#fafs1

Still, when she slipped up the alley by the temple, she paused. A quick glance to her watch told her she still had an hour before she needed to be at the warehouse. An entire hour to kill, and what better way to spend her time than giving some old religious bastard a heart attack? She couldn’t think of anything, so she silently slipped through the front door of the small temple, splashed some holy water at the tapestry of the gods, and made her way toward the small confessional booth. 

Celaena settled inside on the uncomfortable, hideously upholstered bench and waited quietly. After seventy-two seconds, and just as she was about to leave and give up on spooking a foolish old man, the divider on the priest’s side of the partition slid open with a heinous screech that sent a shiver sprinting down her spine. Dim, warm light peppered over her lap through the grated holes of the window. Never too careful, Celaena adjusted her hood to be sure that ever defining feature about her was swallowed up in darkness. 

“Anneith, goddess of wisdom, we beseech you. Hear our prayer,” she recited, eyes looking to the little holes that separated her from the priest on the other side of the booth. A low, humming voice accompanied hers as she spoke and Celaena found herself slightly annoyed that he didn’t sound as ancient as she had hoped. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been… gods. If I’m being honest, like sixteen years since my last confession. I… I don’t know where to start, actually.” 

Celaena tapped her finger against her watch and made a mental note of the time while she contemplated what she should confess, exactly. It wasn’t like she had a shortage of sins, but if she came on too strong straight out the gate, it would be hard to slip out of the church and into the night unnoticed. She sighed heavily and looked back up at the partition as she twisted her mouth in thought. The holes in this particular confessional were too small to see even a hint of the man that sat on the other side of the booth. Good. That meant he couldn’t see her, either. 

“I haven’t been in one of these things since I was a kid. My mother and father would take me to temple and I would fall asleep leaning against my father and wake up when he lifted me into his arms after it was all over. Church happens so early in the morning for young minds, you know. You should consider pushing back the time.” When the priest said nothing, she huffed an impatient sigh. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure the last time that I was in here it was for shoving my cousin down the four steps that lead up to our front door because he’d taken my ice cream. If you ask me, he should have been the one repenting. He stole -- and from a little girl no less. But I was the one in trouble.” She snorted, giving him a moment to say anything at all but the man was made of stone and said nothing. “I’m here now because I have a long, long list of sins, father. Longer than anyone else that has been in this crumbling building. Well, that isn’t true. There is one man, I think, that would top me. But I doubt he’s ever stepped a single toe into a church, much less tried to atone for the things he’s done.”

Celaena glanced down at her watch again, then settled back against the chair and dropped the bomb to end all bombs: “I’ve been killing for as long as I can remember. Well,” she shrugged to herself, “since I was eight.”

“Killing?” The priest finally asked, a trace amount of surprise laced in his tone. 

“Animals. People. Animals first, because that’s how they train you. The people come second once your technique isn’t so shoddy. And if I say so myself, and I do, my technique has been flawless for the last ten years. There’s a learning curve, but, well, that isn’t why I’m here. I’m not here to brag about my perfect skill or about the secrets that I’ve heard whispered in the dark. I bet you’ve heard your fair share of secrets, haven’t you, father?” Celaena glanced down one more time, already working the door open slow enough that it wouldn’t make any noise. The man didn’t say anything, likely at a loss. Or maybe he was already calling the police on his cell phone. “Anyway, what do you think my penance would be?”

“For killing people?” He finally answered. Celaena smiled to herself as she opened the door enough to slip through.

“Yes,” she said, and then disappeared through the small opening she’d made and disappeared into the shadows of the church, then the shadows of the street. She wasn’t a complete maniac, she didn’t begin cackling as soon as she was out the door. Though she did wish more than anything that she had been able to see the look on the man’s face when she revealed such dark truths. Wished he had been able to see the smile pulling at her lips while she spilled her secrets to him in the dark. 

Instead she weaved up and down the streets and alleys, climbed onto roofs and hopped from building to building when they were close enough. She didn’t stop moving until she reached the warehouse that she knew the stupid fucks were hiding in. She could see all three of them sitting around a shitty metal table, taking turns throwing down cards. Celaena was too far to hear anything that they said beyond a low murmur of voices, not that it mattered. They had all signed their deaths away to her when they’d had whatever part in killing Sam. It was made worse by the fact that they sat around a table now, playing games mere days afterward. She had hardly been able to eat since his blood had been splattered across her face, and they were playing stupid card games? They could beg and plead all they wanted under her knife, but it didn’t matter. Every single one of them would cease to breathe in the next eight minutes or less. 

It hadn’t been hard to figure out which of the safe houses they would be at that week. The men of the Assassins Guild had never been smart. Smart enough to get away with murder, yes, but not smart enough to beat Celaena. They could call her a bitch all they wanted, but growing up with the lot of them she was always Arobynn’s favorite, always the most skilled assassin of them all. Arobynn had crowned himself the king of assassins, but Celaena had earned her title as the assassin queen, had fought for it in violent shades of red over the years. The student had become the teacher, and tonight she would school all of these idiots for thinking they could take Sam from her and get away with it. 

