The Fox and The Hunter

Jon didn’t know what to ask on the way back, so he asked nothing. Viktorya kept changing the position of her hands, muttering under her breath in a way Jon couldn’t interpret. He only tried once to pry her away from whatever she was thinking about. She’d quickly returned to the task afterward.

Viktorya checked her mail before walking him up to her apartment again.

“You were going to explain something to me?” Jon asked the moment the door shut.

Viktorya let go of his hand, otherwise ignoring him. She tossed the mail on the table, then went over to her bed, reaching beneath it and pulling out a box, which she held against her torso as she rocked on her heels.

“I don’t want you to see these,” she admitted, “So if you said you didn’t need to see them, I’d be very grateful.”

Jon considered taking the deal she was offering, but nothing she’d revealed yet had pushed him away, and he didn’t like the idea of secrets.

He put his hand out, and Viktorya handed him the box, looking away from him.

Before he could think through whatever scenario would be revealed to him, he opened the box.

The first drawing had to be years if not decades older than the drawing he’d seen of Eleanor. The proportions were rougher, the hair was drawn differently, and the eyes were a bit more simple, yet the subject was obvious. He was looking at a drawing of himself, from before their first meeting.

The paper under it was much the same, a different angle, slightly different hairstyle. Then the next showed him with short hair, styled in a way he never remembered, but that didn’t matter, did it? Every single paper was a different drawing, drawings she’d clearly been making for ages.

“What the hell is this?” he asked, slowly reanalyzing every interaction they’d had since that first meeting.

He thought she’d paused when she’d first seen him because she thought he was attractive, but now he understood.

“How long have you…” he just couldn’t take his gaze away from the drawings.

“Since I was…” she took a breath, he finally looked up to see she was sitting on the bed. He moved to sit at the table. “Twelve-ish, I think—definitely a kid. After the third vision that ended in a drawing of you, I started pasting them onto my wall, just behind my door. I didn’t want my parents to see.”

“Did they ever—”

“Yep, when I was fourteen,” Viktorya answered before he could finish, “About a week later my uncle came to visit, and my mother disappeared around the same time he left.”

“That’s—”

“I remember them arguing; I think it was about my freedom of choice or something. I didn’t catch all of it. He burned all the drawings too, but obviously that didn’t stop the visions from happening. If anything it made them worse.”

Jon felt some amount of blame for all of it, as if he had any say in her visions.

“I burned the first few after that, I guess I blamed you for my mother leaving. After I got tired of burning things almost every morning, I saved them to burn in batches. Then I just saved them, until finally I started putting the wall back up because I’d seen you less when I had it up, and that worked.”

“And when you saw me?” he asked.

“I did my best to ignore you. Then you came and stopped me from stealing shit, and I wondered exactly how destiny had placed us.”

“Did you see us coming?”

She sighed.

“When I was a teenager, absolutely. I was positive I was going to be Mrs. Wall of Destiny.”

“Wall of Destiny?”

“Every good shrine needs a name, and I was hopeful, until Uncle Viktor destroyed my dreams, then I was just mad I kept seeing your face. Camille asked a lot of questions about it back when she first saw it. Now I know why.”

Jon laughed a little at that one. She finally smiled, slowly walking toward him.

“I don’t remember the visions all that well. They’re a lot like normal dreams that way, but I think there had to be something in there that made me lean romantic so early on.” She sat on his lap as she finished her point. Jon reciprocated the gesture with a kiss.

“Is that all?” he asked after a minute of affection.

Viktorya’s smile faded a little as she looked away.

“Viktorya.”

She leaned away from his hand. He didn’t like her scared, especially not of him.

“You don’t have—”

“I used to—”

They stopped their sentences before the message could come around.

She removed herself from him, going over to the desk. She took a deep breath before opening it and grabbing the drawing she’d kept him from before.

“This is the last prophecy I made of this since I’ve met you.”

It was him, holding a gun. He could just see the bullet down the barrel of it. It would be an impressive piece of art, if it didn’t also show him as a threat.

“That’s a bad sign.”

Viktorya shrugged.

“They’re not always exact. I don’t even remember much of the dream. I know I woke up in the bathroom for some reason, so it probably happened—will happen—in here.”

“Then you move.”

Viktorya laughed, mournful as much as entertained.

“If you fight fate, Jonathan Hunter, it comes back with a vengeance.”

“Is that why you flirted with me?”

That was a touch too far, and he knew it before it even came out of his mouth, but it had to be asked.

“I flirted with you because it made you uncomfortable, and I was uncomfortable with the situation. Then it was because I liked you.”

He did his best to believe that. She watched him like she knew he wasn’t succeeding.

“Anything else?” he asked in disbelief as he set the paper with the rest of them. He understood the instinct to burn all of it.

