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“You don’t have to do this,” Tyria says, but she knows her words fall on deaf ears as a knife whizzes past her ear, taking a chunk of hair as it implants itself into the wall behind her.
“Oh, but I do,” Falynn says, reaching to her thigh, grabbing another throwing knife from her holster. “You betrayed the Table. You knew the price you would have to pay.”
“The Table killed my fathers!” Tyria yells. She lines her shot, aiming for Falynn’s hand. She can’t kill her, even now, but she can incapacitate. She pulls the trigger but Falynn’s too quick, her hand shooting up the sleeve, the bullet bouncing off the kevlar harmlessly, hitting the floor of the museum with a soft clink.
“And then you killed one of mine,” Falynn says, this knife flying towards Tyria’s leg. She pivots a second too late, the blade piercing her thigh, so close to her femoral artery it was almost kissing it. Falynn steps closer, looming over her. “I bet you didn’t even think of that, did you?”
Falynn, “The Heiress,” she was called to everyone who didn’t know her as intimately as Tyria did, who had heard the story around a bar rather than in a whisper while tangled in the sheets. An orphan who had wandered into the Cairo Continental and was consequently raised by the High Table, she was the princess of assassins, as evidenced by the diamonds inlaid on the hilts of her throwing knives. The knife that she plucks from Tyria’s thigh, grazing it under her chin before replacing the knife with her mouth, covering Tyria’s throat in kisses.Tyria welcomes it, relishing in the touch that she’s missed so much. Her breath shudders, but from the pleasure of the kisses or the pain blooming in her thigh, she can’t be sure. “Tyria Sarkin thinks of no one but herself, isn’t that right?” Falynn says, pulling away with a satisfied grin that doesn’t meet her eyes.
“You know that’s not true,” Tyria says, placing a hand on Falynn’s wrist. “You had never mentioned Carlon, so I thought he wasn’t important to you.”
Falynn snatches her wrist away. “They’re all important,” she says shortly. “Not just to me. You should’ve thought before you refused one of their assignments.”
Tyria scoffs. “They gave me the name of a little girl,” she says. “I couldn’t do it.” She struggles to her feet, her face a hard mask, not giving Falynn the satisfaction of watching her wince.
“Then you knew the price you had to pay,” Falynn says simply. “You know how this life works.”
“But why my parents?” Tyria asks, her hands finding Falynn’s, grasping them like a lifeline. There was a time where Falynn’s touch was all she craved, the only thing that brought her joy. Now, she can’t deny the underlying burn that comes with touching the other woman, the rift between them just ever too wide. “They left this life, with full permission from the High Table. They had no quarrel with the Table, but the Table took them anyway.” She runs her hands over Falynn’s repeatedly, the hands that had once caressed her so softly now always one moment away from running a perfectly polished blade across Tyria’s throat. “Why wasn’t I taken instead?”
“That would’ve been a mercy,” Falynn says, a hint of regret in her voice. “My parents wanted to break you, to make sure you would come crawling back to them for a sense of normalcy.” She sighs. “They have long memories, but they wanted you to forget in a blink of an eye it was them who tore your life apart.”
“Excummunicado would’ve been better than this.” She had thought that’s what her sentence would’ve been, on the run until she couldn’t take it anymore and let a hunter cut her down.
Falynn shakes her head. “You’re too good for that. Almost inhuman the way you can sense people’s next moves. They want you to fight tooth and nail because they want you back. That’s why they sent me.”
Tyria almost lets herself smile, the corner of her mouth twitching ever so slightly. “You can’t do it,” she says. “They know you can’t do it. They want us to play cat and mouse until you manage to get me to go back to them.”
“Smart, beautiful, and deadly,” Falynn says, the sadness in her voice impossible to ignore. “That’s my girl.” She drops Tyria’s hands and plucks the knives stuck in the wall. “Go,” she says. “I’ll tell them you weren’t here, that I was met with one of your allies.”
“Say it was Tainer, he’s the one who would’ve let you go. Loran and Phanan would’ve gutted you before you knew who stood before you.”
Falynn’s eyes widen, but she swallows back whatever she was going to say and nods instead. “I fought Tainer then,” she says. She squeezes her eyes shut and tightens her grip on the knife she holds. Before Tyria can react, Falynn slices the knife across her own cheek. She holsters the knife and in another quick motion, she snaps her first two fingers on her right hand back to hard Tyria hears the bones snap.
“I couldn’t have met one of your allies without a fight,” she says, panting hard. “And you couldn’t land a hit on me.”
Tyria runs her hand over her holstered gun, resisting the urge to hold Falynn’s broken hand or wipe the blood from her cut cheek. “It wasn’t for lack of trying,” she says. “You’re too good.”
Falynn cracks a smile. “Don’t I know it.” She shoves Tyria with her non-broken hand. “Now go before I change my mind and drag you to the Table by your pretty blonde head.”
Tyria nods. Before she can stop herself, she leans in and presses a ghost of a kiss to Falynn’s lips. “I’ll be seeing you,” she says. “Though perhaps not so close to home this time.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
Tyria leaves the museum hall, slight limp in her step that she’ll have Phanan tend to later. As she stands in the entryway, she turns and takes one last glimpse of Falynn, haloed by the sun streaming in through the skylight. The light catches the hilt of a knife, the diamond winking at Tyria.
Tyria lets herself drink in Falynn’s visage for one moment longer before she slinks back into the shadows.