Yukiko, Yor (get it?) wife is trying to kill you!?

The therapist's office is aggressively beige. Beige walls, beige armchairs, a beige throw pillow positioned on the loveseat with the careful neutrality of a hostage negotiator. A potted plant in the corner — also beige, somehow, or at least a green so muted it has given up on photosynthesis entirely. The only rebellion against the beigeness is the window behind the therapist's desk, which offers a view of a perfectly ordinary parking lot and a sky that cannot seem to decide if it wants to rain.

Yukiko sits beside you on the loveseat, her hands folded primly in her lap, her posture so rigid it looks like she's bracing for impact. She is wearing a cream-colored cashmere sweater — modest, soft, utterly unlike the black combat dress currently hanging in the back of her closet like a guilty secret — and a knee-length navy skirt. Her hair is swept up in its usual neat updo, the golden rose hairband and ornamental needle pins glinting under the office's fluorescent lights. To anyone else, she looks like a perfectly composed young housewife, if perhaps a bit nervous.

You know better. You can see the faint bruise on her jaw, carefully concealed beneath a layer of foundation. The split in her lip has healed enough to be mistaken for chapped skin, but you know what it is. Her knuckles, hidden beneath those folded hands, are still faintly scabbed. Your own wounds are hidden beneath your shirt — the gash across your ribs, the puncture in your shoulder, the galaxy of bruises that have bloomed across your torso in shades of purple and yellow and sickly green.

The therapist — Dr. Vance, a middle-aged woman with reading glasses on a chain and an expression of practiced neutrality — settles into her chair with a notepad balanced on her knee. She has the look of someone who has seen everything, or at least everything that can be confessed in a beige room with a potted plant.

"Let's start with something simple," Dr. Vance says, her pen poised. She turns to Yukiko with a gentle, encouraging smile. "Yukiko. On a scale of one to ten — one being not at all, ten being completely and utterly — how much do you love your husband?"

Yukiko blinks. The question seems to catch her off-guard, though you can't imagine why — this is therapy, after all. What else would they ask about?

"Oh," she says, and then, without hesitation: "Ten."

Dr. Vance nods, making a note. "Can you elaborate on that? What makes you say ten?"

Yukiko's hands unclasp and clasp again in her lap. She looks down at them, and when she speaks, her voice is softer, stripped of the cheerful obliviousness she usually wears like armor.

"He's kind," she says. "He's the kindest person I've ever met. When we first got married, I didn't know how to cook — I mean, I still don't know how to cook. Everything I made was... wrong. The colors were wrong. The textures were wrong. Once I made a casserole that was somehow crunchy and liquid at the same time, which I still don't understand, because those are opposites." She pauses, a flush rising to her cheeks. "He ate every bite. Every time. He never complained. He just said thank you and threw up when I couldn't see him."

Dr. Vance scribbles something.

"He makes Anya laugh," Yukiko continues, and now her voice wobbles slightly, just for a moment. "The way she laughs when he's around — it's different. Bigger. Like she can't contain it. He reads her bedtime stories and does all the voices, even the princess ones, and he doesn't care that he sounds ridiculous." She swallows. "He's a good father. He's a good husband. He's..."

She trails off. Her eyes flick toward you, then away, and something complicated passes across her face — something that holds the memory of a stiletto descending toward your throat and the weight of her thighs around your hips and the sound of her own heartbeat thundering in her ears while she tried to reconcile love and duty.

"He's the only person," she says quietly, "who has ever made me feel like I could be more than what I was made t- thought I was."

A pause. Dr. Vance's pen has stopped moving.

"I see," she says, and her voice is carefully neutral. "That's a very strong endorsement." She adjusts her glasses. "Now, I'd like to ask another question, if that's alright. A bit more personal."

Yukiko nods, her expression still soft, still open, still caught in the undertow of her own confession.

"How often would you say you had sex?"

The change is instantaneous. Yukiko's face goes from soft pink to blazing crimson in approximately one second. Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. A small, strangled sound emerges — something between a squeak and a gasp — and her hands fly up to cover her face, fingers splayed wide enough that you can still see one wide, panicked eye peeking through.

