The night had a chill to it, but I didn’t care. I had known so much of cold in my life that I had adopted it as a friend.
I thrived in the cold. Some of it was my Russian heritage of having been raised in Siberia for most of my teenage years, but mostly it was something else. Of all the elements of nature I shared the most attachment to in terms of my state of being it was with the element of coldness. Cold after all doesn’t really exist scientifically, cold is simply an increasing lack of heat.
A man without warmth is what they called me. AZ for short, as in Absolute Zero.
My contemporaries within the assassin guild never said it to my face, but I knew. I knew far more than they wanted me to and I remembered even more, but I had to be careful to hide that awareness as I wasn’t the only thing that had the use of my flesh.
I was no one’s fool, and yet I was a slave just like so many others. That’s all this woman was. A slave who had escaped.
Escape to what though? Hell always found a way to track one down and this night I was its messenger.