He was all sharp edges with a brooding darkness that set your pulse racing. His eyes blue fathomless pools. It was like looking into a void. Ice cold.
He was a cold hearted assassin. She was trained to take him down.
A Dark AU Van McCann story (thi...
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I stood in one of the shower cubicles at my workplace, eyes closed and head tipped back, letting the warm water cascade over me. It beat down on my face and flowed off, taking with it the spatters of blood which stained it and my fresh tears, washing away the horrors of the morning. It couldn't clear the images from my mind though. The bullet bursting through Simon's chest. His body crumpling lifelessly to the pavement. His cold, dead stare.
Of course I knew that his fate was already sealed that day no matter whether our meeting had taken one minute or fifteen, and his death certainly wasn't my fault, but still an uncomfortable cloak of guilt had settled itself around me and I couldn't shift it.
Simon's killer hadn't been Van. The dead man slumped in the BMW was unidentified. He'd taken out Simon with a long range rifle in one shot and then met his sudden end at the hands of another killer. The assassin... assassinated. Some would call it poetic justice.
No one had witnessed the shooting of the mystery killer, but as the crowd had gathered around the crime scene I'd heard several officers discussing how they'd seen a motorcyclist riding away from the area at high speed.
Speculation was rife, the whole agency puzzling over who would do such a thing. Why commission an assassin to carry out a hit and then a second one to kill the killer? They said it just didn't make sense. But it did... to me. I knew with certainty that Van had been there, watching over me just like he'd promised, taking matters into his own hands with keeping me safe. Once again snuffing out a life so that I could live. But I could take little comfort from this fact. Simon was still dead, and so was Scott, and I knew that they wouldn't be the only victims in this bloody war. As long as the criminal network carried on operating then the nightmare would continue and the body count would keep getting higher. Many more innocent and not so innocent lives would surely be lost along the way.
I stepped out of the shower and dried myself off, changing into clean clothes that I'd had in my locker at work, transferring the piece of paper with the details of Van's next target into the pocket of my fresh jeans.
My tears were dry now and I was starting to gain my composure, slipping back into the calm and controlled demeanour I knew that I'd need to face my colleagues at the de-briefing. It was true that this job desensitised you to the sorts of atrocities that could render others incapable of functioning, but that didn't mean that I was left completely unscathed. Every death or injury of a colleague and every grisly crime scene I witnessed whittled away at my soft edges, hardening me.
The chatter in the meeting room hushed as I pushed open the door, and I steeled myself. I kept my eyes on the floor as I made my way over to an empty seat, trying to keep my mind clear, hearing various comments from the assembled agents that were directed at me, but not looking to see who'd spoken them.
