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People in his line of work didn’t retire. A few of the smarter ones made it out of the field and into management but you never saw too many middle-aged agents. Operatives would be there one day and then gone the next; no one brought it up except to whisper an operation code name or a city as the explanation for the absence. If an unidentified body were found hanging from of the Pont Neuf bridge or in a ruined building outside of Dakar or floating in the Bay of Bengal, they understood it was the cost of doing business. After all, everyone he knew was already dead and had the grave to prove it. The perverse irony was that when operatives who’d outlived their usefulness were eliminated it was referred to as ‘retirement’.
So, walking away from the job, from Section, wasn’t something that Michael ever gave any serious thought to. Nikita was the one who’d convinced him to dream about it, but he’d never really bought in. He was a survivor and survival usually translated into ruthless pragmatism. He’d made his grave and he’d lie in it when the time came. But then he found himself on a bridge trading his love for his son and a freedom he never felt he deserved. Nikita was the one who wanted to be free, not him, but she had willingly walked back into the machine that was Section so that he could watch Adam grow up. It didn’t seem possible and it certainly wasn’t fair.
In that first year he and Adam moved eight times. He refused to believe Section’s promise and found suspicious threats everywhere he looked. As he unloaded their belongings into their eleventh home in eighteen months he realized two things: Section didn’t have to waste resources hunting him down when he was running them into the ground anyway, and he wasn’t really free at all - in his mind he was still an operative. He’d never be able to relax or to let himself be known by anyone, even his own son. Every moment of every day from now on would be spent living a lie. And that’s when he stopped running.
Over the next few years, they moved a handful of times until Adam got old enough to complain about starting a new school or leaving his friends behind. Michael settled in. He found off-the-books work as a handyman for a small time builder and slowly gained the respect of his boss until he worked his way to project manager, and then eventually opened his own general contracting business. He never touched the secure bank account with the obscene balance Nikita had arranged for him. He was a quiet, thoughtful man that people trusted with their kitchen remodels or their backyard overhauls or their man cave plans. Men admired him for his skills and calm authority, women admired him because, well… women had always admired him. He socialized just enough to seem friendly, but never enough that anyone could claim that they really knew him. He never raised his voice, never got into a fight - he worked hard and played his part perfectly. To everyone he was just an honest man from some unpronounceable town in Quebec with sad eyes and an exotic-looking son. He waited in a state of suspended animation hoping that he could stretch out this fiction long enough to see Adam off to college, then they could come for him and do whatever they wanted.
As the years lengthened into a decade, he mellowed a fraction, but he always knew when their eyes were upon him. It was like a sudden sharp slash across his skin that had him scanning, strategizing, and calculating the odds before his pulse settled. The habits never died, never got rusty, they were always just there simmering under his surface. The sensation always passed without anything coming of it but he never dismissed the feeling: they were checking in, and one day it would be more than that. On a handful of occasions he saw them watching - some cutout or freelancer he didn’t recognize with substandard tradecraft eying him from across the grocery store or at a crowded little league game. He always cracked his disguise in those moments and allowed himself to be seen for what he truly was - Either come at me or move on - but no one took him up on his offer. Sometimes he wondered why Section, or any other outfit, would choose to be so transparent.
The one thing he never allowed himself to wonder about was her. He never pictured her in his mind or remembered the things they’d done or questioned if she were even still alive because behind all of that was a gaping blackness that would suck him down and never let him go. He’d been in love often, perhaps more than his fair share, but what he felt for her was something else entirely. It was compulsion, fascination, an unceasing persistence that eclipsed anything he’d ever experienced. She’d been the fly in his ointment, the anomaly he hadn’t anticipated, the lens that focused his splintered facets down into a single, vivified frame. So, he never dated blondes, never thought about how they didn’t sound or feel right in bed, and he never, ever said her name.
His life went on and he fought the impulse to believe that it didn’t deserve to. He watched Adam grow and thrive with a muted awe that was half parental pride and half disbelief that they’d made it this far. He continued building things and taking Adam camping and teaching him how to cook authentic French food. He went to hockey tourneys and coached bantam soccer and took his crew out for drinks after every successful job. And he cleaned his weapons and trained until he nearly passed out from exhaustion and set up a trust so that Adam would never want for anything.
The night that the storm blew in and the power went out was the first time he’d relaxed in ten years. Finally, he breathed as he threw off the skin he wore and went out into the snow to meet his fate. The only noise was the howling wind as snow obscured everything into two-dimensional brightness. He waited silently and let his body get accustomed to the cold; his fingers ached a little where he was beginning to show his age but it wouldn’t slow him down too much. He’d been training for this moment. The tree line was far enough away to be just a silhouette, cedars waving in the gusts - anyone using them as cover would have come closer to get a decent shot at him. He stood still until snow began lining his shoulders, his hair, and the toes of his work boots, but no one appeared. He didn’t feel hunted but he felt… something.
