The Last Assassin Read Online Free PDF Page B

organization. They used her for the things she was good at, but would never trust her with real power. And she’d long ago accepted that, after the things she’d done, she could never have a normal life. She could never have a family. She could never let someone get that close.
    Except…Rain had been getting that close. Which was why what he’d told her tonight hurt. Worse than hurt. It ached in a place she couldn’t describe, a place she hadn’t even known was part of her.
    Their reservation was for a week, but she didn’t know now how long he was going to stay. She realized this could be their last time together. Even their last night.
    Maybe the child wasn’t his. That was possible; he’d said so. Or the woman would otherwise reject him. Or something else would happen to make this turn out the way she wanted it to.
    She watched him sleep, and was surprised at how possessive she suddenly felt. And threatened. And angry.
    She wasn’t helpless, of course. There were things she could do to create the right outcome.
    She’d gotten a little more information from Rain in the bath. Not much—just that he was going to New York. But combined with the name he’d mentioned, and a few other details she remembered from Hong Kong, it ought to be enough. She’d be looking for a Japanese female, first name Midori, who emigrated to the U.S. from Japan in the last three years, was currently residing in New York, and who gave birth to a boy, probably in New York, in the last eighteen months. Her organization had found people before with a lot less to go on than that.
    She lay there for a long time, struggling with warring impulses: hope and fear, sympathy and anger, temptation and guilt. Eventually, just before moonlight gave way to sun, she slept.

3
    D ELILAH AND I spent the rest of the week in Barcelona. My “situation,” as I thought of it, wasn’t on my mind as much as I would have expected, and its absence seemed linked to Delilah’s presence, because I found myself thinking of it mostly when she was off doing something else and I was left alone. At those times I would be gripped by a vertiginous combination of excitement and dread, and I was always glad when we were together again.
    Of course the news had been a surprise to her, but beyond that I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know what I was expecting, exactly—that she would be angry with me? Argumentative? Sullen? But she wasn’t. We would get up early and stay out late and make love before napping every afternoon and we didn’t discuss it again.
    The only clue I had to how she might really be feeling was that she was less moody than she had been in Rio. Rio had been the first extended time we’d spent together, and it had taken me a while to get used to her periodic pouts and petulance there. But in the end I’d come to appreciate that side of her because it felt real. It told me she was comfortable with me, she wasn’t acting. And now I wondered if the more consistent good cheer on display in Barcelona was deliberate, a form of overcompensation intended to obscure whatever was really going on inside her.
    The morning I left, she came with me to the airport. I shouldered my bag outside security and tried to think of something to say. She looked at me, but I couldn’t read her expression.
    “I hope you’re going to be careful,” she said, breaking the silence.
    That wasn’t really like her. I shrugged. “That’s not a hard promise for me to make.”
    “I’m more concerned with whether you’ll be able to keep it.”
    “I’ll keep it.”
    She nodded. “You going to call me?”
    That was even less like her. “Of course,” I said, but the truth was, my mind was already half elsewhere.
    I kissed her good-bye and got into the security line. When I turned back a minute later, she was gone.
    Once I was past immigration, I used a prepaid card to call my partner, Dox, from a pay phone. The burly former Marine sniper had provided me with his new, sterile