The Laughing Assassin [Assassin's Diary] (Siren Publishing Classic) (7 page)

Her mother wasn’t told the truth due to the classified status of his mission, but she refused to stop seeking it. The determination was only deepened by the closed casket service that they were forced to have for the remains. Her mother asked questions of the government, and when that didn’t work her mom questioned other officers in her father’s command. The fellow officers were sympathetic, but sympathy only extended so far, and the men were unable or unwilling to provide even the most meager of details.

After a myriad of dead and loose ends, Serena’s mother seemed to lose all patience with the slow pipeline of information. She would never forget the words that started it all. “Serena, we are going to find out the truth of what happened to your father, come hell or high water. And no one is going to stand in our way.”

Not a month after her father died, she and her mom were on a flight out. Not to China at first, but a roundabout trip that took them both to Inner Mongolia, and a secret trip over the border hidden under rancid smelling rags.

Her mother was sure that if she looked hard enough that she would finally find the truth. Or that the truth would find them.

Her mom was right, and one sunny afternoon, someone approached their small rented flat in Tianjin. Mom shushed her with a determined look and little else.

Serena quieted, more so in response to the look than the hiss from her mom’s lips. It was then that she finally heard the cadence of footsteps that seemed layered one upon another until the sound was that of a bass drum keeping time. Her mother paled to an ashen shade, and she thrust Serena into a tiny closet and pleaded with her not to make a sound.

When the men kicked the shoddy door open instead of knocking, Serena knew neither of them would survive the night.

She bit her lip as she heard her mother first give entreaties for her life, then barter with her body and finally beg for merciful death. Her mother never even mentioned Serena’s presence, and the men never asked her whereabouts either.

Serena hated the pleas just as much as she hated the men who barged into her home. She could hear the men joke with each other as they decided what they would do with her mom. One said he wanted her ass, while another laughed and said his comrade could have that if he got to have her mom’s cunt at the same time.

But her Chinese was poor, and she was unsure of all that they said, but she did understand that they said they had never had dark meat, whatever that meant. The crude men tortured her mother with several brutal rapes before she heard a single gunshot reverberate cruelly into the air.

Serena clapped her hands over her lips as she peered through the slats in the closet door. She saw the men distracted in jovialities as they laughed about the atrocities visited onto her mother. There was one pair of pants that had been tossed carelessly aside by the owner’s haste to indulge in abuse, and she spied the fat butt of a gun protruding from one pocket.

It was one of the hardest things in her young life, but she kept silent even as she screamed within. The door was thin, and opening the scrap construct barely even disturbed the air around her. Although she was sure that she would give herself away, Serena crept from the closet along the floor. She had no idea what she was going to do, but she planted one knee in front of the other anyway. The flooring beneath her was raw, untreated, and the combination ensured that she felt every splinter and grain of dust beneath her palms along the way.

The pain of her fresh loss motivated her to keep moving until she reached the discarded fabric. The gun was claimed with hands so shaken that she could barely hoist the barrel upright. Even with the deadly weapon, Serena was unsure of what she was going to do. But the decision was taken from her miraculously when the pressure of the situation became too much to handle.

Even later, she had no idea how the firearm in her hands went off. Her wild shots were dead on as the man closest to her side of the room crumpled. She saw the spot on his shirt bloom into a grotesque bloody flower that soon claimed the bulk of the fabric, before fat droplets built a small puddle.

Father Time was slow in those seconds. Every tick of the clock was a single mote in the eye of a god. The other man seemed stunned as she aimed at him with no hesitation even as she saw him fumble for his weapon. Two more shots rang out, and Serena had killed for the second time in her short life.

When the horror of the crime scene was complete, Serena cried silent tears huddled on the floor as she memorized the last hours she had with her mother. No one came to check, and maybe that was for the best.

Serena lay on the floor for what remained of the night and mourned the loss of her sole parent. Her body seemed strangely disconnected from the carnage around her, even though she was personally responsible for the brunt of it. She knew it was strange that she felt no guilt for killing the men, but even as she looked at their bullet-riddled hides, she knew she had served justice.

When she stretched her swollen lids to see better, Serena was transfixed by the sight of her mother frozen stiff within death’s grip. Her mom’s eyes were wide, as if she had lived and died with the view of nightmares as the only witness with nothing to comfort. Yet there was only a neat hole between the brown orbs to mark her passing, even with the evident violence visited upon her flesh.

Serena’s last gift to her parent was to close the blankly open lids before she clasped the cold fingers around a stem of blossoms that she picked from a nearby tree. She wiped the snot from her own face and packed what little she could take with her. For one of her age, it was amazing what seemed important. The gun was carried in a wrapped bundle of fabric to be tossed into sea later. A picture of her family still whole and happy, a shirt with her mother’s scent still fresh on the fabric, an apple, and her parents’ wedding bands. Nothing else seemed worth having or fighting to keep.

At that very moment, when her mother’s bands left the stiffened thumb and ring finger, Serena knew she was alone and that no one would ever kiss her or tuck into bed at night. She had no one that she could trust, and she somehow knew that she was next if the person that ordered her mother’s death caught wind to her presence.

None of the poorer caste would be able to offer her aid, as she was considered dirty and unclean due to the stigma of her skin color. The wealthy would see her as less than a dog or horse. She had seen enough of that during her travels.

The only items she had of value were kept close on her person at all times. The meager things were protectively wrapped within a blanket that she kept over one shoulder as she wandered the miserable village directionless. Serena roamed the streets during the day, and at night she used dry docked fishing boats to sleep beneath and protect her small frame from the elements.