"We — I — that's —" She is physically vibrating now, the cashmere of her sweater quivering with the force of her mortification. "That's a very — I mean, we've been married for — but that's not — we don't —"

She cannot seem to complete a sentence. Her ears have achieved a shade of red previously undocumented by science. The golden hairpins in her updo are trembling.

"We've been busy," she manages finally, her voice muffled behind her hands. "With... work. And the... and Anya. And there was... we had a... a thing. Recently. A disagreement. So we haven't really — I mean, not since —"

She gives up entirely, pressing her face fully into her palms with a mortified groan.

Dr. Vance blinks twice, her pen hovering uncertainly over her notepad. She looks at Yukiko — currently attempting to fuse with the loveseat through sheer force of embarrassment — and then turns to you with the expression of a woman who has decided to change tactics.

"Perhaps," she says, "you could answer the same questions. On a scale of one to ten, how much do you love your wife? And then —" she glances at Yukiko's still-trembling form, "— the same follow-up question, if you're comfortable."

The front door clicked shut behind you with the soft, familiar sound of homecoming — a sound that, in any other marriage, might have signaled safety. In this one, it signaled the beginning of the end.

Yukiko had been waiting.

She stood in the center of the living room, barefoot on the hardwood floor, her weight distributed with the casual precision of someone who had learned to balance on knife-edges before she had learned to balance a checkbook. The curtains were drawn. The afternoon light bled through them in muted gold stripes, catching the dust motes suspended in the still air. She had been standing there for forty-seven minutes, unmoving, her pulse slow and steady at fifty-two beats per minute. She had counted every single one.

The knife left her hand before the door had fully settled into its frame.

It was a chef's knife — the good one, the one you had bought her for her birthday two years ago because she had insisted she wanted to learn to cook properly. She had been so earnest then, so genuinely hopeful, holding the knife up to the kitchen light with wide crimson eyes and asking if this meant she could make Anya's birthday cake from scratch. The cake had come out green. No one knew why. Anya had eaten two slices anyway and practically died for an hour.

That same knife now spun through the air in a perfect, silent arc, its trajectory calculated to within a millimeter of the right side of your face. It was not a miss. It was a greeting. A statement of intent carved into the space between heartbeats.

The blade buried itself in the wall beside your head with a dull, vibrating thunk, and a single strand of your hair — severed clean — drifted down to land on the shoulder of your coat.

Yukiko watched it fall.

"Welcome home," she said.

Her voice was quiet. Not cold — Yukiko was never cold, not really, not in the way that mattered. The coldness lived in her eyes instead, turning them from warm red wine to frozen garnets, half-lidded and utterly still. She had shifted into her assassin's stance without appearing to move at all; one moment she was simply standing there, a beautiful woman in a black dress, and the next she was something else entirely. Something that had been waiting in the marrow of her bones since she was a child.

Her golden stilettos gleamed in her hands. She had drawn them from somewhere, the blades caught the filtered sunlight and threw it back in thin, hungry lines across the walls. Her fingerless gloves creaked faintly as she tightened her grip.

"I've been thinking," she continued, and there it was — that slight, almost apologetic tilt of her head, the ghost of the scatterbrained wife peeking through the killer's mask. "About Anya. About how long she's been at Yuri's. She called again this morning. She asked if we were done with our grown-up time yet. She said she misses her Papa and Mama."

Her voice cracked on the last word. It was the only crack in her composure, and it sealed over instantly.

"I want my daughter home."

Yukiko took a single step forward. The movement was fluid, economical, almost dance-like — her long legs shifting beneath the fitted skirt of her dress, the thigh-high boots flexing silently against the floor. The cape behind her rippled with the motion, flashing its crimson underside like a warning flag. Her breasts, full and soft beneath the structured harness of her bodice, rose and fell with a breath she did not strictly need to take.

"I've been patient," she said. "I've been very, very patient. I've tried to poison your dinner, but my cooking is so bad you couldn't eat it anyway. I've tried to garrote you while you were reading, but you dodged. I've tried to drown you in the bathtub, but you held your breath longer than I expected, and then you looked up at me with your stupid face and I —"

She stopped. Swallowed. The tips of her ears went pink, which was absurd given the circumstances.

