The Assassin and the Soldier Read online

  “Hmmm,” she turned her head again, unconcerned. “I suppose we’ll see about that when the time comes.”

  He stalked towards her, unable to contain himself any longer as he grabbed her by the shoulders and whirled her around. She stared up at him, her lips parting slightly open. Despite her glib words, her expression was as sulky as a child’s, which he supposed was why she tried to hide it.

  “Let’s get one thing straight around here,” he started, his tone steely but level. “I’m the one training you. That means I call the shots. For the next three weeks, you’re on my time, not the other way around. You’ll train when I say you train. Now, can you comprehend that, or should I send you a pamphlet?”

  She cocked a long, sculpted eyebrow at him ironically, as if amused at being reprimanded. “Perhaps you’d like another trip across the floor?” she threatened him drolly; her lips very close to curling once more into that irritating smirk of hers.

  He took hold of her upper arm, her skin perplexingly smooth and soft for what she was capable of, and shifted her closer towards him. “And perhaps you’d like one over my knee?” he growled.

  She emitted a small puff of breath from between her parted lips, the start of the smirk vanishing as her expression contorted into confusion. To be honest, Callan wasn’t sure himself what possessed him to say such a thing. She was just so… so bratty and condescending and slick. It might do her some good to be taken down a notch the old-fashioned way; forget electric rods or tracking bands or work prisons.

  For several moments, Kaelia let herself be held in place against his chest, as if stupefied into stillness. Then all at once she seemed to remember herself and yanked back, though Callan held her fast.

  “I’d like to see you try,” she hissed at him anyway, jerking again.

  This time, Callan promptly released her, caught off guard she stumbled backwards, her eyes flashing lividly. Callan simply shrugged. “I told you, you’re undisciplined. You might have the talent, but you need to get your attitude in check. Running around throwing tantrums over sunscreen lotion, pulling door knobs out of their sockets, attacking anyone who looks at you wrong. Do you really think that’s any way to behave?”

  “I’ll behave any way I want,” she insisted without hesitation, as if suggesting otherwise was something obscene. “And you’re just mad because you can’t give me orders.”

  “Take today to rest,” Callan allotted her, turning abruptly and sweeping his way towards the dismembered door. He eased it slightly open, and then looked back at her. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. At six sharp. And if you pull anything then like you did today, you’d better be prepared to take the consequences.”

  Her entire expression was a snarl, her eyes filled with disbelief. Well, of course she didn’t believe him. He had just let her crumple him to the floor, and now he was threatening to spank her. Of course, she was too arrogant to remember how she had tried to help Emmanuel, and he had held her back, or even how he stopped her right before she was about to slam his face into the floor.

  Sure, Callan had tricked her, in a way, letting her even get that far, or yesterday, when he only gave about half of himself during their sparring match, unwilling to call too much attention to himself in a public area. But Callan had wanted to see what he was up against—what the others were up against. Or perhaps he didn’t want her knowing what she was up against. Either way, she had impressed him well enough with her bokken in the gym yesterday, but then to bring him down with her bare hands as easily as if she were taking out the trash today. She was unreal. She couldn’t be real.

  But Callan, of all people, knew she could be.

  Kaelia

  Kaelia sat on her balcony, spooning the flesh of an avocado into her mouth, enjoying the way her freshly clipped hair grazed lightly against the small of her back when a breeze blew. After Callan had finally gotten the good sense to leave this morning, she’d rescheduled her hair appointment for that afternoon, and spent the day watching television, napping on and off, and taking a long bath in the Jacuzzi tub. Train, my ass, she thought. What sort of idiot would waste their time training when they had luxuries such as these?

  She’d also been spying on some of the other competitors with their trainers out in the yard and on the beach from her balcony on and off all day as well. The trainers had their contestants doing everything from sprints across the sand to balancing on one foot to timing the length they could hold their breath underwater. Kid stuff, Kaelia thought. She’d been doing that sort of stuff since she was five years old.

