When Lysander arrived back at the estate, he found Miria poring over the materials Tessa had left with her again. Julia must have brought her a pot of mint tea and some biscuits at some point because a tray sat not far from Miria’s elbow, largely untouched. Lysander watched his best friend work for several moments in silence, using her distraction to simply absorb her presence. He wanted to tell her all of the truths he had learned, wanted to pour out everything he was hiding from her, but everytime he opened his mouth, nothing came forth. A solid block of guilt and shame and terror clogged his throat and coated his mouth in cotton, drying his tongue and leaving him frozen. Gripping the doorframe, Miria must have heard him at last, her head swinging up and around to see him looming there.

“Lys! You’re back! I got worried something happened, so I was trying to distract myself with this mess,” she said with a gesture at the piles of papers laid on the table in front of her. He hadn’t checked the time, but it had to be approaching a time of the night that teetered on the verge of just being called morning, and yet Miria still looked wide awake, exhaustion only showing in the deep circles appearing under her eyes.

At the comment, his guilt only compounded tenfold at having left her alone long enough that she had to worry. “Ah yeah, sorry about that. Bingley wanted to spend more time wandering the backyard than doing his business,” he lied, the truth still lurking in the back of his mind and refusing to come out. Normally any lie of his would have come out stilted and awkward and obvious, but he had distanced himself so far from the reality of what he had done that this came easily to his lips.

“Sounds about right. What a silly pup,” she said, smiling at him before waving him over to the table, “C’mere. I haven’t really come up with any brilliant plans yet, but I’ve taken some notes and done my own calculations based on the information they gave me. Maybe you can help me make sense of it? Or do you wanna get some sleep?”

He did want to sleep, honestly, but he didn’t think it would come, would probably just lay in bed thinking too much. So, he stepped farther into the room and joined her instead. “Do you think they gave you all the available data?” he asked while dropping onto the sofa.

“I didn’t even think of that! Would they really do that? Withhold things from me?” The prospect had shaken her, her eyes wide and nervous and trusting. She would believe whatever he said to her, and he wanted to run away and throw up again, but no, he couldn’t, she needed him.

“I dunno, maybe. Didn’t Tessa say that the whole council agreed because the other cities were doing similar things? You could set up a meeting with the other city leaders to hear their thoughts firsthand.” He remembered the tinny voices ringing behind Joseph’s half-closed office door.

“Is that even possible? If it is, that would be a good idea. Hmm,” she considered, tapping her pen against her lips and jotting a note to herself on a paper already littered in her bubbly script. “Dad probably kept notes in his office for all this.”

“I’m sure he did,” he said even as a shot of panic ran down his spine. Would Joseph have kept records of his dealings with Red and the other assassins in his office? Maybe he could sneak in before Miria had a chance to see it and make any conclusions? But then again, he sort of doubted Joseph would be so careless as to leave a paper trail leading to any kind of shady dealings he made.

“Actually, I kinda had an idea that I wanted to run by you, if that’s cool,” she hedged, glancing over at him from the corner of her eye. She was chewing her bottom lip nervously.

“Uh, sure. Shoot.” While he had no clue what she wanted to propose to him, he couldn’t stop his brain from producing increasingly preposterous suggestions about what it could be. His exhaustion and anxiety created a toxic swirl in his head that he couldn’t shake.

At his acquiescence, she perked up and turned to him fully. They were sharing the sofa, so her knee brushed his as she moved. Lysander had never once wanted to recoil from her, but the touch made his skin crawl and he had to coach himself through the moment so he didn’t jump halfway across the room. No part of him deserved to touch any part of her.

And yet, he still couldn’t tell her the truth.

“Okay, so I know you like your job and all, but my dad mentioned that Jude quit, and I’m really not sure what I’m doing at all with any of this, so I thought it might maybe be nice if you could take over as my secretary? I could even give you a raise or something!” she babbled. He wasn’t sure if she had picked up the habit from him or if he had picked up the habit from her, but either way, she sounded suspiciously like him whenever he asked for a favor.

A multitude of thoughts flew through him at her request, most of them either self-deprecating or terrible, swinging wildly from the desire to push her as far away from him as possible and just quitting his job right then and there and disappearing into the night to wanting to just take the job so he could have closer access to whatever information she unearthed in Joseph’s office.

Both of these viewpoints just made him hate himself more.

His face must have given away at least some of his inner misgivings because Miria’s hopeful face fell slightly and she started chewing on her lip again. “I know it’s not the perfect solution and it would be a lot of responsibility to throw on you, but even earlier you said that we would get through this ‘like old times’. I really need you right now, Lys,” she pressed.

Surely if there was a higher power, it was laughing at him right now.

Effectively digging his own grave and powerless to deny Miria anything, especially now, he replied, “You’re right. Of course I can do that, Mir. Sam and Blair can handle our office without me.”

“I thought so too. Blair is so efficient and Sam is super creative, so I’m sure they’ll do great even without you,” she effused, “Thank you so much, Lys. I’m so scared and stressed, and it just means so much to me that you’re on my side.”

Another prick of guilt directly in his heart.

“Of course, Mir. I’d do anything for you.”

