And then I die

2. Target

Tera

My breaths are laboured, but even as I struggle to breathe, even as I fail to put pressure on the wound on my abdomen, I'm looking up at him. He has me on his lap. He's trying to stop the bleeding, but he's so unaccustomed to these sorts of situations that his hands are everywhere. He's panicked. I can see it in his eyes that he's about to lose it, so I smile at him. Or I try to. No amount of training can prepare you for death; I can't move a single muscle in my body. I hope that my eyes are speaking to him.

But all that I comprehend, all that I see is the blood covering his face. There is so much blood. I did not predict my death to be so similar to my sire. I did not expect the end to be so similar to the start.

The place my mind goes to as my entire life flashes before my eyes is not that bloody day when the little innocent girl that I was died along with her father, though that day is the reason I am in this mess it is not the start of my story; of our story, mine and his, no that started not so long ago.

************************************

I was new there, and I understood what that meant, I was fresh meat, and everyone went after fresh meat. And that would usually be fine because I could stand my own pretty well. I mean, ask anyone who knows of - or knows of me, but that could not happen today. Today, I had to be chewed out. Well, you have to lose some to win some.

So I walked into the classroom and looked at my shoes, I bit my lip when the teacher asked me to introduce myself. I stumbled to my seat and then kept my eyes to myself for the entire class, shy girl persona, check.

I knew the kinds of people that went there and I understood that meant this was going to be different than how it was at a normal schools or how I remember normal schools to be - it had been ages since I was close to anything classified as normal - but it made sense that no one tried to talk to me when the class ended. No one wanted to make friends, no one needed to if they were going to St. Xavier. We all had to file out and go to our next lesson.

Sure, it made sense, but it left me without anyone to tell me where my next lesson was. I looked at the sheet that had my timetable sprawled on it; I had Criminal Law next, a bit extreme for a junior in high school, but it was right on point with the curriculum here.

St. Xavier's was a school for the rich and wealthy, but these rich and wealthy people had one thing in common - their money was not legitimate. But it made sense because the world was essentially run by Organised Crime, and I know what you're thinking, wasn't it always? Yes, perhaps, but the legalisation of organized crime took a huge leap about a decade ago, and literary became the Fourth Frontier, ha! And people thought Virtual Reality was the way to go.

Anyway, Crimes paid and St. X was where you go if you wanted to be anyone in the Criminal World which despite its attribution to the end of recession and basically the longest boom in the Monetary Cycle was very secretive but I was born into it, I was basically royalty but no one there knew.

So I quickly got up and planned to ask a blond haired kid with hunched back shoulders and quite possibly the worst posture in the world for help. I tapped his shoulder, and the moment he turned around, I knew.

He was one of my targets, I knew him well, but there was something else making itself known to me as well but it wasn't something I made time for. Sure, I was only sixteen and my Aunt Helen thought I should be obsessed with boys not murder but no, nope, the flutter in my stomach, the way I lost my breath and even my accelerated heart beat did not mean anything.

I felt the same way before a mission. So what if his eyes were insanely green.

Forget the eyes, I told myself.