Jackie (286)

The way to a man’s heart was through his chest plate- preferably with something really pointy.

The ice pick had done its job, and Jackie’s arm was crimson with the remains of the day’s work.

This was the last time she’d be able to show here face in Sri Lanka.

Next, she was off to Antwerp to receive her new orders. The rabbi slipped them to her across a quiet café table during high tea.

A day later, she was dressed in leather, pretending to be charmed by her target in a darkened Goth club.

She didn’t have to try to hard to get him back to her place. They had dirty, demeaning sex all night and he left the next morning without ever asking her name.

Jackie got the fresh sample of his DNA back to the lab as quickly as she could. She didn’t know why they needed it, she didn’t ask. Her job was to act without asking. Her job was to kill without questioning.

She was good at her job.

4 years later she would meet a man, an average joe- not part of the business, not part of her world at all. She’d fall madly in love with him. They’d have a child. She’d leave the business and move far away from here.

Five years after that, she’d be the victim of a random act of street violence- an act that seemed a lot less random to her as she lay in her hospital bad, realizing that maybe, all those years ago, she should have asked, questioned…wondered.

Her child, a boy, would cry at her funeral, and notice a man at the cemetery that he didn’t know.

A man who hadn’t been outside his home for ten years.