Season of Ashes Ch. 01-02

Nevertheless, diplomacy triumphed: she accepted his hand. She even managed a smile.

"Right. The key." Her eyes swept over to the limp body lying on the ground near them. His blood-bruised lips warbled in a gurgling moan, and his laboured breath whistled past his crushed throat. It took a prodigious amount of strength to leave a man in that state using only the brute force of elbows and fists. She tried not to look impressed.

She leaned into the car again and extracted the handgun, pulled the slide for a quick chamber check, and — in a stunning display of trust — offered it to her companion. "Don't make me regret this."

She squatted next to the body, wrinkling her nose at the unexpected fetor emanating from him. Had he voided his bowels? She held her breath, taking no pleasure in the task ahead, and rummaged through his pockets, pulling out toll receipts, a butane lighter, two fifty-euro notes, and discovering — tucked under his shirt — a slender, Y-shaped key dangling from a silver chain necklace.

"Perfect." Standing up, she slotted the metal into the keyway of her cuff and twisted; the rivet squeaked, and one plate swung open, releasing her hand. She passed the key to him and rubbed the bruised flesh of her wrist.

"I don't suppose you have a bulletproof hideout nearby?" she asked, rushing around to the other side of the car so she could examine the unconscious driver. She didn't want to risk going back to her own hotel — not if there was any chance her real identity was known to the police, or to the mastermind who had hired these kidnappers. "Might be a good idea to lay low until we know just how much trouble we're in." And to clean up. Though her dress was hardly modest, Milicent felt as though she were wearing multiple stuffy layers — a husk of grime and sweat and blood that she worried would bond permanently to her skin if she didn't undergo a scalding baptism.

Her rushed pat-down of the driver produced a wallet stuffed full of banknotes and a licence ("Guillaume Brodeur") with an unusually faded black-and-white portrait that very well may have resembled its ostensible owner — or some generic, dark-haired, middle-aged Frenchman of pale complexion. From his rear pocket, she gleaned a cheap, prepaid phone suitable for little more than making and receiving calls. But even outwardly harmless cell phones could hide sophisticated gadgetry — even advanced tracking capability.

With a spiteful, pursed smile, she buried these personal effects under a shallow layer of gravel, then proceeded to drag the driver by the ankles, hauling him out from the shelter of the garage. The rain would cleanse him of her touch, and maybe even invest him with a cautionary illness. A small price to pay, really, when the alternative was to perish.

Dominik

Still attached to her by the wrist, Dominik watched the woman retrieve the handgun. She handled it with practised ease, checking the chamber before she...offered it to him? His eyebrows rose as she relinquished the weapon, but he took it without question, checking it again for himself. He wasn't sure what calculation figured into her offering the weapon, but he wasn't going to question it. Not when there was potential danger waiting for them. Dominik thumbed the safety before tucking the weapon in his waistband.

"Regret it? If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead." It was a statement of fact; he'd had the advantage often enough to make that clear. He gave a shrug, "For now, working together is the best chance we have — and we need to figure out who the hell set us up."

He took the key from her, unlatching the cuff from his own wrist in turn. His skin was raw where he'd had to tug the girl along with him. It would heal, and the pain was a focal point amidst the dizzying high of adrenaline. He started to toss the cuffs away — but thought better of it, slipping them into his pocket along with the key. There was no telling when they might come in handy, but there was no point in tossing away a potential tool.

He looked up to see the woman dragging the driver away, following suit with their other captor. He grunted as he dragged the passenger by his collar, ignoring the way the man whimpered through his ruined throat. He wasn't certain he'd survive, but he wasn't going to kill him if he didn't need to. He dragged the man alongside his compatriot, grunting with effort as he did — the passenger was a tall man, even if he was lanky. Straightening, he nodded at the woman's question, turning to face her.

"I know of a safehouse in the Latin Quarter. The room I was renting in Montmartre is compromised if they know who we are." Technically speaking, he shouldn't have revealed that to her, but this was an abnormal situation. He had no backup, no allies to call upon. None except for the mysterious blonde in a blood-soaked dress. "We're going to need some ground rules, first."

