Toy Soldiers (Helford #1)

(4) Dreaming

“What?” I snapped, still forcing my breathing to return to normal. “Watching me sleep, Blackwell? That’s a concerning habit.”

“You were crying,” he responded flatly, reaching out toward my face. I flinched, but his fingers barely skimmed my cheek, warm and calloused, and he held them up to the light so that I could see my own tears reflecting in the light on his fingertips. I looked at them emotionlessly before I shrugged and turned away, turning back toward the window and down at the world underneath of me, so small and insignificant. Just another place that wasn’t home.

When I didn’t respond, Rian took that as his cue to continue his monologue.

“Do you normally have these dreams?” he asked me, sounding concerned, but I never could trust an assassin. “Do you normally writhe like you’re being tortured or something?”

I didn’t respond.

“I think we all have those kinds of nightmares, Caitie. There’s no need to be so unresponsive. I used to dream all the time,” he told me, opening up, but I didn’t want to see this side of him. This side that cared about things. I didn’t want to see anything. “I would always relive my first kill, over and over. It was a man, and he was in his forties, and he was skimming some money from some company and they wanted him gone. So they sent this gangly, awkward, antisocial fourteen-year-old to do it. And I did it, don’t get me wrong. I tracked him all the way to his home and ambushed him in an alleyway less than a block away. I took a knife to his throat, but I didn’t slash it—I buried it deep, so deep that it snapped into his spine and killed him instantly. I watched him bleed out on the ground, my limbs locked down with panic. All I had been able to think about was that no God in any religion would ever forgive something like that.”

“You talk a lot about God,” I observed, trying desperately to change the subject. “You speak like you are a believer.”

“I am,” he told me outright, not ashamed. “And I’m enough of a believer in Him that I know that there is nothing I can do to repent for the sins that I have committed here on this earth. No Hail Mary prayers are going to save me for the hellfire that I am going to burn in from the moment I die.”

“Not many people in our line of work believe in a higher power,” I told him slowly, my voice distant. “They can’t help but to think that there is no way God can allow something like us to exist.”

“It’s not God that tells us how to exist,” he replied softly. “We decide that for ourselves. He just decides what we deserve to get from all that we have done.”

“I’m not religious,” I told him, and he chuckled, my statement somehow amusing him.

“Oh, that I can tell,” he said to me with a laugh in his voice. “I could tell in the way that you called it a crucifix—you don’t call it that because that is what it is, do you? You call it a crucifix because Jesus was nailed to it to suffer for what he believed in. It’s the symbol of what happens to people who are killed for what they believe.”

I looked down at my hands.

“You think of a crucifix as all of the people that you have had to kill because they believed what they believed,” he murmured so low that I had to strain to hear him. “And that is what makes you different from the rest of us, Caitie.”