******Chapter One

If he was given the chance to fix each major mistake of his life, Kairi Hirore would refuse. Some small part of him feels it would be cheating and after what he had done he knows he doesn’t deserve the chance to cheat. He doubts fixing every wrong deed would erase the guilt sitting in his stomach or the memories tossing and turning in his head.

The worst memories come at nights like tonight when the wind refuses to stay quiet and comes screeching and howling down from the mountains outside the narrow windows of his living room. His house creaks and moans, reminding him that it’s almost as old as he is, and he sinks into his armchair as far as he can. Its nights like these that keep the master assassin firmly seated in front of a dying fire, unable to sleep easily.

His hands are familiar shapes in the flickering firelight, skeletal and gnarled like bare poplar trees in winter. When the master assassin slowly stretches them out, finger by finger, they settle into a row of pale knobbed sticks. They’re familiar like bred-in-the-bone routines and childhood friends. It made sense to count them as friends; his hands have been with him since the day he was born fifty years ago and he doesn’t have many friends in the first place.

The fire begins to die down in the grate and the last few flames flicker among the charred wood. Electricity is so much more convenient, the master assassin thinks to himself as he jabs at the embers with a long iron poker. But he likes to think by himself when the hustle and bustle of training brats at the training hall all day long was over with. And damn it all, those brats were clever today. He’d almost gotten drenched with half-melted snow during outdoor training when his twin trouble-making students had tried to catch their teacher unawares.

He had never done anything that stupid when he was being trained in the arts of assassination in the same training hall. Children back then were taught to respect their superiors, not to see how far they could flout and break the rules without getting punished. No, he had never tried lobbing snowballs at his teachers because he was too busy trying to keep up with his twin sister Leja. She was the model student and she had grown into the perfect assassin as an adult, which had apparently meant ‘stiff’ in her book.

But then again, Leja had always been a little withdrawn even in childhood like there was a wall she gladly maintained between her and the outside world. He remembers calling her ‘robotic’ and ‘emotionless’ and how she had simply stared at him when he had done it. But he had envied her discipline and control in situations where he had been rash and emotional.

All of the master assassin’s poking at the fire is in vain when the embers finally give up and turn black, plunging the cavernous room into darkness. He sits back in his worn armchair and sighs, feeling joints ache where they hadn’t ached in his youth. All this thinking of the past was getting him to miss being young. He hadn’t thought about his age in years, too engrossed in handing out assassinations and teaching brats at the training hall. But now sitting in the dark with the dead embers smoking in the grate, the thought creeps upon him. And with it comes the memories, roaring through his head like a rainstorm.

No, not now.

He can’t think of that right now; windows slam shut in his mind, keeping out the storm. He can’t let it in; the specters and the false truths would return and her rare smirk that he just can’t—

No, not now.

But the window cracks and the rain seeps through.

Ghosts, shadows, devious shapes of things that he thought he had forgotten in his old age slide inside; things better left to the dark and the night to hold and not his feeble, selfish mind. Oh yes he is selfish, cowardly and prone to pride, though it’s only the third attribute others would attribute to him. He alone knows exactly why the words ‘selfish’ and ‘cowardly’ would apply to him, knows only too well.

He wonders if any of it could have been averted, all the mistakes he wouldn’t dare speak of to anyone. One person knows and it’s already too much for Kairi. They are his mistakes and as such he thinks it best to keep them hidden from anyone else. But now staring at the blackened grate in the fireplace, he finds his mind wandering backward.

A familiar face slips into his mind, a face distorted in shock.

He quickly shuts his eyes tight and it’s gone, but the memory shakes him to the core. Her face, he never wanted to see it like that again, but it’s there lurking in the back of his mind as a constant reminder of what he had done. He couldn’t—

No.

Kairi takes a few breaths. He counts; one, two, three until his mind clears.

No, instead Kairi thinks of when and where he and his sister’s lives as assassins had started. He thinks of a small house perched on the edge of a forest with craggy snow-choked mountains far beyond it. He thinks of a bitter woman who sat in a room furiously scribbling out her fortune time and time again.