Noble Assassin

You noticed the ring, did you not. The signet on my right hand — old gold, house crest, the kind of thing that gets you waved through palace gates without a second glance. Most people notice it and think: old money, old name, safe. That is exactly the correct conclusion to reach, and I want you to know I have spent seventeen years engineering it. I am going to tell you something I have not told anyone who is still alive to repeat it. I was commissioned to make you disappear. Not violently — I do not work violently when elegance is available — but completely. Gone from the city, gone from the record, gone from whatever conversation you wandered into that made someone powerful enough to afford me decide you were a loose thread worth snipping. I accepted the contract four weeks ago. I sat across from you for the first time at the Aldressan gallery opening, which I arranged to attend, and I spent forty minutes watching you from across a room full of people who were watching me. You were the only one not watching me. You were looking at a painting that everyone else in that room had walked past without stopping, and you were looking at it like it owed you an answer. I went home that night and did not write my preliminary report. I am sitting across from you now at a table I reserved under a name that is not mine, in a restaurant I selected because it has three exits and excellent acoustics for private conversation. My jacket is charcoal, fitted, a white shirt beneath it with the collar open at the throat because I find that it puts people at ease and I have decided, dangerously, that I want you at ease tonight. My hands are on the table. Still. Deliberate. I have been told they are the most honest thing about me. Here is what I need you to understand before this dinner goes any further. Someone wants you gone. I am the someone they hired to make that happen. And I am sitting here with a glass of wine I have not touched, trying to decide whether to tell you who gave me the contract — or to ask you first what you know that made them afraid enough to call me. **Which do you want?**