aware of her many talents, and she had so many. I still think fondly of several of them.”
Mi Na growled at the suggestiveness, designed to provoke.
Requiem smiled. The enraged often made mistakes. “So tell me, were you planning to fillet me as we fucked?” Requiem asked. “Or was this seduction routine just to whet my appetite? What you really wanted was for me to agree to meet your fictitious boss somewhere later so you could dispose of my body out of the way? Mm?”
Mi Na cried out as Requiem tightened her hold on the fishing wire. “Answer!”
The woman hissed out a “yes”, pain etching her features.
“Well, points for originality. Shame about the execution.”
A peace symbol was pressing into the side of Mi Na’s face, creating an ironic imprint. Requiem almost laughed. “So why not kill me while I was on the table? Too messy? Harder to hide the stains?”
“With your back turned?” Mi Na said, squeezing out her words with difficulty. “You think I have no honour.”
“No honour?” Requiem repeated. “You even sound like her. Who hired you? The dregs of Fleet Crew? Or someone else?”
“No one. This is for myself. For family honour.”
Family honour. Requiem’s grip eased. She’d been right: this silly girl was no assassin. Great. A civilian on a vengeance kick. Although Mi Na had obviously had some actual training. “Family honour? What does that even mean? Nabi and I were not enemies in the end.”
“You broke her heart. She told me. You broke her. Then…I found out later you killed her. You shot her, when she was trying to protect her boss.”
Requiem said nothing for a moment, picking apart the anguish in the words, like ligaments from muscles. “I never killed her.” She didn’t bother denying the rest. The girl’s misplaced affections were hardly her fault.
“You used her! Treated her like dirt. And Sal said you killed her. It’s my right to avenge her. He trained me to fight you.”
Requiem sighed. Saliya Govi. The new head of Fleet Crew. Freshly out of jail, if her sources were right. He’d been the smartest gang member left standing when the dust had cleared after Requiem had betrayed the entire Australian underworld. She had wondered how long it would take someone to figure out she’d been the one. Of course Sal didn’t know for sure, so he’d manipulated Mi Na and sent her after Requiem. No matter the outcome, his hands were clean.
Slippery little shit.
“I didn’t kill your sister,” Requiem said in irritation. “Sal has his own agenda. She died of her wounds when police shot her as she was trying to escape.”
“Bullshit! And she didn’t deserve to die in some dirty alley like she was nothing. She mattered. She mattered to me.”
A burst of scrambling and twisting resulted in Mi Na wriggling out of Requiem’s grip. She let the woman go and sat back on her haunches.
Mi Na did the same and rubbed the red lines at her neck as they eyed each other cautiously, four feet apart.
“I didn’t kill her, like I said,” Requiem said. “Mi Na, your sister was someone I could no more kill than she could kill me. That was our relationship. Dysfunctional and complicated, but for assassins, that counts as downright friendly.”
There was a strangled, tortured noise and Mi Na brought her hands up to cover her face. Tears slid out from between her fingers as she wept silently.
Requiem stared at the emotional display with distaste, stomach plummeting. She wasn’t any good at this. The failings and frailties of humanity were nothing she’d mastered, beyond how to exploit them. The adrenaline was wearing off as the threat passed. She felt the stillness inside herself, and the seeping away of the part of her that was raw, pure, and dangerous, until Requiem faded.
Natalya lowered herself in front of Mi Na and waited until she had her eye.
“I was there. I held Nabi when she died,” she said evenly. “I held her when she made her peace with the universe, and made her peace with me. There was too much blood loss to save her. She died well. She was unafraid, she was strong, and I think her family would have been proud of her. I know I was. I told her so.”
Tear-filled, suspicious eyes sought the truth.
“I could have killed you just now,” Natalya added. “I didn’t. So you know I have no reason to lie. You know that.”
Mi Na became still, dropping her hands to her lap. Natalya could see their trembling.