook when you’re at home?”
“I live in a house,” Alistair lied smoothly. “It’s a little way outside of town. I have two roommates. One of them has a girlfriend, and he’s constantly bringing her over and then they take over the living room and watch shitty movies, and I told him if he keeps it up I’m going to start charging her rent.” Lee smiled, letting her guard down a fraction. “I can slap a steak and a pile of vegetables on a plate, but I’m not what you’d call a skilled cook. But that’s fine, because the other roommate loves cooking, so he does most of it for the rest of us.” More lies, intermingled with threads of the truth. Then he slyly reached out and took Lee’s hand, getting her off guard by stroking his thumb over the back of it once, twice... “So… what was it that had you spooked before you went to get the drinks?”
Lee had been expecting the question; Drew was too astute to have missed her sudden muted panic. But at the same time, she’d been hoping to avoid it by distracting him with small talk – not because he wouldn’t notice the diversion, but because he might be generous enough to simply let her get away with it. After all, this was a casual Saturday night conversation, not a formal interview for his work.
The question of good and evil had never been a complex one for her. Kidnapping children and training them to kill each other, torturing animals, murdering politicians and businessmen... she had long ago resigned herself to the knowledge that not only was she the epitome of evil, but so was the organisation she worked for. It had been an uneventful realisation, and one that had never caused her to ask too many questions. Such was the life of a Satva Khuli, and she had never expected another. But now...
“My father has done some terrible things,” she said, staring at the table. “And sometimes I didn’t do anything to stop him, and other times I helped him do them. What is there in my life to redeem me? You seem to think I couldn’t possibly be all evil. But I...” But she had been sent here to kill people, and up until very recently, she hadn’t stopped to think twice about doing so.
“You’re not all evil,” Drew told her, seeming startled by the very idea. “That wasn’t meant to be a comment about your life in particular. I don’t know nearly enough about you to start judging you one way or the other. My point was simply that people are very rarely who they seem to be on the surface.”
“That part is certainly true,” Lee agreed with him. “And I meant what I said; you think about unusual things. And I like that.” Then she decided to go out on a limb. “I’ve been thinking about what you asked me last time, about whether I approve of my father’s business.”
Drew shook his head. “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”
“It’s okay. It gave me a lot to think about.” Today, sitting in her favourite tree all day, she’d spent far more time pondering idle questions than thinking about how to make it undetected past that wall. “And I still don’t have a real answer. My childhood was very strict. Everything I did was controlled by my father. I was trained to carry on his business, to understand his work, with no question that I would ever want to do anything else. I’ve travelled to many different countries and met so many different people, but at the same time, there are so many things I’ve never been allowed to do. To drink alcohol.” She fiddled with the glass in front of her, well on its way to being only half-full. “To go on dates with a boyfriend. I have dated men,” she clarified, not wanting to give Drew the wrong impression. She was no blushing virgin. “But they were arranged by my father, with men he felt were ‘suitable’.” That was one way to describe the men she had been sent to seduce. Suitable, not to be potential husbands, but to be killed, blackmailed, or bribed in various ways. “I live in the house that he tells me to live in, and talk to the people he tells me to talk to, and travel to the countries he tells me to travel to. I think that maybe, before I could decide if I approve of what he does, I would have to learn to choose things for myself and see how they turn out. Then maybe I could see the reasons why he does the things he does. Or maybe disagree with those reasons.”
“You’re already choosing things,” Drew said, in that disarmingly straight-forward way he had. “You’re drinking alcohol. And chatting to strange men in pubs. Small things, maybe, but don’t discount that. And okay, so you still have to attend his business meetings, but what else would you like to do while you’re in England?”
What did she want to do? The question had never occurred to her before. “I would like to... to take a walk beside a river and just look at the trees. I would like to go to a play. I’ve never been to a play before,” she said, excitement and sorrow warring inside her. She could say she wanted to do it as much as she liked; she knew full well she was never going to. “I want to...” She wanted to ask the shifters questions about who they were, and why they were, and what being a wolf felt like. “I want to understand how other people see the world, and to know what’s important to them, and why they fight for the things they fight for.” She looked up into his startling blue eyes and felt her world tilt. “I would like to fall in love,” she said, without really thinking about it.
Drew smiled, an expression so warm and open and heartening that she almost wanted to cry. “Oh, you would, would you?” he mused, an incorrigible sparkle in his eyes.
She’d said it as an idle wish, only now realising how it must have sounded when she was sitting at a cosy table sharing a drink with a handsome man.
But perhaps...
Drew reached out and took her hand, his fingers stroking hers seductively. “Perhaps I could help you with that?” He lifted her hand and kissed the back of it, his eyes never leaving hers. “Perhaps you could tell me more about what you would like... somewhere more private?”
Despite her rather selective experiences with the world, Lee knew a seduction routine when she saw one, and for a brief moment, she was tempted to accept his offer. Being merely ‘Lee’ was changing her, making her more curious, making her dare to break the rules that had governed her life for so long. Perhaps she could take Drew upstairs to her room, and...
But no. Because she wasn’t just Lee. She was also Li Khuli. And for a Satva Khuli, nothing could ever be so simple. The vast majority of men she’d slept with, she’d killed soon afterwards. The few she hadn’t killed had been spared only because they were pawns in other plots. One was a married politician who had subsequently been blackmailed over his involvement with her. From another she had stolen files from his computer while he slept. For Li Khuli, sex and violence were inextricably linked, and there was a good chance she might inadvertently kill Drew if she dared to delve into a more intimate relationship.
“I don’t... um...” She fumbled for words, breaking their eye contact, carefully extracting her hand from his grip.
“I’m sorry,” Drew said, his face flushing pink. “I tend to make assumptions, and... English woman are... well, no, I mean, not all of them, but... Maybe I misunderstood. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said finally, though Drew had pretty much covered that territory with his fumbling apology. “I like you. Very much. And you’re very charming. But my life can be complicated, and I think it would be better if...”
“No, that’s okay,” Drew assured her. “It’s fine, really.”
“But I would like to see you again,” Lee blurted out. “Before I leave England. Would that be possible?”
The smile that lit up Drew’s face was positively blinding. “I would like that very much.”