  Evening was falling now, and with it were clouds rolling in from the distance, though the air remained as tepid and thick as cream of tomato bisque. Most of the competitors would be down in the banquet hall by now, gorging themselves on the buffet-style feast. But Kaelia wasn’t in the mood to socialize, and had ordered fresh fruit to be brought up to her room. What would be the point in making friends here anyway? It’s not like she’d be able to keep any of them.

  A noise caught her attention, a shriek from somewhere across the palm tree and flowered shrubbery dotted yard. She quickly turned towards the noise, only to see her alarm had been for naught. It was contestant No. 69, Lux Beacon, with his trainer Maddie Drew.

  He was chasing her, but it was playful, Maddie’s shrieks laced with shrill laughter, and Lux’s smile taking up his whole face. Kaelia watched, transfixed, as Maddie lured Lux across the pathways of the resort, scrambling around patio furniture and leaping over lounge chairs, her legs as sleek as a gazelle’s. Lux followed in hot pursuit until they came to the pool, where Maddie performed a graceful dive off the edge, her peals of giggles replaced by a smooth splash. Lux dove in after her without hesitation, and when they both emerged from the glittering water, he’d already caught her around the waist. Kaelia watched as trainee pulled trainer in for a long, deep kiss.

  Kaelia felt something in her chest tighten. Already? That had been fast. The pair of them had only met a little over twenty-four hours ago. For the first time, Kaelia realized Lux was attractive – very attractive, though he wasn’t really her type. Too tall, too flashy, too full of himself. Still, it had been oblivious of her not to have seen it before. It was no wonder now why the audience had cheered in such a lively way when he’d been introduced, and Maddie Drew had jumped into bed with him so fast. Or, at least, into the pool.

  She wondered what it would be like to be kissed like that. Like she was a long, cool drink of water to someone dying of thirst. She had been kissed before, of course, by Pierson, nearly every single day for over a year, but never quite like that. And then he had betrayed her, sold her out to save his own skin, and Kaelia had spent the following three years in Krakian wondering if their whole relationship had been a joke to him.

  Pierson had used her; that much was obvious. She knew he was using her all along, and she let him, because she needed him, too, in a way. His connections, his street smarts – but it had been more than that. There came a point when she became attached to him, when she liked him more than any of the other boys her own age, maybe even loved him. Their relationship had been platonic at first, almost paternal, she had been so young, and he had other girls – many, many other girls. But as Kaelia bloomed and matured, he dropped the others for her, and even promised to marry her. Kaelia had been happiest during that time; a fleeting, ignorant, short-lived happiness that she couldn’t be stupid enough to ever let herself feel again.

  Kaelia shook those memories off her like a wet dog coming in from the rain. She couldn’t let herself think about all of that anymore. She’d done enough thinking in Krakian. Pierson had betrayed her, but he’d saved her first – took her in when no one else would, and trained her in the art of assassination. And now, it was over. Done.

  She didn’t dare let her mind wander to Callan Merone, as it had been trying to do since he had left her alone in her room that morning. It was apparent the man had as little interest in her as he did a wet washrag, though it had been fun knocking him to t
he ground, and watching the look of surprise on his face when she tore the door handle off.

  It was stupid, she knew, she shouldn’t have flaunted. It was risky, but Callan was freakishly strong, she had needed to use more of herself to get the better of him. Was she really that weakened after three years in Krakian? Maybe she really could use some training, or maybe she just needed more rest. After all, she had still beat Callan, even if she had to pull out all the stops to do it, which she knew wasn’t very smart.

  Luckily, what Callan made up for in his own special sort of stoic attractiveness and strengths, he seemed to utterly lack in wits or critical thinking skills. Most of the public knew absolutely nothing of the DNA and Genetics Redesigning Lab that came under fire over a decade ago for splicing the genes of human embryos with those of some of the most dangerous predators on the planet. The lab had been shut down and the practice outlawed when Kaelia was only eight years old, and those left alive who knew about it were most likely paid to keep their mouths shut. Though Kaelia figured they were probably all dead.

