Roman

Pretty blonde girls with hair down their back and an ass that begs to be stared at, they're like kryptonite to men. Politicians, sports stars, and me.

The second she walked into the bar, I couldn't keep my eyes off her. She walked with the shaky, uncertain stride of a woman who didn't know whether she was making the right decision, like a caged animal being released into the wild. There was hurt there, I could see it plain as day, knew the smell of it the same as I knew the lines that criss-crossed the back of my own palm.

I watched the whole thing unfold, from start to finish. Or at least, from start to now. I chose dive bars like this - ones in shitty parts of town - for two reasons: nobody bothered me, and they never had anyone interesting enough to distract me from the important business of drinking the pain away. When she walked in, it was like a candle being lit in the darkness, or a toddler sketching the Mona Lisa in a kindergarten art period. My heart skipped a beat, my eyes widened and I put down my whiskey. The single, melting ice cube rocked from side to side like a metronome. Right then, not even an earthquake would have distracted me.

Beauties like her weren't supposed to hang around in places like this.

I sat, mesmerized by her beauty, and then a bunch of brutes dressed like fluorescent traffic lights got in my way. That was bad enough. I never did have much control over my emotions. Sometimes I get the feeling that my anger is somehow a bigger part of me than even I've ever been, like it overshadows me, and I'm just its servant. I watched, and I simmered. My jaw tightened, and I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. "Not your fight, Roman," I grunted softly to myself.

Not your circus, not your monkeys.

I almost believed it, too.

And then the asshole pulled out a knife. My legs stood up before my brain had even fully processed what was going on. My heartbeat slowed to almost nothing, and I was in the zone. Details disappeared, and all that was left was what mattered. Saving the girl. The why didn't matter, and I didn't know the answer, anyway. All that I knew was that they weren't going to hurt her, not on my watch.

Eagles jumper's voice carried across the room. "Ain't no one coming to help you now, girl." A wide, smug, self-indulgent smile filled his face, the look of a man who was entirely at peace with himself, regardless of the fact that his soul was black. The mere sight of him made me clench my fist, and flooded me with an intense, visceral wave of rage. I bit back down on it, taking conscious control of myself.

"Anger is the enemy," I muttered to myself as I circled the room, careful to stay out of the road crew's sight, using the dark bar's many hidden corners as cover. "Breathe deep, relax, be at peace." It sounded like some kind of new age, hippie mantra, but nothing could have been further from the truth. It was the only thing that kept me sane, the thing that kept me moving, and the thing that kept me killing. I had the taste of it now, a pungent metallic urge that would only disappear if it was sated, preferably by blood. And Eagles jumper, whatever his real name was, his would more than fit the bill.

Of the four members of the road crew, only two were directly involved in intimidating the pretty blonde. Eagles jumper, and his boss. The other two were, much like bullies anywhere, sheep – they'd follow wherever they were led.

In a war, it's always best to pick the weak ones off first, better still if you don't even have to fight them. I sidled up to the nearest orange-jacketed road worker and he flinched before he'd even properly seen me, pulling back and turning nervously to face the intrusion into his personal space. "Who," his voice quavered. "Who the hell are you?"

"I'm asking the questions, tough guy," I whispered in his ear, prodding two knuckles into his wobbly, rotund belly as hard as I could. "And that's a Beretta thirty-eight I've got pressed up against your fat stomach, so one wrong move…" I left the thought hanging, and was immediately pleased to watch as the man's knees almost gave way with fear.

Not so tough, are you.

"I'll give you a choice," I murmured into his ear. "You leave, now, I'll let you live." I said it as threateningly as I could manage, letting just enough of my old Russian accent intrude back into my voice to reinforce the message. I hadn't spoken like that in a long time, to the rest of the world I sounded as American as apple pie. But every now and then, I grinned, a little Russian could be plenty intimidating. "You walk straight out that door, no looking back, you understand? One glance and I blow your brains out."

The man quivered, and I knew I had him. "Okay, okay," he muttered, desperate to escape. "I'll do whatever you want." I prodded him in his soft gut one more time to reinforce the message, and gave him a firm push towards the door. He scurried out like a terrified little church mouse, without so much as a stolen glance backwards.

Atta boy.

The movement must've caught the leader of the group's eye because a couple of seconds later, I heard a surprised, gravelly voice. "Hey, Billy, where ya going?"

The only answer he got was the door slamming shut behind his cowardly friend. That was when he turned his attention to me, flinching in confusion as was forced to readjust, and to look up at me. I got the sense that this was a man who didn't often come across men that were bigger than him "Who the fuck are you?"

My neck and back tensed up as he swore at me, and I made a conscious effort to relax, repeating my silent mantra in my head. Anger is the enemy… "Gentlemen, I don't want any trouble." I said with a broad, forced smile stretched across my gums. And it was true; trouble was the exact last thing I wanted. They should have had a sign at Hitman School, not that such a place existed, that read: 'don't make a scene', because really that's the only skill you need in this line of work. "So how about you let this pretty lady free, and we can all go about our days. No trouble," I emphasized.

The leader's face stretched out into an unpleasant grin. "Nobody tells Mikey what to do," he scoffed, talking about himself in the third person. Who does this guy think he is, I wondered. "So if you don't want no trouble, then how about you get your interfering ass out of here."

My shoulders sagged, and I let out a long-suffering sigh. Not because I had any plans of giving up, but because I should have known it wouldn't be that easy. "Come on, Mikey," I improvised. "What is it you want out of all this, a woman?"

