Sometimes I check up on her, but it's always from a distance.
Ashton's words rang through my ears like sirens. Funny how just weeks ago I was certain I was going to end Ashton Naifeh's life and now I was risking my own to save it. The world worked in mysterious ways. I'd been in Paris not seven full days before I ended up with a dead body and a substantial bounty on my head. There were always people out there who wanted me dead, but I never thought anyone was stupid enough to actually try and kill me.
Clearly, Kavyat was desperate enough to pay a daredevil to come after me. God only knows if there's another assassin already after Ashton. Surely Kavyat prepares for the worst and had backups in line. He wouldn't want one of us surviving long enough to earn the other. Maybe I was already too late.
I couldn't bear the thought of it. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life and done a lot of wrongs I can't make right, but if Ashton died on my that would be my biggest regret. I loved him more than I'd like to admit.
All I could think about was the bullet most likely between his eyes.
Maybe we deserved it after all the pain and suffering we have caused. I know we deserved it but that didn't make accepting it any easier.
And that's how I found myself on the streets of The Hague, Netherlands. I could smell the water in the air as the sun shone down on the winter day. Luckily there was no snow because I couldn't stand the thought of the white glare intensifying the already too bright sun. It bothered me when it was so vibrant in the winter; it just felt odd.
If you thought it was easy for me to find Ashton then you thought damn wrong. When I booked my flight to the Netherlands, I didn't particularly care if Ashton was really here or not. At that moment, my number one priority was to leave Paris before the dead body in my room was discovered. Though upon landing, it took hours of hacking and research to find the dashing Palestinian. I had to scan every alias used on flights out of Jiddah in the past week, cross refinancing them with a list of passports entering France or the Netherlands. From there I had to figure out which of those four hundred people never signed into a hotel either the same name nor was already a citizen of said country. When I went to check a suspicious Jacs Harmon, I found video feed of the back of Ashton's raven-colored head and chiselled back straining against a T-shirt on airport security footage.
Part of me thought it was odd that no one had identified Ashton's face and lived. Then I remembered I knew how he thought and what was important to him, and that was more of a tool than anything. That tool might even be what saved his Ashton Naifeh's life in the end.
All-day I had been watching for Ashton down the road from his hotel. Deep down I was starting to get nervous. The man I love could be dead in an alleyway or having his fingernails ripped out one by one as I walked through the park-like an idiot. Every second made my stomach drop further, my heart aching with each thud.
And then I saw him. After seeing Ashton leave his towel at seven on the dot this morning on security cameras, he was finally returning over twelve hours later. He wasn't the only one there, though. Thirty feet back walked a woman in joggers clothes, her dark skin tone and black clothing doing a perfect job of keeping her in the shadows.
I stayed leaning against a tree a hundred yards back in the midnight park, watching from a distance. My hand reached back and pulled a gun from my waistband, feeling the weighted metal in my palm. I was down a silencer; I didn't have time to bring one across the border. This gun had been with me since Monaco but sadly, the silencer got lost in translation. Aka the hotel room in Paris that I had to leave in a hurry. I was still kicking myself for abandoning it.
When they both passed me, I stood from where I leaned against the rough bark and stepped after them in the soft grass, my sneakers padding almost silently as I shifted to the damp grey sidewalk. If I shot her it would all be over; there would be cops and someone would see me run away from the scene of the crime. I had to get in close without her noticing, and take her down that way. If I died for Naifeh my former associates would be rolling in their fucking graves.
