The Rouge Assassin’s Daughter

Avery weaved her way through the crowded platform. She was use to the hustle and bustle of the cold train station. She was tired but kept her head down making no eye contact with the people passing by. Her blue green eyes were striking and she found no eye contact helped her pass unseen. She had spent her life blending in and she knew how to make herself forgettable to the people around her. She was a shadow. She came from a long line of rouge wolves who made their living as Shadow Assassins. Shadow Assassin’s belonged only to the order and only took orders from the Shadow council. Avery was the first female in almost a century to be born. My father had considered my gender to be a fluke, he trained me as he would a son. But I would never be the male heir he had wanted. After several years of trying the heir her father longed for, my baby brother, who I now called Luke, was born. Unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough the train my brother for the trials or in the Shadow Assassin ways. I had only been thirteen when he was reported lost on and deceased from a dangerous mission. Thankfully I had passed the trials at twelve to gain access to the assassin archives, maps, potions, and elixirs. My father had been equally proud and displeased about me passing the trials. He was proud that his bloodline was strong and proud that I was able to pass…but displeased at the thought that I would ever be an assassin. He had been a tough man but he had loved us, his family, dearly. The Elders and council had dispatched my father on a top secret mission. It was almost unheard of for the Elders to assign a Shadow Assassin a personal mission. To keep their favor no Assassin would turn them down. Elders were there to simply monitor make sure no assassin broke their strict code. My father had been reluctant to go but he did. Something was different about this mission and it seemed like he knew it. For the first time he had shown me his personal journals and how to decode them. His journals were hard to decode and get the hang of reading. He had passed off sharing them with me as him preparing me to code my own journals. I shook my deep auburn shoulder length hair at the memory. I should have known better. His journals along with several others, from now deceased family members, were my most prized possession. My only guide to our handed down skills that made us so lethal and how to maximize our success in certain scenarios. All of the journals had been scanned and the originals placed in a safety deposit box my mother had gotten us. I didn’t like it but carrying that many journals while on the run was too cumbersome. I had then placed encrypted USB drives in all the cities we ran to and kept one on my person at all times. If something happened to me Luke could hopefully someday get one. If someone else tried to access it, it would simply self-destruct. The Elders and a few members of the council had taken an uncommon interest in my family since my father’s passing. They sent agents unannounced and followed our family’s every move. For a while I had held out hope that maybe he had survived. But no one in their right mind would stalk a living assassins family. Something must have went wrong and they were probably seen as loose ends. Avery made her way out of the train station and along the quiet dark streets. The Sun would be up in about an hour. She was working night hours in the train station taking tickets and assisting any night time arrivals. It was a boring job but it allowed her to care for her mother and brother. Her father had made several arrangements in the event of his death but no one was expecting it to happen so soon..or the blackmail and stalking to keep their identities hidden. If her father was alive...If only.. Avery shook her head, shaking her hair loose, trying to push the “if only” possibilities out of her mind. Those thoughts wouldn’t help. At sixteen I had convinced my Mom to withdrawal one large sum form our father’s account. All assassin accounts were monitored by the council and Elders in the event of an Assassin death. This made it possible for them to invest the money if any children were left behind and allowed them to quietly transfers it out over time to shell companies then to more legal companies and stocks. This kept others from tracking the money back to them but also gave them control of the surviving family members. When the Shadows Elders inquired about the large withdrawal our mother had claimed she was putting us into a special school for our protection and education. Such schools were exclusive and extremely expensive. The Shadow Elders had approved the withdrawal of over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, not expecting anything. Before and after the withdrawal I had planned our escape. I was meticulous, like my father, our escape was planned so that once gone no one would be able to trace or track us. I had decoded my fathers journals and removed everything of value and found everything of use from his hidden caches around the city. I had even taken a few potion, elixirs, and books from the caches for assassins located on the archive maps. I started my own coded journals for notes. Luke at only nine understood and even helped prepare but I would only divulge so much. An assassin never tells their entire plan to anyone, and even then that plan is only one of many. On the day of our disappearance Luke and I had dressed up in our new boarding school uniforms. From any one observing us it looked like we packed the SUV for our trip to go away to school and for our Mom to be gone a long weekend. Over the previous year we had stripped down the house to the bare essentials. Slowly selling anything of value. I had been able to get another $150,000 out of everything. Our Mom had even sold the majority of her jewelry and sold her vehicle, keeping only our father’s SUV. Nothing to identify us and nothing that would show any of our preferences was left behind. Our father had loved James Bond and while he always picked SUVs that blended in, he had made sure to have them wrapped in several different colors, an easy James Bond disguise. I knew we would be followed but hoped the interstate would provide us the opportunity to get off an unexpected exit, remove one layer of wrap, change the plates in a parking garage, and drive in to opposite direction. We