He looked down at the slender figure, silhouetted in the headlights of the car, surrounded with a halo of sparkling raindrops. The rain was cold, but it provided respite from the blood and grime caked on him. It ran in rivulets down his face, leaving red smears where it trailed. He regarded her for a few moments, searching for something — he wasn't sure what — in her expression. It was difficult to gauge her; underneath her striking beauty was a woman who was not easy to shake. He suppressed a shiver. It wasn't just the rain; if he had to face her on the wrong end of a weapon, he would have to be very careful.

"I don't trust you. I'm sure you don't trust me." He stared her down, as if daring her to dispute that. "But we need to work together if we're going to make it out of this alive." He sighed, pushing a sodden lock of hair back from his face. He held her gaze for a few seconds longer, then extended a large hand. "I'm Fujiwara. Dominik Fujiwara, but everyone calls me Fujiwara."

He was taking a chance. He knew that much; trusting this woman with any piece of information could come back to bite him later, particularly given the circumstances of their first meeting. He wasn't certain he had a choice. Something bigger was going on than the two of them. Someone was trying to play them for fools. He wasn't going to stand for that, and two heads were better than one.

"I have a bad feeling that we're being used as scapegoats. INTERPOL is going to have our names soon enough, and we need a plan. I don't know about you, but I could use some food and some sleep first." The clock was ticking and it would take valuable hours, but they weren't going to be useful if they were exhausted. The trials of the day were showing in his face now, his angular features creased with lines, and his posture no longer ramrod-straight. "We can't be more than thirty minutes outside of the city. We should be able to get a few hours of sleep before we start figuring this shit out."

They'd need as much help as they could get. Their line of work — he was certain that she was as much a professional as he was now — was not one that bred allies. He'd left many enemies in his wake, and it could be any number of them; she was likely in the same position.

Milicent

Milicent's mouth curved into a cockeyed grin at his mention of a safehouse. Fate had supplied her with exceedingly little opportunity to exert mastery over her situation tonight, but now she stood on the precipice of salvific respite, where a glimmer of actual fortune could at last shine upon her diminutive figure with all the brilliance of a beacon at the end of a tortuous tunnel. There was finally profit in this expedient truce; he was proving to be more than just a pretty face with a powerful punch.

She stood just beyond the threshold of the garage. Her body faced him, but her eyes were closed, and her expression — apart from that skewed smile — was largely withdrawn; elusive. She luxuriated in the evanescent peace that gripped her during this fleeting lull. The rain was frigid, especially in her scant attire, but what it lacked in agreeable tenderness, it made up for in thorough, februating immersion. After so many trials, there was an almost religious jubilance in surrendering herself to the tempest.

She lifted her head, chin tossed to the air, and exposed the fragile column of her throat, which was lightly ligatured with the impression of her earlier assailant's grasp. She gulped; her throat pulsed; the jugular notch that formed a hollow beneath her neck quivered. Her flaxen tresses steeped in the rainfall, coiling and clinging with damp stickiness to her nape, her temples, her cheeks. Her insubstantial dress, the most pitiable casualty of the night, embraced her figure with all the worn desperation of wet tissue paper; the soaked white left little to the imagination, and the bloodstains bloomed into runny smudges of almost-pink under the onslaught of the shower. Lost in her trance, she even shivered.

Such repose — such vulnerability — would seldom characterise the behavior of an apex predator, nor would it inspire much confidence in the long-term prospects of any prey. What it signalled, instead, was a subterranean shift in Milicent's stratagem, one that reflected her new conclusion. She determined that there was no possibility of overawing her companion into subservience by relying on the more conspicuous weapons in her arsenal; no amount of savagery could stupefy a savage, and even if it could inspire respect, it would be respect of the frosty sort, the kind that was representative of the wary regard with which a bear might look upon a lion.

Foregoing the arsenal, Milicent now dipped her fingers into a subtler reticule. Uneasy truces had to be consecrated by something more binding than shared secrets and the risk of mutually assured destruction. She had already tasted the earliest glimmers of a new possibility on the balcony back at the hotel: the sparkle of inclination, the diaphanous gleam of marionette strings that drew her inexorably toward him. She resolved now to begin submitting to the impulse rather than to continue resisting it — to strike the match instead of pretending she was oblivious to the smell of fuel. Rain falls from the atmosphere when the weight of moisture surpasses a certain limit; Milicent, in turn, was sure she could saturate the atmosphere with subdued charms and precipitate something terrifying from the static that jolted with profound force, even in hibernation, between their bodies.

