Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Contracts, A Slip of Skin, and A Paper Heart
This was the life that John remembered from before Helen, the one that he thought he had left behind for the calmness of peace and quiet and minimal bruising of the strictly accidental bumped-my-knee-on-the-designer-coffee-table sort.
This endless cycle of contracts, kill orders and coins, so many glinting, glimmering godforsaken coins slipping cold and callous against his palms, running like a macabre blood and gold-tinged stream through his fingers. His hands should be stained red by now, blazoned with the blatant evidence of his uncountable sins, but somehow they were just as they’d always been, tan-colored and absolute and disturbingly deadly, if neither clean nor innocent.
John took another sip of the whiskey glinting amber hued and thick in his glass, a gently aged single barrel bourbon judging by the crisp warm taste that sparked like fire each time it touched his tongue, and glanced expectantly at his drinking companion wedged firmly on the other side of the luxurious corner booth they occupied. The wizened older man that sat nursing his Manhattan, reading glasses perched precariously on the edge of his nose, was shifting laboriously through a pile of seemingly important papers spilt onto the shining mahogany table before him. The exact matters which they concerned, John was glad to say, were well above his pay grade.
“Have you seen the latest contract?” Winston asked casually, glancing up from his shuffling and huffing to peer at John over the perch of his spectacles, though the glint flashing in the older man’s grey-green eyes was intense, piercing, belaying a subject that was anything but casual, and John was certain that a less seasoned man would have flinched at the contact.
“Yes,” he answered simply, gesturing somewhat disdainfully towards the newly acquired, secure cell phone tucked into the pocket of the pristine suit he wore tonight, it’s fabric just as midnight black and smooth as the Venetian silk blend that it’s hand stitched label denoted.
“You should take it,” Winston supplied conversationally, as if they were discussing the likelihood of rain tomorrow afternoon instead of the dangerous prospect of delaying his retirement and John quirked a sardonic brow in his old friend’s direction in amused response before he replied.
“And why is that?”
“Because it’s not every day that you get offered a contract involving strippers,” Winston supplied, his gravelly voice imbued with a thick layer of intention and no small amount of delight at John’s responding raised brows and low scoff.
“When have I ever been moved by a bit of skin?” John shot back, taking another sip from his dwindling glass to mask the telling downturn of his mouth, the biting interest that he suspected sparked hotly behind his eyes.
“Well perhaps now would be a good time to start.”
The comment caught John utterly off guard, not because it was overstepping any carefully drawn lines in the sand, really between himself and Winston there was only one and John didn’t plan on crossing it any time soon, but because it rang with a small kernel of tempting truth, pulsing and vibrant and unignorible as it slid down his spine, settled hotly somewhere between his hips.
“We are masters of our unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out,” Winston said, “And you, Jonathan, are a man of very few words and the possessor of a handful of very revealing tells.”
“Churchill?” John quipped in gentle prodding, hasty to shift the attention away from his old friend’s thinly veiled, compassionately offered references to his poorly handled grief and crushing loneliness, and into decidedly safer territory. After all, it wasn't the hotel owner’s predilection for British statesmen that made John's fingers twitch reflexively for the trigger of the gun stashed covertly in his belt.
“Our great Master and Commander,” Winston barked, raising his Manhattan high, the maraschino cherry floating in its sloshing sea of bourbon and bitters threatening momentarily to leap out into the free air below. John chuckled as Winston completed his zealous toast with a hearty gulp from his glass, and after a moment John joined him, finishing off his whiskey neat with a quick tilt of his head, grateful for the searing burn of it, torrid and punishing, down his throat.
“I know that you want to retire, my friend, and I understand,” judging by the dark circles and heavy bags that sat burdened beneath Winston’s sharp eyes, John could almost believe him, “But this one is different.” Winston slid a manila folder that he’d procured from a previously unseen place beneath his papers towards John in offering, “This one is innocent.”
John broke his gaze from the long, solemn lines of Winston’s face after a pointed moment spent scanning the older man’s features vehemently for any signs of exaggeration or dubiousness, and finding none he focused down onto the contents of the folder opened beneath him.
His gaze met color photographs of a woman, no doubt younger than the thick eyeliner and crimson lipstick artfully applied to already pretty features denoted, though the look, for all its heavy handed sensuality, seemed to suit her well. It highlighted the full bow of her lips, the almost exotic curve of her lashes. In an instant John could tell that the photos didn’t do her justice, and as he flipped through them he was suddenly grateful that there were no pictures featuring this woman in lingerie, if not for the sake of his palms that had begun to sweat then for his poor jaw, which was clenched in abject determination to conceal the curiosity running rampant through him. Judging by the gentle lilt of her smile in one shot as she flashed it to a stranger outside of her building, and the sincere crinkle of her eyes in the next as she held the door for an elderly woman exiting a metro station, she was too kind, too charitable to deserve death. The printout of the contract, reason for termination supplied in stark black ink on the bottom line, seemed to support this notion.
Winston, it seemed, for all his scheming and quoting, was right. This woman, whoever she was, was innocent, and any hitman who saw her contract would know that. Not that it would stop them from collecting the heavy one million dollar purse attached to the deed. His kind were not known for their empathy.
When Winston leaned in, bracing a suit clad arm on the table beneath him to meet John’s eye, he saw something immeasurably weary yet determined, something almost personal glinting in the older man’s gaze that had John sighing, toying with the idea that perhaps retirement could wait for just one more contract.
“This one,” Winston said, gaze intent, fingers clutching the edge of the revealing folder, voice grave as sin as he rasped, “needs Baba Yaga.”