Free The Last Assassin by Barry Eisler Page A

“Yeah,” I said.
    “You need to go. Please.”
    I blinked and shook my head. “Will you call me?” I asked.
    “Will you get out of the life?”
    “I’ll try.”
    “Then you call me. When you’re out.”
    I couldn’t ask for more than that. I walked to the door and pulled on my shoes, the fleeces, and the jacket. I nodded to her. She nodded back. Neither of us spoke.
    I got the baseball cap on in the elevator and moved through the lobby with my head down. I stepped outside and checked the hot spots. All clear. I headed east. The chill air hit my face but I was barely aware of it. I felt exhausted, empty. I should have known I wasn’t in the right condition to protect myself. I should have known what was going to happen next.

    MIDORI STOOD AND WATCHED the door for a long time after Rain left. He was gone as suddenly as he had appeared, but his presence lingered everywhere and changed everything, from the feel of her lips and tongue to the contours of the apartment to her thoughts of the future.
    How many times had she told herself she hated him, for what he did to her father, for the lies he told her afterward, for everything he was? And yet, not two minutes earlier, she had been kissing him with such abandon that she was still light-headed from it. How the hell had she summoned the will to send him away? She wished for a moment she hadn’t, and the thought made her feel ashamed.
    She sat on the couch, closed her eyes, and put her head in her hands. That thing he had said about what she was going to tell Koichiro about his father had stung. She had considered the issue many times, of course, but could never come up with a comfortable answer. It was easier to just defer things, to tell herself she would figure it out as Koichiro got older, but now she wasn’t sure.
    When she had first learned she was pregnant, she felt her body had betrayed her, as though she was a woman carrying the child of a soldier who had raped her in war. She had made an appointment at a clinic, determined to end the pregnancy immediately and never think of it again. But that same night, as she lay in bed staring at the ceiling, one hand half-consciously rubbing her belly, she thought maybe it was better not to act so hastily. It was still early. Why not sleep on it for a few nights, make up her mind more deliberately? The option to abort would still be there. It wasn’t going away.
    But those few nights turned into many. She thought ceaselessly about her circumstances. She loved living in New York, loved doing gigs here, loved the freedom of life away from Japan. And meeting men was easy enough. She saw the way they gazed at her while she played, many of them repeat customers, and she was aware of the nervous timbre of their voices when they approached her to thank her after a performance. She went out with a few, but none of them had interested her long-term.
    At some point, she had come to understand that, in her late thirties, the chance for marriage and a family had probably passed. But that was okay. She concentrated on all the good things in her life and told herself that a husband and the rest would have interfered. But on those long sleepless nights after she learned she was pregnant, she realized she had been making a virtue of a necessity. Because her circumstances had seemed unchangeable, she had been motivated to accept them. But everything was different now.
    She believed in fate, and this felt like fate to her. Yes, she knew she could choose to abort as she could choose to have the baby, so how could either alternative be fate, really? But she didn’t care about the logic so much. It was her intuition she listened to. And her intuition told her to have the baby.
    But she felt no desire to try to contact Rain. It wasn’t only because of her father. It was because of what Rain was. Then, when the baby was born, her conviction that she should never tell him only deepened. From the moment the doctor brought that tiny child from