She reaped an early victory in the confession of his name. She laughed, hearing her own joy bouncing off the walls of the garage: had his parents spun a globe at random in search of a suitable label for their child? The twin sapphires of her eyes opened immediately thereafter to meet his gaze. The slight yellow in the light of the distant headlamps mingled with the blue of her irises to form a viridescent surface, like the variegated pools of sunlit, tropical waters. Her face was luminous in the glow, suffused with a gloss of dewy freshness from the rain. She liked the weight of his eyes on her; under his appraisal, she felt as though she embodied a delicate dangerousness, like a diamond-bladed scalpel of unproven loyalties — just as likely to cut the wielder as any object to which it is applied.

"Sure," she said, a teasing lilt evident in her inflection. "Dominik Fujiwara." She parroted his manner of articulation, tasting the syllables of this name in her mouth. "Such a pleasure." She dipped her head ever so slightly, lowering her lashes in an approximation of bygone decorum. She didn't offer her own name.

He spoke of INTERPOL and urgency, but her ears were most attuned to the mention of rest. She stared past his shoulder, looking beyond to the misty horizons that stretched far from the paved road connected to the garage. She laced her fingers, imagining the gunshot residue washing off her palms in the rain. They needed to leave now, before that other vehicle returned, before any reinforcements ambushed them, before another knot tangled the smooth rope of tranquility. But first...

"Hold still." She slapped a hand against her thigh to brace the skirt of her dress, then ripped off a chunk of the hem with her other hand. Squeezing out excess water with a quick twist of the fingers, she began dabbing his brow to wipe off the blood smears, balancing herself on the edge of her heels to reach him. If they were going to run into any eyewitnesses, she could possibly pass off her wardrobe as a token of avant-garde innovation, but even gullible passersby would have a hard time overlooking bloodstains on flesh. "There," she remarked with a smirk. "Handsome as ever."

She took a final look at the bodies on the ground and, with a final exhale, began making her way back to the car. "I'll drive." He had the gun: it was only fitting for him to ride shotgun.

"And by the way," she said, hesitating as she curled her fingers around the latch of the driver's door. "I'm Milicent."

❦

Milicent drove like a maniac. Her motorist skills appeared to have been forged in the crucible of urban racing, and her perfect indifference to road signs bearing the notice vous n'avez pas la priorité indicated that, while driving, she was temporarily robbed of any facility with the French language. Immune to the ordinary apprehensions of mortality, she accelerated through the midnight roads with such vehement carelessness that she almost retroactively rendered their kidnappers, by the strength of contrast, as law-abiding citizens. It was as though she were disappointed in the way she had evaded death by bolt and bullet, and longed to counterbalance her good fortune by indulging in recklessness.

In truth, she was impelled to this daredevil streak by a keen sense of timing and deadlines. A tick-tock countdown. A car this nice could be tracked easily, to say nothing of its inherent GPS capabilities. They needed to get far — far enough — before abandoning it for good.

There was also the unfortunate matter of the bullet hole in the roof, which roared and whistled in protest as they weaved through the streets, and which occasionally inconvenienced Milicent by drooling an accumulative raindrop on her shoulder. She did her best to ignore this mild annoyance, though it grated on her nerves like an adapted form of Chinese water torture.

Milicent extended the torture by going around in circles at several junctures, either because she wished to elude any trackers, or because she deemed it prudent to squeeze in a few extra minutes of driving practise. After forty-five minutes or so, she parked the car near the Luxembourg Gardens, tucking it in an inconspicuous side street obscured by the impressive girth of neighbouring trees.

"You mentioned ground rules," she said, turning off the engine for the first time that night. Her ringing voice was pronounced in the sudden silence. "Don't worry. I won't steal your toothbrush."