did that three times before changing vehicles. It was hard to trade off his SUV but I knew we would need the money and a more common car. Avery ducked into the back entrance of an apartment complex. Looking around cautiously she made her way up the stairs lost in her memories. Her Mother, a natural silvery blonde had dyed her hair a deep red. Herself and Luke, both naturally dark haired dyed theirs as well. Avery chose to cut her waist length locks to go darker (she had hated it) and Luke had chosen to get rid of his little man bun and do a crew cut, his hair color was dyed between the deep red and dark brunette Avery had chosen. They looked different but still looked like a family unit. Their saving grace had been their genetic mutation. All wolves had a scent specific to them. Most of the Shadow assassins had very minor scents, some even had the gift of altering scents for a period of time or mimicking others, but Avery came from a line of assassins that had no scent detectable except to their true mates and offspring. This had made them excellent assassins and elite trackers. It had also made them very protective and controlling of their mates and offspring. If rejected by their mates (because of being rouges and because of their profession) it wasn’t uncommon for them to kill the mate that rejected them. This was to keep their identities a secret. Their mates could smell them and therefore track them...or be forced to track them in some cases. Killing their mates often made them even more ruthless and feared killers. It also became taboo for their true mates to reject them because it was known to carry the high possibility of death. Offspring could also be used in a pinch. But the scent of family was very faint and therefore not as easy for offspring to track, unlike a mate. A mate could track for miles and smell their scent hours and sometimes a full day after leaving a room. Offspring could tell you if they were in the same room or maybe the same building. Offspring were usually used as bait and insurance to protect themselves if their target was getting to close. I smiled at the thought of my parents. My mother loved my father instantly, like most true mated wolves, they had been mated, marked, and bonded within 24 hours. She had often described her scent to be a sweet lavender smell but she lost her scent after only a few days of being mated. Luke, my Mom, and I all had the same almost floral earthy smell to each other. It had been mostly earthy until my father died. My mother said the floral was probably me as I was the only assassin of age in the family now. If smelled by any wolf or human it would be completely undetectable. This also made use sensitive to many human smells, wolf scents trackable and detectable for miles, we could detect poisons, and infections. All useful tools for an assassin and a great tool for evading other wolves. I took the next flight two stairs at a time. We lived on the seventh floor and after a long night I was ready for bed. Pulling my hood up and exiting the stairwell and made it to the door of our tiny run down apartment. I quickly opened and bolted the door behind me. It wasn’t much but it was home. And it was affordable. Out of habit I checked the peep hole to see if anyone was around. No one was in sight. I smiled and slowly started unbundling myself from my snow coat and boots. The Colorado mountains were frigid in November. I heard Luke arguing with my Mom. “But it’s Saturday other kids don’t do schoolwork on Saturday” he complained. “Luke, Avery is going to be tired. Do you want to keep her up?’. Leave it to my mother to guilt trip him out of bed. I smiled to myself and walked into out shared bedroom. Luke bolted upright “Ava!”. His personal nickname for me made me laugh. He had never grown out of it and I couldn’t help but smile every time he called me Ava. It was the one constant. We had changed names, states, and places...but I was always Ava to him behind closed doors. My full name was Averitus Ameila Arbosa Duquesne and my bothers was Lucas Ranieri Arbosa Duquesne. After multiple moves we had resorted to something closer to our birth names, I knew it was a risk but Luke and Avery suited us. My mother’s name was Aria but my father always called her “Ri” and this last change she decided to go with Rita, I think she did it to remember him, but to us it was always just “Mom”. Luke launched himself from the bed with a growl. He had just turned eleven and his wolf nature was starting to show. I caught him but had to step back to steady myself. “Hey trouble” I laughed as I hugged him back. He was gaining weight and losing his boyish pudginess. If our father had been alive he would’ve been well on his way to training for the trials but I had only recently started on a training regimen. One that I had pieced together from what I remembered of my training, the few books I had stolen and the journals my father had passed down. “Hey Mom.”. I gave my mom a grin as I put Luke down. “Hey sweetie”. She looked tired but I also knew being cooped up didn’t help. She and my brother only left the apartment a few hours every day. Usually to go to the park or to pick up essential items. She never went anywhere without Luke. Only once did my mother leave Luke and I alone to run errands. She had been gone most of the day, doing the necessary changes that were required when we move. We hadn’t been apart in ages but Luke and I had been tired and I decided to babysit and watch him while she went out. I had woken up to the scent of a wolf in our apartment. I hid Luke and prepared myself for a fight. To my surprise the wolf was my Mom! She had regained her scent. Without my father and being away from us she was no longer scentless. We had quickly moved apartments and made sure that she was never without one of us. Even at her Doctor appointments I would go with her. My mom straightened the bed out for me. “Breakfast or sleep?” She asked with a small smile. She had a heart of gold. I smiled back and replied “Light breakfast ”. We made our way to the small kitchen and dining room area hearing Luke rummage in the fridge. My mother quickly took over and had breakfast made in no time. All of us discussed the training schedule for the day and came up with a solid plan. We always did this. We were a team. After breakfast I showered, changed, and prepared for bed. It was a dreamless sleep that I drifted into.