She made her way into Fukouka, Japan as a stowaway on a cargo ship, and after she arrived, she begged for scraps on the street. If the offerings were poor that day, she also made a nimble-fingered pickpocket. She stole whatever she could, fruit from a market stall, or clothes from backyards strung on lines as her own clothes became too worn for her to use as suitable covering.

It wasn’t until she picked the wrong pocket that her career as a sneak thief ended.

Serena bumped into a robed man on the street and quickly relieved him of his money, but left his pouch around his waist. He stopped for a moment, and she apologized in her best version of butchered Japanese when he snatched her by the front of her most recently acquired shirt.

“What do you think you are doing?” he asked her in faintly accented English, just a slight drag over the vowels a hint that this was not the man’s first or second language.

“Nothing. I didn’t mean to bump into you.” There was a rush of adrenaline that accompanied her reply. She knew she was in trouble, even the shop owners didn’t speak to her. When she was actually capable of making a purchase, she normally just took what she needed and left an estimate in yen on the counter.

“No, I mean with my money.” He was the man who changed her life.

The Master ran a school on mount Kizan, specializing in jujitsu and home to Rōnin warriors. The Rōnin were considered in the Japanese culture to be a samurai without a master, and her Master gave them a home and a place to help train his hand-picked students. He took a clever kid off the street and made her into a honed weapon. The first months were hard, and she cried enough tears to fill a well, but after he was done with her, she was a force to be reckoned with. The one thing Master didn’t tolerate was complaining.

If she whined at any task she was given, he made her do it over and over again until she could perform the action in her sleep with handfuls of blisters to boot. But she wasn’t abused for simple amusement. No, every cruelty had purpose. The pain made every inch of her strong and capable, not to mention she had calluses that were earned on inches of her flesh that even the sun barely saw.

Master would have her cook his rice each morning, and when she least expected it, he would smack her with a stick without rhyme or reason. It took Jaden almost three years to be able to make breakfast without getting hit once before the bowl was served.

The pain made her able to become what she was today, and without the long years under his tutelage, she would have never been able to accomplish the things she had. She would have been unable to save Kris and stop men like the ones that took her.

The first paid assassination was a fluke. She was wandering the streets after a head-banging, body-slamming night at a rave in Germany when she saw two men snatch a kicking and screaming girl off the street. They dragged her toward a van parked in the alley, and Jaden refused to do nothing about it. When she attacked, it was with the intent of stopping them, but they were determined to kill her and showed no hesitance.

The art of jujitsu was crafted to kill even when she was outmatched in height, weight, and weaponry. Jaden murdered both men and freed the shaken woman. Her extremely grateful father, Alderich Goethe, was more than wealthy from the years as a chocolatier, and this was not the first time that people attempted to kidnap his eldest child or her siblings. Her father paid her handsomely. At first, she was a security guard on the payroll. Then she moved her way up to the head of security detail within her first six months.

But then she felt the wanderlust, and the Goethe family as a whole was reluctant to let her leave. Although, when Alderich realized she was adamant and there was no way to stop her, he ensured she was halfway to rich upon exit, and he made referrals occasionally.

From there she was in business, and she had banked more money than she knew what to do with. Now most of it was stashed under various identities in banks across the world. She never really had the need to touch most of the funds, but it was nice to have.

The only thing that saved Kris was the fact that a grieving family made enough complaints to become a problem for local authorities. The data Jaden had unearthed seemed to plead with her to visit death on the man that took their daughter. A simple trip to Guyana gave her what she needed to know. The parents knew of him. He was a wealthy foreigner that stayed on their island during certain times of the year, and she was able to go from there.

But there was nothing paid for the kill. It was an unrequested pro bono job she performed just to keep a monster off of the street.

The edition Kris got was highly edited, and she didn’t force the most vulgar details down her throat.

“Really, your name is Serena?” Kris seemed stupefied.

“No. I am Jaden now. But at one point I was Serena.” She looked at Kris and then turned her eyes back to the lonely stretch of highway.

The rest of the ride was silent. Not even the radio could blunt the memories that Jaden unearthed after leaving them buried deep for so long.

Breathless

Jonah saw quickly that Jaden was leaving town when she hopped onto a small Cessna with a pack and little else. He had to know what she was up to, and he quickly located the flight information when she took off with a quick hack into the registered logs. He was fairly sure it was accurate, and he was able to drive the distance. It would take five hours or so, but the view he was given at dawn was worth every bit of missed sleep.

When he saw a Jeep pull up and the driver leave the campgrounds in another car, he knew that this was Jaden’s intended ticket out of Dodge. He planted the bug in the Jeep that was dropped off at the visitor’s center first. Then he settled in for a long wait, but his prize was the ability to watch her climb back down the cliff with grace and dexterity. The girl with her was tired. It was apparent even from the distance he was away from them. But they both made it to ground level where they dropped their packs and stretched a bit before reshouldering the heavy bags. He watched them run back toward the visitor’s center, and he left to make the drive back.

But Jonah was stupefied as he listened to Jaden recite her history without inflection or emotion. No wonder he couldn’t find a detailed report on her past. She was presumed dead, just like her mother, based on eyewitness accounts. But her story made sense. Now he could clearly see how she ended up as Jaden.

How she had become a legend among legends.

He had known that she was something special before, but it was little wonder that she had become the woman that she had. He even knew who killed her mother and father. The man, known simply as Doragon, ordered her mother’s assassination and was actually disposed of by another team five years before. Coincidentally, the man was killed just before the Jourdain job. It was ironic that they had killed off the very men plaguing them and neither of them knew the other at the time.