  Not even Pierson ever figured out the truth about her. That she was grown in a petri dish in a lab as an embryo, and eventually implanted into a surrogate Kaelia would never know who would birth her. And then, from a time before she could even walk, she’d been trained to be a lethal human killing machine, and trained well. Callan would have had to possess some highly specialized investigative skills to even know about the DNA and Genetics Redesigning Lab, let alone figure out she was a product of it.

  Chapter 6

  Callan

  Callan stood in the hall outside her suite, checking his watch more times in the span of a few minutes than he considered dignified. A maintenance person had repaired the door handle yesterday, and for a half a second he wondered if it had ever been damaged at all. Maybe the idiocy of this competition was making him crazy. If only that were truly the case.

  5:58, 5:59, 6:00 a.m. That was it. That was all she was getting. Especially since he had been up since four himself, still adjusting to the different time zone, though he’d been here a week already, arriving three days earlier than the contestants. As he slid his key card in the slot in the door, he practiced some visualizing. He imagined his charge already awake in her room, fed and dressed, perhaps even doing some warm-ups on the floor. He nudged open the door, his hopes deflating.

  She was in the bed again, all crisscrossed limbs and tangled sheets, her burnt umber hair splayed across her pillows like wet seaweed clinging to rocks. Oh, no. He wasn’t about to have a repeat performance from yesterday. He didn’t care how skilled she thought she was – a showrunner had called him out last night during dinner, wanting to know why he and Kaelia never made an appearance for training. He had lied and said she wasn’t feeling well, smiled and gritted his teeth through all the dumb jokes and pleasantries, and it had all been over quickly enough. But he wasn’t about to do it again tonight.

  “Get up!” Callan boomed, striding to the foot of her bed and staring down at her. Her skin, for once, looked nearly tan against the stark white of the sheets, and if Callan didn’t know any better, he’d say she put some color on. He glanced at the door to the balcony, still wide open, fanning himself against the humidity. Why did she keep it so hot in here? Either way, she must have been out there during the day yesterday, lounging about while her fellow contestants were put through the wringer. It irritated him, for some reason. He didn’t have a balcony, or a Jacuzzi tub either.

  When she still didn’t move, Callan cleared his throat. “No. 72!” he barked. “Up!” She was perfectly still, though if she was sleeping through his wake-up call or purposely ignoring him, he couldn’t tell. He groaned to himself. Was he actually going to have to drag her out of bed, as he threatened to do yesterday? It made Callan’s breath quicken to anticipate touching her, feeling all that smooth, creamy skin under his hands. “I said, up!” he repeated. “It’s morning.”

  He reached for the body part that was closest to him, her slenderly arched foot, the heel plump and pink, and her nails freshly manicured and gleaming with clear polish. He grabbed it around the middle and shook vigorously for just a second before she jerked it back, the foot burrowing under the sheets like a small animal dashing to safety inside the earth.

  “It’s not morning,” she countered, her voice muffled against the pillow.

  Good. She was actually conscious. Callan decided to try the cheerful approach, the way his foster mom did when he was a melancholy teenager. “Come on!” he nearly sang. “It’s a beautiful morning. Let’s get out there and hit the bricks while it’s not too hot.”

  “Hit the bricks?” she repeated, and Callan was baffled that even while half-asleep she would mock him. “Did you actually just say hit the bricks?”

  Okay, so it was a stupid thing to say. Excuse him for trying to make an attempt at being nice. Apparently, it wasn’t working, so forget it. “That’s enough, No. 72!” he bellowed much more sternly. “I want you out of this bed and ready to go, stat!”

  “My name’s Kaelia,” she murmured sleepily, curling tighter into herself, pulling the sheet more closely around her body. “Not No. 72. Now go away. I was up late last night, and I’m tired.”

  “That’s not my problem,” Callan grunted, lacking anything better to say.