One Month Ago

Lexi wandered back to the temporary base Noah and she had set up. The abandoned gas station wouldn’t have been her first choice, given that such a location would almost certainly be popular with other squatters, but Noah had insisted on a one night stint in the back room, citing a desire to paw through the remains of the employee lockers. He hoped to find something new to read, she knew, but she had very little doubt that his search would be fruitless. The place had been abandoned too long and looters would have certainly already taken anything of value. But she felt kind of bad that Noah spent so much time just sitting around while she traipsed about doing her work, so she couldn’t deny him this.

In fact, she had just received a new commission from a woman in a nearby suburb. Lexi tried to never accept jobs in the same area as where they were staying, just for safety’s sake. Something about this job, though, sat wrong on her shoulders. She had never been one to dwell on the work she did, taking Zephyr’s early lessons to heart. Tenant number one of being an assassin was to always see the target as just that, a walking, talking paper doll, something less than human. It made the work palatable, and Lexi had always found it disturbingly easy to do so.

But this woman had hired her to kill some random smuck, and she had hired her under the name of the most powerful man in the city, so already, something about the situation stank. Lexi would do it, but it would probably feel weird.

Maybe.

Knocking on the heavy metal backdoor using their secret pattern (a silly thing leftover from their days as two children on the run together) and waiting for Noah to let her in, Lexi stamped her feet in the cold. A late season snowfall had begun, the flakes swirling and settling on the exposed skin of her face. A moment later, Noah ushered her inside, only opening the door wide enough for her to slip through.

“Find any takers?” Noah asked as soon as they were tucked into a corner of the old employee break room. Every cabinet--and even the decrepit refrigerator--was missing a door, so they were surrounded by empty pockets of blackness, only barely cut through by the stubby candles Noah had placed around the room.

“Yeah, actually. But it’s kinda weird,” she replied while burrowing into her pile of blankets. She brought those blankets everywhere. One of the first things she had learned while surviving alone with her mother was to never take a good blanket for granted. It made her travel pack bulky and cumbersome, but she refused to leave even one of her three behind, even when she had to get particularly creative with folding.

Noah raised an eyebrow skeptically at her. “Weird how?”

“I dunno, just weird. Joseph Campbell wants me to kill his foster son.”

He scoffed. “That’s not weird. Pretty par for the course, actually. Though the pay should be good if the job’s from Campbell himself.”

“I guess. But from what I’ve heard, his foster son is just some nobody. I can’t even imagine why he would need him dead.” She had no real idea why she couldn’t let the matter go, but everything about the situation--from the proxy who hired her to the target himself--just felt strange.

“Well, did you take the job?”

She gave him a deadpan look. “Of course. I’m gonna start staking him out tomorrow. How did your stuff go?”

“Terrible. This place is gross and barren.”

“I told you so.”

“Oh fuck off. It was worth a shot.”

“If you say so.”

Giving her a final glare, Noah huffed and snuffed out the candle nearest his own sleeping bag, flipping around to face the wall. Laughing to herself, Lexi did the same, mentally preparing for her newest job.

When she finally tracked down the right guy the next day, she was struck again by how normal he was. She found him walking to the train station after work, tall but not imposing. He had an open face, so much so that she could read almost every flicker of emotion that crossed it. He kept furrowing his eyebrows and biting his lips while he rode the train, so he was troubled by something, though she had no way of knowing what. He also kept fidgeting with his hands like he had just been gifted the appendages and didn’t know exactly how they were supposed to work.

Everyday for two weeks she watched him and everyday she waited for him to do something shady or even morally grey, but the worst thing he ever did was meet up with a man she recognized as one of the more upstanding fences. And she grew more suspicious about why she was being hired to kill this dude. She watched him help an old lady cross the street, for heaven’s sake. The whole thing felt ridiculous, like spying on an awkward, hapless nobody.

Then, one day, she followed him into his local Campbell’s. Normally she tried to avoid following a target into an enclosed public space because it made it harder to disappear into a crowd, but this guy had zero self-awareness so she felt safe to tail him a little closer. Multiple times over the past few days, he had even seen her, had looked directly at her, and still he didn’t recognize that someone--the same someone, in fact--was stalking him. Even with all of her disguises, she was almost offended that he seemed to have so little recognition of her.

Still, she didn’t want to push her luck too much, so she lingered in adjoining aisles while he shopped, and she overheard a commotion as a little boy kicked up a fuss nearby. Initially, the disturbance just annoyed her because it would just hamper her ability to hear anything if her target said or did anything, but then the self-same target came around the corner. Again, she could tell that he seemed troubled, his teeth doing good work destroying his bottom lip, but this time he seemed to be watching the child as his father wrangled him out of the store after collecting their allowed goods. With one last unsure look, her mark snagged a nearby pastry from the bakery section. All goods considered non-essential still had to be paid for with credits, and the target did so quickly, leaving behind all of his other groceries. Curious now, Lexi followed him outside only to catch the tail end of an exchange between him and the father and son who had just left.

The target passed over the pastry he had just purchased, sheepishly admitting to overhearing the commotion the little boy had caused about wanting it. The father seemed hesitant at first, but his son looked so hopeful that he could do nothing but take it and hand it to the waiting child.

And it was so stupid, but she couldn’t help but remember a bright red apple and a longing that spelled destruction.

Shaking away the remembrance, she followed him back into the store and made a plan to speak with him face to face the following night.

She needed to know what made Lysander Badeaux (the world’s most cartoonishly kind and wholesome man) tick, even if it ruined the job.