WANTED: Love of my Life

Epi-Epilogue

He took a deep breath.

"At first, I did what they said. I learned. I trained. Sometimes it was even fun. Diable, there were bikes, and guns, and there was action. Of course it was fun. But then... then I reached my eighteenth birthday. I was to become a man, a full member of the family. But in order to do that, I had to prove my worth."

"Um... I guess not by getting an A in your assignment, right?"

A choked laugh escaped him. "No. They took me to a room. Told me that to be a man, you had to be willing to get your hands dirty for the family. Told me that since it's my first time, they'd make it easy. In the room... In the room was a little girl. Danielle. The daughter of a rival clan."

Danielle. The name hit me like a hurricane. I remembered all too well his anguished screams in the park that night as he cried out that name.

"They wanted you to kill her," I said.

With bated breath, I waited for what came next.

He let his hands fall from his face, and there was a deep gentleness there, such as I had only seen sometimes when he looked at me. My heart clenched.

"She was only four years old," he whispered. "Four years old, and they wanted me to kill her."

My heart expanded, and I let out a sigh of such deep relief that I was surprised it didn't ripple the water of the bay in front of us. Four years old. A child! She was a child! Not someone he loved, but a child!

Well, so was I, maybe... but not to him.

"You couldn't do it," I said.

He gave me a quizzical look. "You sound so sure. How do you know?"

"Because I know you." My voice was soft. "I know you could never do something like that. Not in a million years."

"How do you know? I could be a brutal killer!"

"Are you?"

"Well... as it happens... no." He let his gaze dropped as if he were embarrassed or something. It made me want to laugh, and cry at the same time, because it made me think of what kind of world he had grown up in, to be embarrassed for a deed of goodness and mercy.

"What did you do?" I wanted to know.

"I was suddenly sick of it," he said. "Sick of the violence. Sick of the false glamor, the false pride in what we did! I grabbed the little girl, knocked the guard at the door on the head and took my father's car from the garage. It had his wallet inside, and inside his wallet were his bank account details. All the secret numbers. All I could think of was that I wanted to cripple them, to prevent them, as much as I could, from doing any more evil. There was only one way I could think of to rob them of power. I drove straight to the bank and emptied all the bank accounts. When I had dropped off the little girl at a safe place, with orders for her to be delivered back to her family, I made straight for the nearest private airfield. We had a plane there, fueled at all times, in case of emergencies. I was just able to get it out of the hangar and off the ground before they caught up with me. I could feel the tremors as bullets buried themselves in the back of the plane. I got away just in time, before they got out the heavy guns. I flew for hours. Somewhere over the border I put the plane on autopilot and jumped. I had a parachute. Landed safely somewhere in Switzerland. From Switzerland, I made my way to France, from France to America. And the rest you know."

"Not quite." I shook my head. "I mean... the way you've been living, as an outcast, homeless... with all that money, why did you do it? Or wasn't it enough money?"