Her expression said yes.

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell me.”

“No,” Viktorya said, “Because if I don’t tell you, your sister will, and I’d rather know when you’re going to ask questions.”

“What does that—”

“The Order of Addiction.”

He’d heard the term before, along with Camellia’s term for the leaders, Lords of Despair.

“What deal did they have for you?”

“A little of everything, the house needed more repairs than my dad could handle, name changes cost money, let alone gender changes, mages were outed and made unwelcome anywhere we were.”

“And they could solve all your problems in exchange for one thing.”

“My functionally eternal servitude.”

Camellia had described growing up in their servitude, though not the circumstances around it, if she even knew. It took an escape and decades if not over a century for her to get enough funds to buy out her own contract and be allowed to live as she pleased.

“Did you get out?” Jon asked.

Viktorya nodded.

“Camille saw enough potential in me for the queen to buy out my contract. Then I stayed a thief for a long time until my father got me to leave.”

Jon nodded. She was out, he didn’t need to ask any more questions.

“What did they have you do?” he asked. Camille saw potential, not skill, so she hadn’t been a thief.

Viktorya sighed.

“You have to ask all the worst questions, don’t you?”

“You don’t—”

“I do, Jon, because if I don’t answer them, then you’ll guess, and whatever you guess is going to be something you think is terrible enough to keep secret, and hopefully my answer isn’t as bad as you worry it might be.”

He just waited. There was nothing else for him to do but wait.

“They didn’t call on me for awhile. I managed to get my masters, start looking for jobs, and then they called me. I was a smart, relatively attractive young woman with a history degree and a minor in journalism.”

“Journalism?”

She nodded.

“It put me in a perfect position for men of wealth and political power not to question why I wanted to ask them questions. They’d send their bodyguards away, offer me a drink, and I’d slip something in theirs so I could search through their files and find what the client wanted.”

“So you’d look pretty enough to get full access?” Jon asked. Unethical definitely, and who knew what her “clients” did with the info they’d received? But Jon didn’t see a reason to hold her accountable now.

“Some men needed a harder sell than others, but that’s at least what I did at first. They found out I could fight, and started hiring me out to people who needed protection. I got paid enough that I didn’t worry too much about the fact it took up all my time.”

“Did you kill anyone?” Jon asked. He didn’t know if he really cared. It was sometimes part of the job when you were protecting someone, and it took a lot of skill to hold it as a last resort. He doubted Viktorya was actually taught how to avoid it.

She gave a tentative nod.

“Men with guns, or weapons, or powers. I’d try to heal them just out of the mortality point if I could help it, not that I know if they got to a hospital or not.”

“You tried.”

“Your brother was one of the last people I stole from,” she admitted.

“Half-brother,” Jon admitted. He could guess the context of the conversation considering he was in the back of her book.

“Was Gareth a target?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I was good, but most of my targets didn’t have any powers to speak of, let alone whatever level of Magek your employer has. You might have scared them off too.”

“Imagine where we’d be if we met then.”

“I’d rather not,” she noted, “It might have helped that he doesn’t have much of a womanizing reputation either.”

“He’s only had eyes for one woman.” A detail Jon was glad to have been oblivious to until he was a teenager. Val didn’t like it when she’d learned about it earlier.

“Thought about what you’d be with him as your full father?”

Many times. Jon would never admit how glad he was to not worry about inheriting that level of power, to be alone because of the harm you could cause… There was a reason the love of Gareth’s life was one he never had to fear hurting.

“Lonely,” Jon answered.

“I’ve met your family. I don’t think lonely is something you’d actually have to worry about.”

That was true enough.

“What was your collateral?” Jon asked. They always demanded something, often someone, that they could claim if someone tried to escape from the contract. Camellia always got quiet when they asked what hers had been.

“Dad,” Viktorya admitted, “I had no idea what they would do to him, but I knew I couldn’t let it happen.”

He wanted to reach out, pull her close again, tell her she was safe now, but he didn’t think she’d believe him.

“And Camille found you…”

“Stealing from the same person, but not the same things. She saw me open a safe on the first attempt without really listening, and she had to know how it was done. She had been invisible the whole time, and I was searching for threats to me, which she wasn’t. She was my ticket out, not that I actually knew that at the time.”

He could see Camille popping out of nowhere just to ask a question. He’d had that experience several times, but it didn’t work as well when he could sense her without vision.

The assassin thing wasn’t important. She was out of the order, so it didn’t really matter. The visions, the idea of him holding a gun, even if was still the wrong hairstyle, and the idea that Viktorya had known of him decades earlier than he had any idea she existed. Something about all of it didn’t sit well with him.

“Are you hungry?” he asked, “Does what we had last night work for you?”

