Requiem for an Assassin

friend. What was it costing him, to recall and relate a memory like that one with such dispassion?
    She took his hand and looked at him. “I’m sorry, John.”
    He shook his head slightly, his eyes still on his wineglass.
    “Hey,” she said. With her other hand, she reached for his chin, and gently steered his face toward hers. He met her eyes, and the flatness she saw in his actually made her flinch. She’d seen eyes like that before, on Gil, her colleague, the frighteningly efficient killer who had died in Hong Kong. But Gil’s eyes were like that all the time; it was all there was to him. It was worse to see the look on John, whom she knew so much better, whom she cared about so intimately.
    He blinked, then suddenly was back, his eyes alive again. He swallowed and looked away. “You, uh, you want dessert?” he asked, glancing around for the waiter.
    They finished with a Grand Marnier soufflé accompanied by glasses of an ’85 Graham’s Port, followed by French-press coffee. That look she’d seen didn’t return, but nor could she say he was being himself. It was almost as though someone was doing a good imitation of him, but the persona wasn’t quite natural, with some acting, some effort showing through it. But why? What was he hiding?
    Back at the suite, Rain poured them each a healthy measure of the Glenmorangie. The fire had burned low, and she sat on the couch, the lights off, watching him kneel in the glow of the embers, moving coals, adding logs, getting it going again. After a little while, there was a good blaze, and she thought he would join her. But he didn’t. He stayed where he was, kneeling almost formally, one hand under the whiskey glass, the other on its side, watching the flames, his back to her.
    “You going to come sit with me?” she asked.
    After a moment, he came wordlessly to the couch and sat down a few inches away.
    “What is it?” she asked, after a moment.
    “I’ve just got a lot to think about.”
    “You want to talk about it?”
    He took a swallow of whiskey. “I don’t know how to.”
    She looked at him. “Maybe that’s the problem.”
    He returned the look, his eyes narrowing. “No. The problem is the problem. Not my disinclination to discuss it.”
    “So you know how to, but don’t want to.”
    For an instant, his face contorted in anger. He swallowed and seemed to get it under control. “What difference does it make?” he said.
    “It makes a lot of difference. How is about you. Not wanting to is about me.”
    He flushed and looked away, and she realized she was pushing too hard, no matter the truth of her words. She could be enormously patient and subtle when she was eliciting information from a target, but she had a habit of reverting to a more primitive, more deep-seated self with Rain. She cared too much about him; that was the problem. Her feelings made her forget herself. They brought forth all her default settings, the bad along with the good.
    A little more tactical, girl, she thought. Not just for you. For him, too.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “It just…scares me when you keep everything bottled up. It makes me feel insecure. I’m not used to feeling that way.”
    He finished his Glenmorangie. Ordinarily, he savored a good single malt. Gulping it down like this, especially after a bottle of wine and a glass of port, wasn’t like him. “What do you mean?” he asked.
    She shook her head. “Just…there are parts of you that you don’t let me see. And sometimes I feel like they’re the most important parts.” She was being tactical now, yes, but she wasn’t lying, either.
    He refilled his glass and topped off hers. They sat quietly for a while, Delilah sipping her whiskey, Rain drinking his down, the light from the fire playing on the walls.
    “I don’t know why you want to be with me,” he said, staring into the flames.
    “Why do you say that?”
    He kept looking away from her. “Because of what I am.”
    “What are you?”
    “You know.”
    “I don’t. I only know how I feel about you.”
    He shook his head as though saying No, you’re missing the point, then looked at her, his lips pursed, struggling with what he was trying to say. This time, what she saw in his eyes was utterly different from what she’d seen in the bar. She had never seen it before in him and wasn’t entirely sure what it was. But if she had to attach a word to it, the word would be…pleading.
    “I’m…a…killer!” he whispered emphatically, as