The Assassin’s Sacrifice: 2
Part 1 can be read here.
The Order was supposed to be a force of good. They were rescuers of Zabian’s weak, defenseless, and abandoned, and enemies of the dark forces that preyed upon the city’s streets. That night’s business was part of the mission.
They had found the child among the homeless and taken him to that place to draw out their enemies. It was all a very clever plan, Heider knew, and made good strategic sense, but it did not settle right with him. Where I come from, he thought, heroes don’t use children as bait.
Adta looked up, the dark eyes in the slit of her niqab falling upon his weapon. Realizing he was gripping the kukri’s hilt as if ready to draw, Heider pulled his hand away. The woman’s eyes lingered a few more moments on him before turning back to the child.
Heider looked at the boy’s moonlit face. Again he got the uncomfortable feeling that he knew the child. He had suspected as much from the moment that Adta first lured the child away from the marketplace. There was something very familiar about those cobalt eyes.
At first he had thought it was simply one of the many children he had rescued over the years, but witnessing the face now in the darkness stirred faint impressions of a much more distant time. He found himself uncomfortably thinking of his own childhood, a time he…
