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There's an art to becoming a shadow, and he has mastered it.
Noiselessly he picks his way across the sprawling estate and into the main house, tripping no wires, triggering no cameras. The only evidence of his presence here and in Spain generally come morning will be the senator, who he kills without waking. He fires the bullet through a pillow to muffle the shot, into the skull, and with a flurry of bloodied polyester fibrefill the job is done.
He has instructions to retrieve a specific document as well, and so he searches for it. There's little point in painting the killing of a politician as a robbery when it clearly isn't, so he makes no special effort to ransack the house. He rifles through the desk drawers in the senator's home office and comes up with nothing. He goes down the shelves, flipping through every book in quest of carved-out compartments. Finally he goes down to the house's basement, unfinished and almost labyrinthine.
He hears the whimpers as he nears a door with a flower ornament hanging from the knob, and with a brief dread he opens it, gun readied. He expects to find a child hiding.
Instead, inside is a prison cell, only without bars. The only furniture in the room is a flimsy cot, on which lies a young woman with a battered face, swollen with bruises of various shades. Her hands are shackled to the frame of the cot, wrists bleeding and rusted metal chipping as she struggles weakly against it. She's naked, and though he has sworn off sympathy, the blood new and old that coats the insides of her thighs turns his stomach.
It is not his place to consider the morality of a job, to inquire as to why his targets were hated so thoroughly that someone saw fit to hire him. He doesn't care so long as they pay.
Even so, he's sometimes left with the distinct impression that his target had it coming in a big way.
Slowly he approaches the cot, his finger tense on the trigger, and the woman doesn't stir until he's inches from her. He casts his shadow over her like Death's cloak. One eye is swollen shut, but the other rolls up to meet his impassive stare. There's a gaunt, hollowed-out quality to her, an emptiness he sees also in himself, and lifting his gun to her head, he steels himself against empathy. Her cracked lips part and he waits for her to speak; she deserves last words at least, after this.
"Thank you," she whispers, her voice a thin, broken thing. Her smile is just the same as she says, "Mi ángel."
It's against his programming to be swayed by such things, but it stays his hand nonetheless. The way she looks at him locks his joints, and he hesitates, though he shouldn't. She's seen his face.
"It's okay," she says. Does she mean to give him permission? “I know, I — it's okay.”
A minute passes, viscerally defining. He shifts the gun slightly to the side and fires, severing the handcuffs. She doesn't flinch, as if she knew all along he wouldn't shoot her.
In sparing her he strayed from the path and there's no turning back now. He wraps her in his jacket and carries her to the car he arrived in with no physical difficulty, even when he has to scale the fence surrounding the estate. She weighs next to nothing and clings helpfully to his shoulders all the while, never becoming dead weight. He lays her across the back seat with a gentleness usually reserved only for his guns and drives them to the nondescript warehouse unit that is his base of operations at present, outside Barcelona.
All he has inside is a cot, weapons and a few boxes of ammunition; and a first-aid kit. He sets her down on the cot and goes to retrieve it.
"I thought I would never..." She trails off, handcuffs rattling as she moves her arms to rub at her face. "I don't know how long he kept me there. What year is it? What month?"
"2020. March," he says, his voice croaking almost as badly as hers, rough with lack of use. He brings the kit over and kneels on the ground in front of her. She offers her hands unprompted and watches him pick the locks, the cuffs falling away after only a few seconds. Her wrists are raw underneath, so he wraps them. She's warm and alive in his hands, her fingers twitching whenever he grazes her palms. It's not often that he touches a living person for any other purpose than to kill them.
She's silent for a moment, and then, “Only a few months,” she says. He moves on to dabbing at her face with an antiseptic wipe. "It seemed like longer. He... When you killed him," she asks, her listless stare gaining intensity, a new viciousness that surprises him, "did he suffer?"
He shakes his head, cleaning a laceration at her temple. "I'm sorry," he says, noting her disappointment. The assignment was to be quick, not to torture him.
She nods, a tendon twitching in her jaw. She leans forward and presses her lips to his forehead, then stays there, resting her head against his. He's tense and uncertain until she says, "Magdala."
"Your name," he says, and feels her nod. He won't reciprocate, but she doesn't ask him to. For a long time she'll call him "Angel."
She's asleep when the handler's call comes, and he steps outside to avoid disturbing her.
"It's done?" Hodges asks, clipped.
He glances back at her through a crack in the door, the way her chest rises and falls as she breathes. He gave her her pick of his clothes and turned his back while she changed into them. Turned his back, as if he knew she wouldn't grab any one of the knives or guns within her reach. He should tell Hodges about the complication and let him decide how best to handle it.
"Yes," he says, and nothing else.
[*]
He's bleeding.
It was sloppiness on his part, failure to consider that the millionaire wasn't the only soul in the penthouse, that one of the help might be armed. He cauterized the wound with a hot iron and bandaged it tight before he left, but this is only a temporary fix. He carefully conceals the injury until he's home, parked in the driveway of the house that wasn't his idea. It's hers, really, built to her liking, surrounded by trees and far separated from the nearest town; she just lets him sleep here sometimes.
If only their relationship was really so impersonal.
He finally lets himself limp as he makes his way to the door, and it opens just as he's lifting his hand to knock. Magdala is there, bright-eyed and smiling. Since the beginning she's made a habit of being glad to see him; he doesn't pretend to know why.
"God, how I missed you," she says, bursting, and she throws her arms around him to draw him inside. He goes easily, but he can't hide his wince when her hip bumps his and of course she notices. Her keen eyes zero in on his crooked gait, the way he's favoring one leg.
He opens his mouth to tell her it's nothing, he'll take care of it, but she shushes him. She pulls off his jacket and removes his belt, then slides his pants down just enough to uncover the bandage, well on its way to being soaked through with blood. Her face falls, and her hands become very gentle tracing the lines of it.
"You're hurt," she says. There's an edge of grief in her voice, as though his pain is hers.
She pulls his arm over her shoulder and has him lean on her until they reach the bathroom, where she sits him on the toilet lid and just strokes his hair for a while, promising him it's going to be alright. It's really not that dire, just a bullet buried in a flesh wound, but he lets himself take comfort. She's good at this, hands steady holding the forceps and tying off the stitches, eyes never straying from her task once she gets started. He doesn't know how she does it, but it never hurts when it's her.
She never asks him where he was or what went wrong, who he killed or why. He wouldn't tell her even if she did, but her grace surprises him. He would have expected frustration in a lover, that he keeps things from her. He would have expected impatience, that conversation is such a challenge for him and he's so often gone. He would forgive her if she satisfied herself with other men in his absence, but the only person she ever brings here is her brother, who he has come to consider a friend.
They have dinner together, reheated leftovers, and watch cartoons, which she loves, he thinks, for their moral simplicity. She tells him everything that happened in the two months he was gone, while he mostly listens. She has a way of filling the silence even without speaking, with just the music of her breath and heartbeat when he lays his head on her chest to hear it.
It's late when they finally turn in for the night. She curls up beside him in their bed, under the blankets, careful of his leg even when he forgets about it. He cups her cheek in the dark, feeling the familiar lines of her smile, and she kisses his hand, heedless of all the invisible blood caked into his palm.
“Mi ángel,” she says, and as always he refrains from correcting her.