Visha crouched in the shadows of a large chimney, gazing down at the manor across the street.
The manor of Lady Sophia Everston, the closest thing she had to a friend.
The manor that she was supposed to sneak into to kill its owner, by order of Mistress Lairis.
To kill Sophia.
Visha sighed and shook her head, at a loss. Could she really go through with this? Lairis hadn’t even told her what Sophia had done to deserve this fate, or even who had hired them to go through with this.
Worse, she was starting to get the feeling that no one had—that maybe Lairis had decided it was time to test her loyalties and see where they truly lie.
With her mistress, the woman who had saved her life when she’d been nothing but a homeless orphan living in the streets, or with her friend, who had given that life meaning.
To be bluntly honest, it wasn’t really a choice, not to Visha; she didn’t even like—would even go so far as to say she hated—Lairis. But to turn her back on the woman also meant turning her back on everything she’d ever known, and thus the idea was uncomfortable to say the least.
What was she if not an assassin, a scoundrel, a thief? What was she without Lairis? The woman practically made her.
But I never wanted this, she thought. It had never been her decision; Lairis taken her when she’d been a young girl desperate for anything besides the miserable existence she’d been living before and then shaped her to fit the needs of the guild.
Visha had been too young and afraid to see what was happening, but she saw it now.
And now she had a choice.
And, frightening as it may have been, she knew what she needed to do.
Visha dropped down from the roof, into an alleyway with a large dumpster at its back. She stripped off her mask and weapons, then tossed them into the bin with the rest of the rubbish.
The assassins working under Lairis would surely come searching for her and discover them later, but she did not care; let them see her discarded belongings, the evidence of her decision.
She would choose her own path now.
Thank you for reading! I wrote this story as part of the Storytelling Collective’s Flash Fiction February 2023 challenge, so a huge thanks to them for inspiring me to give it a shot.
