Silent Storm [ManxMan]

Chapter 1 ~ I left a million dollars in the...

"When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better."

- Mae West

[River's POV]

I was so bored.

I didn't even know if I had ever been this bored ever before.

I was currently occupying the armchair, placed slightly to the left of the glass window leading out to the balcony. You may think that placing it there would somewhat destroy the point, since the point was to be able to see the view.

But of course then you would be wrong.

The truth was that it was placed exactly where it should be in order to avoid me being shot, by for example a trained sniper. Yes, I actually did say shot. You see I have a lot of enemies. Being a multibillionaire and a very mean and rude one at that, seemed to be the main cause. Though that wasn't the only reason people wished to see me dead. No, I had actually had quite a life so far.

[Flashback]

I can honestly say that up until my tenth birthday my life had pretty much been like every other ordinary child's but there's where the similarities stopped. My tenth birthday actually also happened to be the day when both my parents were assassinated leaving me, the only child, heir to their entire company and their current wealth too.

Of course there had been no way they would have let me, a simple ten year old, take over a multibillionaire company just like that. It had been decided that I would get absolutely nothing until the day I turned eighteen and that's how it played out too.

To protect me from being made an easy target I had to change my name and I was moved to Russia to live out the following eight years of my life, up until my eighteenth birthday, there. I was placed in a small school and I was assigned as a foster child to an elderly couple, everything as to not raise any unnecessary suspicion. Hell, even I myself didn't know that I was actually the richest, youngest living boy there was.

Now when I look back at it I can maybe see the benefit in that.

Everything worked according to everyones' expectations until my fourteenth birthday came around. That's when my life got turned upside down. I became a witness to the brutal murder of my foster parents in our own living room. The man who killed them turned out to be an assassin and when he found me hiding behind the couch he had laughed and ruffled my hair playfully. He had said that he wasn't there to kill me (a fact that would have changed drastically if he had known that I was indeed a multibillionaire). Instead he told me, that the elderly couple I had spent the last four years with, was a part of the Russian mob and he had been paid dearly to deal with them.

I didn't hate him and I actually asked if he could bring me with him because I didn't want to be left with two rotting corpses when the police decided to show up. The man chose to take me under his wing and well, that's the story as to how I ended up as a trainee to become a professional assassin.

I spent four years with the man who had killed my foster parents (he never once told me his name but I decided to call him Winter) and a guild of other assassins. By the time I turned eighteen I was the best there was and I was already quite well-off seeing as a lot of people paid me well to make their problems simply... go away.

But as you all know, all things must come to an end and so did my interest in killing people (well not really but the 'working as an assassin-part' did anyway). So when I got a visit from a lady from the bank telling me that I was actually the only heir to a big and well-going company and a multibillionaire at that... well let's just say I took that as my cue to leave my assassins-days behind me.