I pulled a roll of banknotes out of my back pocket, a couple of thousand bucks worth of crisp, clean hundred dollar bills and peeled off five or six of them. "If that's what you want, be my guest." I didn't approve of the flesh trade, not really, but if that's what it took to distract him from the blonde who'd inexplicably caught my eye, then it was an evil I was willing to go along with.

Mikey's eyes lit up at the sight of the money, and he took a greedy step forward. "How 'bout I take that money of yours, rich boy, and the girl too. Any fancy last words on that?"

My jaw clenched with anger, and a slight hiss of air escaped through my front teeth. Is he an idiot? Could he not see that I was standing with all my weight balanced on the balls of my feet, knees half-bent, shoulders packed? In short, couldn't he see that I was prepared to fight? A predator, completely comfortable in my own domain, like a lion prowling the African savanna.

The simple answer was no. Of course he couldn't. He was a road worker, an idiot, but most importantly – a bully, not a fighter, and I'd make short work of him. "Hey, Mikey," a nervous voice said to my left. "Maybe we just leave this girl alone, you know. This guy's pretty big. I didn't sign up for no fight."

A snarling, animalistic grin formed on my lips before I knew it, and my teeth were bared in a primal snarl. At least one of them had more than one brain cell to rub together, I thought. "Hey Mikey," I mocked, copying the speaker and too far provoked by their leader's cocky arrogance to hold back. "How about you listen to your boy before I beat all three of you to a pulp." The initial speaker backed away the moment he heard that, his hands raised up, open-palmed, to the height of his shoulders in the universal sign for: 'this isn't my fight'.

Another one bites the dust, I thought with satisfaction. Two left. Unfortunately, I hadn't managed to scare away either the Alexandria Eagles guy, or his leader, Mikey. Perhaps that was asking too much. More importantly, from this distance I could see the whites of Eagles' eyes as he stared greedily at the girl. And even more importantly, from this distance, I could tell that he was on something.

I locked eyes with the pretty blonde girl at the epicenter of this testosterone-fueled clash for the first time. A puff of air blew out of my mouth and I felt like I'd been punched by a bolt of lightning. She was way more beautiful than I'd allowed myself to imagine, and I'd allowed myself to imagine a lot. But she wasn't just looking at me, no, there was a message in those eyes. It was a universal message, a cry for help. But it wasn't a request I'd ever fulfilled before, not that anyone had asked.

I was more used to getting kill orders sent directly to my phone than being asked to save someone. I shivered. It felt kind of nice, like it was warming me inside, instead of the cold knot of anger that usually carried me through a mission. I shot her a glance to say, hey, don't worry, it'll all be okay.

"Hey, Eagles," I called, and the guy turned slowly, stupidly to face me. His eyelids were drawn back, and the ice themselves flickered wildly from side to side, as though afraid to catch my gaze. I knew it wasn't personal. He was high on meth, or something like PCP. At least, that would be my guess. It meant two things, he'd come at me wildly, without inhibition, and through everything he could at me, which was bad; but it took his intelligence out of the equation, which was good. Even the stupidest man on earth is, at heart, the finest killing machine that nature has ever developed. "Catch."

I wasn't going to wait another second. I'd seen the way he was looking at her, and there was no way I was going to risk it. I flung a half empty beer bottle directly at his forehead, and his hands floundered slowly in the middle of the air as he attempted to catch it. I didn't stand around watching. Every ounce of adrenaline left in me was being pumped into my bloodstream as fast as my body could handle.

Even my sense of smell kicked into overdrive, bringing to my attention things I would never have noticed in the normal world. Mikey's dead, fearful scent, led with the reek of body odor was most obvious, powerful, kicking itself head and shoulders above every other background sent. Eagles' drug-fueled chemical scent was next on the agenda as my brain ran through every sense, detecting every threat; but there was something else too, a scent that I felt like I could touch, taste and hold rather than just smell. I filed it away to deal with later, but it was her, I knew it. I hungered for it.

Time had slowed, and as I heard the beer bottle crashing against the floor, exploding into a thousand tiny shards of shattered glass, I drove my elbow into Mikey's gut. As I listened to the air hissing out of his lungs, a sense of satisfaction shimmered at the edge of my consciousness, but I didn't dwell on it. That was for amateurs. I span around him, using his body for leverage and brought my hand down against the back of his neck, out cold. He toppled to the floor, and I was about to finish him with a kick to the throat when a scream ripped the air apart.

My stomach clenched and I felt like throwing up. How could I have been so stupid, I thought. I turned as quickly as I could, and saw Mikey's compatriot approaching the blonde, a trickle of blood dribbling down his forehead from where the bottle had collided with it, and a wild-eyed manic look stretched across his thin, ugly face. Every muscle in my body tensed, and my brain sent a single message down every nerve way open to it. The message was simple, save her. I cursed myself for not bringing a gun, or even a knife. It wasn't like me, but I just wanted to escape the life, just one night.

"Eagles," I shouted desperately. "Freeze!" I just needed a second, and I got it. He hesitated briefly, half turning his head to check whether I was carrying a weapon. The second he saw that I wasn't, he charged forward at the blonde, but I'd bought myself a time I needed. I threw myself forward toward him, lancing my body like an NFL linebacker. I hit him just above the hip, and sped through him, knocking him to the floor with an almighty hit. It didn't take a doctor to realize he wouldn't be getting up from that one for a while.

I picked myself up off the floor, feeling my thigh twinge with discomfort as it finally registered the pain of the fight. I cracked my neck, just to relieve the nerves. "So," I asked, as casually as I could with my blood thundering through my veins at lightspeed. "What's your name?"