The domesticated persona he’d adopted said It’s just the storm - power goes out all the time, and he found himself walking to the side of the house and starting the generator out of habit rather than a belief in his inner voice. When he came back around to the front porch again, he sensed the change, like ozone in the air before a lightning strike.
“If you’re here to kill me,” he mumbled into the wind. “Even now, it won’t be easy.”
He turned back toward the trees and there she stood, dressed entirely in white, as if she’d simply risen up out of the snow drifts - a storm-borne phantom. His breath shivered out of him once unsteadily, random puffs drifting for a second before being whipped up into the swirling snow.
“I thought someone would come but I didn’t think they’d send their best.”
“I’m not here for that.” She raised her hands to show she was weaponless and came a step closer.
Michael widened his stance and curled his fists at his sides. She was the best he ever trained; he knew that she didn’t need a weapon to end him. He refused to ask the obvious question and instead waited for her to make her next move.
“I don’t have a lot of time.” She took another step forward. Still, he waited. “Surveillance blackouts are hard to manufacture these days, and even harder to justify.”
There was something off about her, and then it came to him: her hair was bound up the way Madeline had done it in her later years. There was a latent mistrust that he’d associated with that look. Had she done it on purpose? Was she trying to warn him?
“I know that you’re always watching,” he murmured. Madeline would’ve known his location every minute of the last ten years. If she were the new Madeline…
She took another step closer - she was now just six feet away. “No one’s watching now. Only Jason knows where I am.”
“Why?”
He could see her clearly for the first time even though the snow stung his eyes and gave everything an unnatural glow. Her hair was lighter than he remembered, almost white-blonde - maybe she was dying it again. And he couldn’t recall if her eyes had always been such a translucent shade of blue or whether that was an effect of the storm. She had lines around them now, lines that would’ve lit up when she laughed but he doubted that’s how she got them. And her lips were a pale pink as if frostbitten, circulation making a desperate effort to forestall hypothermia. He wanted to warm them with his own but satisfied himself with watching them as she spoke.
“I wanted to see you with my own eyes. No surveillance photos or drone footage or secondhand asset accounts.” He watched as her mouth turned down at the corners, and then her gloved hands clasped together wringing in uncharacteristic nervousness. “Ten years, Michael… ten years… I ran out of justifications to stay away. I had to come.”
He moved back to her eyes, assessing. She was a skilled player, just like him, and considering that she was still alive, she’d probably improved those skills since he’d last seen her. She could be playing him now and he wouldn’t know until she held him close and slid the blade between his ribs.
He was so tired of waiting, so tired of pretending. He was just… tired. He let himself remember their last time together, the only time he ever told her he loved her. He remembered watching her walk away, giving herself up for Adam, how it felt like he’d carved out his heart and left it on that bridge. His shoulders sagged, his fingers loosened. It was okay if it ended this way. Adam was a year away from college and Michael had made sure that he could take care of himself. It was fine if she took him - it would be fitting - and he’d have one last opportunity to tell her he loved her no matter what she did. He walked forward wrapping a hand around her waist and warming her against him and the chill. She gasped a little when his other hand reached up and pulled the pins from her hair and dropped them to the snow at their feet. There, that was better… her hair swirled around them in the wind as he leaned against her and waited for her to act.
“Nikita.” It came out sounding a little like a sob but it didn’t matter. It was everything to see her again. Everything.
She pressed into him hard, arms wrapping solidly around his back and fingers biting into his dark jacket. She leaned her cheek against his and he listened to the sound of her staccato breath with fascination. She just held him like that, fiercely, in the howling storm, and didn’t say a thing for a long time.
“How’s Adam?” she asked when she finally came back to herself. He pulled away to look her in the eye - he didn’t understand what she was doing. She read him (and he’d never understand how she distinguished one blank stare from another) and then cupped his jaw willing him to believe her through her fingertips. “I told you, I’m not here for that.”
“He’s… smart and strong. He has many friends and he’s a good person,” he rambled, still unable to parse her intentions. “He’s everything Elena hoped he’d become.”
“You must be proud.”
“I am,” he hesitated. “I’ll always be worried for him.”
Her stare hardened suddenly. “He’ll never have a reason to fear Section. Not so long as I have a say in it. And if a competitor should make the mistake of using him to illustrate a point, it’ll be a bloodbath. We take care of our own - everyone knows that, Michael.”
“But I’m out. The rules don’t apply.”
She gave him that dimpled grin that made him think of the feral street kid he tried to break so many years ago. “You’re not out if you never leave.” She tapped his forehead with a gloved finger. “You’re still in Section up here, still expecting me to do you in with some Byzantine plot or other. That’s so 90s, Michael.”
