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It kept her memory alive.
While making me grieve her death.
Every fucking night.
A fitting punishment, I knew.
I'd been the reason she'd been killed, had been considered collateral damage.
I deserved that fresh pain every night.
In the end, it had taken six years.
Six fucking years.
And not a single part about finding him had been from all that work I had put into it, all the feelers I had put out, all the people I had needed to owe favors to, all the times I could have gotten caught doing something I knew I wasn't supposed to do.
One day, a bright, stark-white winter day in Russia - four fresh inches of snow on the ground covering the six that had already been there from the last storm.
I was there on a job trying to figure out why, among the stirrings of civil war in Syria, we were hearing chatter about Russia's willingness to get involved should a war break out. It was of no surprise to anyone in the intelligence community that they would support a sham election made possible only after changing parts of their constitution to allow for it.
But, hey, potential war was potential war. And there was one thing the US - historically - wanted to know all about, it was war. And how they could spin it so that the best political ties could be knotted before strings started to come loose.
There I was in this giant ass fur-lined jacket, a hat on my head, neither of which were doing much to ward off the chill. Though the flask I was lifting to my lips every few minutes was putting up a valiant battle to warm me.
I was just supposed to be meeting with someone who had ties to Bashar in a very convoluted, distant way that I figured was going to be a giant waste of time, and not worth risking frostbite over. But orders were orders. And toes were overrated.
I was just standing there waiting.
And someone passing by in a car caught my eye.
I didn't even register anything at first, just the kick to the gut sensation that had me taking a second, longer look.
His hair was longer, his nose sloped a little, broken a time or two since I'd last seen him, and there was a neat, trimmed beard used to cover his somewhat weak jaw, his soft chin.
But it was him.
In the backseat of a car with some woman in a gaudy leopard-print coat and matching hat.
There'd been no time to take a picture, to follow the car.
But I noted the changes in his appearance, memorized the plate number to look into later.
Then spent three useless hours with a paranoid, self-important middle-aged man who had clearly never been close enough to Bashar to have any actual, workable intel.
By the time I made it back to my hotel, clued in Allen, and checked all my appendages for frostbite, it was too late to start looking around, to ask questions.
I sat down off the side of the bed, reached for my wallet on the nightstand, pulled out a picture that was needing to be replaced, getting creases from being moved in and out of the pocket in my wallet so many times.
Six years.
And nothing had dulled the grief, the guilt, the anger at myself.
But at least now, for the first time, I was getting close to making him pay.
Maybe then I could put it behind me.
Maybe I could find a way to move on.
Without revenge to fuel me, I wasn't sure what would. What could.
I figured I would find out soon enough.
Because there was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to bring the bastard down.
It was another four days, my body plagued with sweats because I had a plane to catch out in another two, and had still not tracked him down.
He was going by Michael - a businessman from California. He'd been seen around with Natasha, the wife of a prominent businessman.
The woman in the leopard print.
Pretty.
Sophisticated.
Likely bored to death of her aging, ailing husband twenty-one years her senior.
It was ironic, I thought, that I would finally find him when he was running his own Romeo game on someone.
I wondered if he managed to keep it wholly professional, or if he fell for the sadness behind the woman's eyes, found something fulfilling in curing her of her loneliness, if he told her stories, if he tried to memorize the feel of her.
Or if she was just a job.
Either way, it didn't really matter.
Unlike him, though, I would leave her out of the equation.
When I finally tracked them down to a little cottage they used to screw around, I sat there waiting for her to leave, to go back to her husband, to get all dressed up and hit some charity art event like she didn't still have 'Michael's' touch on her skin.