Dominik

He watched the woman as she stood in the rain, her eyes closed. Her hair, though damp and hanging limply about her face, was a halo of gold in the headlights of the car, wreathing her in an ethereal glow. Her dress hung off her frame, the rain soaking through the fabric and exposing the frame beneath — the rather attractive frame, he had to admit. The expensive fabric was reduced to a filmy gauze, tinged pink with the blood from her victim earlier in the evening. It lent her a macabre beauty, like a demoness of vengeance basking in her victory. A smile curled at her lips. It was one of predatory satisfaction.

How could he not admire that in a woman?

His brow quirked as she laughed, the peals ringing off the walls of the garage. He'd heard amusement at the confused provenance of his name before, but never outright mirth. Perhaps it was the joy of living to fight another day after a difficult evening. He'd certainly felt the same giddiness at times, the need to celebrate the simple pleasure of being alive after so much bloodshed. While he might try to suppress it at times, it was impossible to deny entirely. He was honest with himself, if nobody else. His mouth tightened with the hint of displeasure; he didn't like being mocked, but he wasn't ready to push their tentative partnership by telling her off for it. Not yet.

Then, the slender blonde leaned down to tear a strip off her dress. His forehead wrinkled with confusion — did she have an injury in need of a tourniquet? She was upright and he saw only the blood staining her dress, no new wounds or bright scarlet to indicate further injuries than the bruises on her throat. His eyes followed each step she took toward him, and Dominik had to fight the impulse to push her away as she dabbed at his forehead with the strip of fabric.

He hadn't been expecting that.

It wasn't something he'd complain about, either. Instead, a deep chuckle rolled through his chest, and he inclined his head in thanks. Perhaps she was warming up to him — though her sparkling blue eyes were as good a poker face as any he'd seen. The thought was certainly tempting; Fujiwara couldn't tell if it was entirely the after-effects of adrenaline and the all too human survival instinct. However, he was certain of one thing: it would be dangerous to become entangled with the mysterious blonde, beautiful though she was. The honey trap was the oldest gambit out there, and it was still useful because men were still fallible. He was certain that there were more than a few broken hearts — and bodies — in her wake. He had to be imagining the faint cracks around the edges of her facade, or it was all part of her ploy.

She turned, the gravel crunching under her shoes, and he shook his head in the darkness, trying to clear his thoughts. It had been a long day, and he needed to rest. As he went to unlatch the door, she spoke, pausing to look at him over the roof of the vehicle. He met her gaze in the darkness, searching her expression, though he didn't know what he was looking for. For the first time, her words came slowly, as if the revelation was arduous for her. He offered a skewed half smile, nodding in the darkness.

"I'd say it was nice to meet you, but the circumstances weren't very nice. Let's hope the rest of our time together isn't as eventful."

❦

The trees and fields of the Parisian countryside flashed by in an amorphous blur, turned into dark smears in the window. It wasn't just the sedative still clinging to his senses; Milicent — he rolled the name around on his tongue — was a determined driver to say the least. On more than one occasion, she'd come a hairs' breadth from a collision, leaving other hapless drivers cursing helplessly as the Peugeot roared past. Fujiwara was a competent driver, but he wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Milicent spent time in Monaco or Le Mans for her holidays. She drove as if she expected the world to move around her, rather than as a means to get to her destination in one piece. It was a terrifying display of recklessness, tempered only by her competence.

Pulling up to a stop in a small side street was a small mercy after the roller coaster of terror that had guided their evening. He unclenched his hand from his thigh, glancing over as Milicent spoke, breaking the silence that had hung sullenly about the car since they'd departed.

It was a struggle not to roll his eyes at her attempt at humour, "I'm not worried about plaque. I want to make sure I — we..." — He quickly corrected himself — "...get out of this alive. Either of us could have killed the other already, but that's not a promise that we won't."

Fujiwara held her gaze carefully, searching for any sign of deception in her expression. "If we're going to get to the bottom of this, we need to trust each other. I need to know what you know about the binder — and who hired you to get it. Then I'll tell you what I know about it. If I ever get the sense that you're not being entirely honest, or hiding something that I need to know? I walk away and leave you to whoever those fuckers were." His voice took a dangerous turn, an edge of a growl to it as he finished. Pretty or not, he wasn't going to put up with the potential danger she posed. If she gave him a reason, he'd make sure she regretted crossing him.