He allowed a half smile to curl his mouth, and then she leaned in and brushed the tip of her nose against his as she closed her eyes and sighed.
“I’ve missed you. So much,” she breathed.
He pulled her in then, gripping her neck too tightly, drawing on her lips with too much force. She gasped and he sunk into her, remembering every stolen moment, every forbidden night between them when he moved in her and felt like a king, and she looked at him as if he were perfect and it sheltered the only part of him worth saving. She saved him, like he was irreplaceable… she was the only person on the planet who really knew him and she still thought he was worth that.
She slipped from his lips with a smile and two pink smudges high on her cheeks and then she ran her leather-wrapped fingers through the hair at his temple.
“You’re going grey. It suits you.”
This isn’t what I wanted. I need you. I never wanted to do this without you. The words stuck in his throat and no amount of desperation would pry them free. He’d never been much of a talker. He stared as she stroked his hair and thought about all the times he’d prayed that she was alive somewhere. All of those moments when he simultaneously wished he were dead so he’d never have to figure out how to live without her in the world. He added this moment to those.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” In truth, he wasn’t sure he could watch her walk away again but his admission caused a look of horror to wash over her face.
“You have to,” she murmured dangerously. “I can’t leave yet.”
He didn’t say a word but his expression must have questioned her resolve.
“I will leave.”
“Nikita…”
“I didn’t come here to make things harder.”
“But you did.” He let his arms fall away and she backed up, glaring at him. “I’ve spent ten years pretending you don’t exist, trying to be someone else, sleeping with other women…” He watched as his words bruised her, just as he intended. “But what I’m ignoring never goes away. It never changes. The only part of me that’s still alive is you, and this” He gestured between them. “Is all I’ve had in a decade. I wasn’t built for this - I should’ve been the one who stayed, not you.”
Section had been the making of him. For better or worse, he was good at it. He didn’t know how to be free and, other than a few fleeting daydreams spent with her, he’d probably had to admit that he never wanted it. Ten years was a long time to fake the desire.
She fixed him with a look that probably made many at Center wet themselves. “You want to know why it had to be this way? Because you wouldn’t have made it another ten years.”
She let that sink in for a moment.
“You tried to give up Adam once and it broke you. How long would you have lasted if I’d taken Adam and disappeared? What would you have found to live for then? I did this to save you, not your son, although it’s nice that things worked out for him as well.”
As soon as she said the words, he knew it was true. She understood his limits and she’d sacrificed herself to them. While he’d been out in the real world shadowboxing with ghosts from his past, she’d been surviving the flesh-eating culture of life in Section on her own.
“So, don’t stand there and tell me that you can’t do this anymore. Don’t tell me about the women you’ve slept with as if it’s news to me. There hasn’t been a hard time invented yet that Michael Samuelle can’t handle, so you are going to go back to your violence- and espionage-free life and wait for me because I love you despite everything and there isn’t an organization on earth powerful enough to keep me from you. Am I being clear?”
He nodded, feeling as ashamed as the time his mother caught him stealing from the boulangerie. Except this time it was worse. Back then he’d known what his sin was, but this time she’d had to explain it to him, and he was much smarter now than he’d been as a thieving teenager in Marseilles.
“Good,” she shivered and then gripped herself trying to keep warm. Her terrible stare lasted a moment longer and then melted into a look of desperation. “I just can’t leave yet…”
“Pardonne-moi,” he said quickly before he caught himself. Now that he knew what the objective was, he could visualize a successful outcome to the mission. “I’ll wait. Even if you never come, I’ll love you. That’s a truth that will always be.”
“Michael…” He thought she’d been holding it together pretty well, but when she whispered his name into the wind he thought he might have pushed her too far.
Something made an unnatural chirping noise and her body stiffened instantly. Her weakness vanished under a mask of professional indifference so close to his own back in the day that he was momentarily taken aback at the sight of it.
“Time’s up,” she said without a hint of emotion.
“Are they coming?”
“No. I have ninety seconds to make it to a minimum safe distance before surveillance comes back online. I’m supposed to be in the area anyway for something else.”
He had no idea what the safe distance would be but assumed that she needed every second to make it. “Go,” he said quickly. “Just remember to come back.”
“Just remember to be here when I do,” she gave him one last sad grin, hair tangled and shot through with snow. “Or I’ll kick your ungrateful ass.”
He closed his eyes and smiled a smile that he only gave to her; he didn’t doubt her abilities at all. “My love,” he murmured, but when he opened his eyes she was gone as if she never existed. No retreating footprints through the drifts, nothing. And then he laughed out loud, the sound echoing across his yard to the trees and up into the storm clouds above.
So that’s what that feels like, he thought as he turned and headed back to the house.