After waiting another two minutes, Tern and Harding both stood from the table and began their laps around the property. Mullin stayed seated, idly shuffling his cards while Celaena snuck inside and up behind him. With a simple flick of her wrist, her favorite daggers had extended into her hands, and moments later a blade was at his throat. The assassin queen didn’t bother with pleasantries, didn’t inconvenience herself by trying to go easy on the rat beneath her fingertips. She pressed the blade into his skin and fought off a grin when a bead of blood dripped down his flesh. 

“Which one of you did it?” Her other hand twisted into his oily hair as she pressed the blade harder against his neck. “Normally I wouldn’t give you any credit, Mullin, because you could never out run me. But since I was in a little bit of shock, whichever one of you did it had a few minutes time to get away. You can tell me who it was and I’ll consider letting you live, or I can slit your throat right now and let you bleed out before your friends get back.”

“They were your friends once, too,” Mullin grit out, to which Celaena snorted.

“None of you were ever my friends. I could counter your shitty argument with the same one, he was your friend, too. He still lived with you, for gods’ sake. And you or one of your nitwit friends shot him in the head like he didn’t matter. So, I will give you one more chance, Mullin. Which one of you stupid fucks ki—”

She was violently cut off by someone yanking her head back by her ponytail. While part of her wasn’t surprised that someone had found her, she also knew they had found her a little too soon. Their fifteen minute patrol hadn’t been nearly long enough. Neither of the men should have been back yet, but here she was with one at her back and two at her front. Mullin now held her dagger in his hand, the one she’d had at his neck but dropped from the surprise attack. Harding stood beside him, which left Tern  keeping her hands in a vice-like grip behind her back, his knife pressing into the throbbing pulse in her neck. 

Stupid. She had been so rutting stupid.

Her eyes slid to Harding, who was kneeling to open and rifle through a wooden crate beside the table. When he stood he was unravelling an iron-tipped cat-o-nine tails. She refused to give any of these bastards the satisfaction of being afraid, so she kept her jaw locked and her eyes clear. Mullin approached her, pulling two pairs of handcuffs from his pocket that he used to lock her arms behind her back. Just as she poised herself to bring her knees up into his groin, her feet were knocked out from beneath her and she was helpless to catch her fall. Instead, she ate the concrete, teeth singing as her chin knocked into the ground and blood pooling in her mouth because she bit her tongue on contact. Celaena spit in the direction of Mullin and Tern, her blood splattering across the ground. It didn’t take long for her to feel the warm stickiness of blood dribbling down her chin while one of them unzipped her suit from neck down to her waist. 

And then they began whipping her. And whipping her. And whipping her.

Until black seeped into her vision and threatened to pull her under. A set up. It had been a set up. Killing Sam had likely been part of that set up. Arobynn had been mad at her for leaving the guild and had killed Sam to make her angry. He knew she would be reckless and a little stupid after losing the one person that meant absolutely everything to her and he had been right. And now she was going to die face down on the floor of a dirty warehouse in the slums of Rifthold, in a pool of her own blood. Poetic. 

“Just leave her,” she registered someone saying, but she couldn’t tell which voice it was. Everything sounded the same with the loud ringing in her ears. Someone was kneeling down beside her, looking at her face but she was seeing double and couldn’t figure out who was who. 

The man’s head snapped up as she heard a second set of ringing that sounded an awful lot like sirens. 

“What the fuck? The cops?” Vaguely, she registered blue and red lights flashing in the windows,  clearly getting closer as the vibrancy became hard to look at in her state of distress. Footsteps ran away from her followed by a lot of shouting. Gods, she wished they would shut up. Her head was hurting, her tongue hurt from biting it when she’d been kicked to the ground earlier. As footsteps ran toward her this time, she tried to focus on anything that wasn’t the mind-numbing pain. 

Tried and failed, until someone was crouching beside here and a set of bright, livid green eyes was in her line of vision. 

“I’ve got her! We need a medic!” The man yelled over his shoulder, leaning down a little closer to her. Celeana’s eyes moved down to where his pinky finger had dipped into the edge of her blood pool. A hard shiver made her body begin to tremor and she realized just how cold this room had become since she’d first entered it. The man rose up a bit, ripping his coat off and draping it over her body. She wanted to scream at the pain, at the raw sensation the jacket rubbed into her mangled skin, but she didn’t. “Can you hear me?”

She blinked once for yes, unsure if he would understand her code until he said, “Yes? One blink for yes?” She blinked again in silent confirmation. Once, she had known this man’s name. The man with the silver hair and bright green eyes that had been tracking her like a hawk. He had always been close, but too far. Celaena had always been a few steps ahead. Now, bleeding out onto the cement she couldn’t even remember what letter his name started with. “Stay with me, Celaena. Stay with me.”

She tried. She really did. 

But the darkness encroaching the edges of her vision was a lullaby and with one final blink at the man, it dragged her down and sang her to sleep.