  “Apparently, it is,” Kaelia pointed out. Stillness fell over the room. Was she really not going to get up? This was ridiculous. Her disrespect was so outrageous; Callan barely knew how to react. “You’re still standing there, aren’t you?” she said, after at least a minute of silence had passed between them.

  “All right,” he threatened, releasing a long breath. It was time to get firm with her. “You’ve left me no choice. If you want to act like a smart-mouthed little brat, I’ll treat you like one.”

  He walked along the side of the bed and took hold of the sheet, intending to rip it off her. But she clung to it fast, and a game of tug-of-war ensued. It was sort of cute – she really thought she was stronger than him. Callan wondered how she would react when she found out that she wasn’t.

  As the sheet twisted and stretched taut between them, Kaelia rolled back and forth on the bed, trying to maintain the upper hand, her teeth gritted. At this rate, Callan could pull her right out of the bed and onto the floor, but suddenly, Kaelia gave one good yank, and there was a terrible tearing sound. The sheet ripped in half, each of them left with a piece, and Kaelia didn’t waste any time in curling right back up with what she was left with.

  “Thanks,” she told him facetiously. “It was hot in here anyway.”

  Her bare legs gleamed like ivory, and as Callan’s eyes involuntarily traveled up them, they stopped short to come across her ass, clad only in a pair of white cotton panties. He almost had the urge to throw his half of the sheet back over her, but that would be like letting her win. No, if Kaelia didn’t care if he saw her in her underwear, he wasn’t going to either. Still, he had to swallow hard as he felt his body flush, the bulge in his pants stirring slightly.

  “Kaelia.” He said her name for the first time, and it nearly exploded out of him, leaving the room thick with the fall-out. “Do you remember what I told you yesterday?”

  “Mmm…” she mused, her eyes shut serenely against the daylight, though her lips curled into a mischievous smirk. “Something about blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah, as well as I’m a self-righteous, presumptuous, holier-than-thou prick, even though I get beat up by little girls half my size.”

  Her eyes flew open like curtains on a pull-string when he dragged her body towards him across the bed by the leg. The look of surprised horror on her face was probably more gratifying than it should have been, and it took her several moments to get her senses together enough to resist him. Digging her elbows into the mattress, she tried to twist her leg free, but when that didn’t work, she promptly moved to kick him with her free foot instead. Callan flipped her over onto her belly before she could succeed.

  “What the…” she spluttered,
as Callan sat firmly on the edge of the bed and swiftly yanked the squirming, snarling woman feet first across his lap. “What are you doing!”

  Her head swung down towards the floor as he got her in position, though she promptly arched her spine to lift herself back up. Callan pushed her down again, much to her clear disenchantment.

  “You’ve been a bad girl,” he told her, in nearly the same facetious tone she used on him. “It’s time for your spanking.”

  “Wha...” she started again, clearly baffled. “Are you crazy? No, it’s not!”

  She bucked and kicked across his lap, becoming more and more panicked when she didn’t get the desired effect of freeing herself. Callan watched her performance in amusement for several long moments, wondering just how long it was going to take her to figure out she wasn’t getting away from him.

  In the meantime, he found himself stirring with arousal to witness the spectacle before him. Kaelia’s small, round bottom cheeks jiggled and bounced as she thrashed, and the loosely fitting t-shirt she had worn to bed fell forward as he held her down, revealing the gentle curve of the small of her back as well as her slim midriff and waist. It was hard to believe such a teeny-tiny girl had such power inside her and for a moment, Callan worried about her. He wanted her to win the competition as much as she did. But at what cost?

  “Hold still,” Callan finally ordered her, after he got tired of her futile acrobatics. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re not going anywhere.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she exclaimed, twisting around, trying her best to face him, though she only managed to turn her head at a slight angle.

  “I told you yesterday I’m the one in charge around here,” he gave her the courtesy of repeating himself. “But it seems like you still don’t believe me, so I guess I’m going to have to spank you to prove it.”