“Yeah,” she accepted with resignation, “I could eat that again.”

“I’ll get us some.”

He needed fresh air. He needed time to think about all of this alone, without her to make it so easy to ignore everything else.

He still lingered at the door, taking one last look at her.

“You don’t have to come back,” Viktorya told him.

He’d almost think she wanted him gone.

The owner of the restaurant thanked him for continued patronage a little faster than he could easily understand, but he thanked her for food in return. One of the other native speakers at the restaurant gave cutting and accurate complaints about his pronunciation that Jon didn’t feel like responding to.

He moved unconsciously toward the hotel where he’d stayed last time, sitting on a nearby bench so he could look up at Viktorya’s window. She wasn’t visible from where he sat, and that was probably for the better.

The question wasn’t if her feelings were real, but rather if they were natural, something she’d feel even if she hadn’t seen his face in visions since childhood.

He wasn’t even sure he should care. It was Viktorya’s choice whether to listen or not, and it didn’t seem like resignation that made her kiss him. Maybe he should talk it through with her instead of letting their food get cold.

As he shook the thoughts out of his mind for now, he sensed two people’s movement in Viktorya’s apartment.

He ran through, ignoring any of Viktorya’s neighbors beyond trying not to run into them.

The door was locked, and he could still sense the movement of two bodies, not yet in a fight, but the stances were tense. One was definitely Viktorya, reaching her fingers near her wrist.

He gently knocked on the door.

“Food’s here.”

A sword appeared in Viktorya’s hand, which she swung at the intruder, who dodged. Viktorya kept the sword pointed at them as Jon heard the click of the lock and heard the latch taken off. He opened the door quickly.

The intruder was the same one who stole the note from Viktorya. He had to be working for Dick.

Jon grabbed him by the collar.

“What were you supposed to take this time?”

“Ask her!”

Jon looked back at Viktorya, who shrugged.

“Not even going to ask what we were talking about?” the intruder asked, “Aren’t you supposed to see through walls? She didn’t start swinging until you knocked.”

“Then tell him,” Viktorya said.

The intruder shook his head.

“I would hate to ruin things for the two of you, not when you’re just getting started like this.”

Jon lifted the intruder a little higher.

“The Order has wondered what something like yourself could do for us,” the intruder noted, “The old heroes still living? The problem is you all would rather die than be brought so low.”

He wasn’t going to offer more information, but he was clearly more competent than he’d seemed before.

“So you’re part of the order?” Jon asked.

The intruder smirked, placing his hands around Jon’s wrist.

“And they don’t take those without power.”

Jon’s wrist snapped with the pain of a break. He didn’t release the intruder.

“Jon!” Viktorya yelled.

More snapping, this time of fingers, as the intruder wrested from his grasp. Viktorya grabbed Jon’s other hand before he could run after.

“I’ll heal soon enough,” Jon reassured her.

“He shattered a good part of your hand. You have no guarantee it will heal correctly.”

“I don’t have to use it.”

“You’re not going to get anything out of him, and if the order’s using him as an errand boy, they’ll probably get him out of jail pretty quickly.”

She coaxed the broken hand inside her reach. She straightened the bones and manifested that same orange glow. He could feel his bones reconnecting to each other as sparks came out of his hand, then wrist.

“What did you two talk about?” he asked.

“Circular threats. You’re not really supposed to reveal your involvement if you can help it.”

“And why was he the one who got rid of the note to prove Chamberlain’s involvement.”

Viktorya shrugged.

“Either your brother hired him, or the council didn’t want Chamberlain’s involvement known.”

“Are you alright?” Jon wasn’t here to interrogate her. He was here to keep her safe. That was the detail that mattered.

Viktorya nodded, not making any eye-contact.

“Fine.”

Jon lifted her chin to get a better look. She seemed scared.

“I can stay as long as you need me.”

“I’m fine, really,” she pushed his hand away, “I just didn’t like seeing you hurt.”

“It didn’t hurt that much. I’m used to the pain.”

“Not a comforting response,” Viktorya noted.

He twisted the previously broken wrist, pushing back Viktorya’s hair.

“We’re both fine, I dropped the takeout by the door, but we’re both fine.”

She laughed.

“I can grab some plates if you’ll—”

He kissed her to remind himself that she was fine. It was brief, just a peck, but it made her pause.

“Are you sure you trust me?” she asked.

He kissed her again.

“I’m sure.”

“You don’t know what else there was to that conversation.”

This kiss went a little deeper, lingered a little longer.

“I don’t need to know.”

All he needed was to keep her as safe as she would let him. He didn’t need to be smart about this, just capable.

“So you’re staying?” Viktorya asked, pulling him close.

“As long as you’ll have me.”

They held each other close, neither willing to lose the other as this kiss built to something more.