"— and I got distracted. But I'm not distracted anymore."

Another step. Her hips swayed naturally with the motion, the curve of them pronounced against the sleek black fabric of her dress, the roundness of her backside shifting as she settled into a lower stance. Her body was a contradiction — softness layered over lethality, the plush fullness of her breasts and the generous sweep of her thighs concealing musculature that could snap bone. When she moved, parts of her moved with her. The jiggle was subtle but present, a reminder that beneath the assassin was a woman, and beneath the woman was something neither of you had ever fully learned to name.

"I've never failed an order," she said. "Not once. Not ever. When I was sixteen, they sent me after a man twice my size who had killed six operatives before me. I put him down in four minutes. When I was twenty-one, I cleared an embassy by myself because my backup got stuck in traffic." She laughed, and it was a terrible sound — soft and genuine and utterly heartbroken.* "I've killed diplomats, generals, traitors, and monsters. I've never hesitated. I've never missed. And then you."

She pointed one of her stilettos at you, her arm perfectly straight, the blade unwavering.

"You. You ate my cooking. Every single time. You ate it even when you threw up. You married me knowing I couldn't make toast without setting off the smoke alarm. You gave me a daughter. You made me happy." Her voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "Do you know how much harder that makes this?"

Yukiko's crimson eyes glistened, but no tears fell. She had cried once already, she would not cry again. Not until this was over.

"So here is what's going to happen," she said, and the coldness was back now, complete and absolute. "One of us is dying today. I've decided. I'm not spending another week trying to stab you and then asking what you want for breakfast. I'm not going to keep pretending we're just having a difficult patch in our marriage. Anya needs to come home, and she needs to come home to stability, and if that stability has to be built on one parent's grave, then —" She drew a shaky breath. "— then that's what's going to happen."

She settled into her combat stance fully now — weight on the balls of her feet, knees slightly bent, both stilettos held in a reverse grip with the blades angled outward. Her black hair, still down from this morning, fell past her shoulders in a silken curtain, the curtain bangs framing the lethal focus of her face. The golden rose ornaments in her hair glinted, and the small flower pendant at her throat rose and fell with her pulse.

"I'm sorry," she said, and meant it. "I love you. I do. But unless some miracle happens — unless the organization itself burns to the ground or the sun falls out of the sky — this is the only way this ends."

A beat of silence.

"I'm giving you a chance, though. Because you're my husband. Because Anya loves you. So if you have any weapons hidden in this house — and I know you do, you're too smart not to — now would be the time."

Her eyes flicked to the bookshelf, then to the loose floorboard by the couch, then to the decorative vase on the mantelpiece. She knew. She had always known. She just hadn't wanted to acknowledge it, because acknowledging it meant acknowledging that her husband was a spy, and acknowledging that meant acknowledging that this exact moment may had been inevitable from the day they met.

Yukiko smiled. It was a sad smile, but it was real.

"Come on. Let's finish this."

The world had narrowed to two points of pressure: the trembling edge of Yukiko’s stiletto descending toward your throat, and the cold steel of your pistol barrel pressing up against the soft underside of her chin. Time had stopped meaning anything approximately seventeen minutes into the fight, when the antique grandfather clock in the hallway had taken a stray bullet to the face and died with a discordant, judgmental chime. Now there was only the ragged symphony of your breathing and hers, the wet sound of blood dripping onto hardwood, the creak of straining muscle and the slick slide of sweat-sheened skin against skin.

Yukiko straddled your hips, her thighs clamped around your waist with the inexorable pressure of a hydraulic press. The slit in her black dress had torn all the way to her hip somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, exposing the full length of her left leg and the lacy top of her thigh-high stocking. The harness of her bodice had been sliced through in two places — your doing, with the letter opener from the end table — and the ruined fabric gaped precariously, threatening to spill her breasts free with every heaving breath. As it was, the plush inner curve of her left breast was visible, gleaming with a sheen of perspiration, the soft flesh jiggling minutely with each desperate adjustment of her position. A thin line of blood traced from her collarbone down into that forbidden valley, a casualty of a near-miss with a shattered picture frame fifteen minutes ago.

She was beautiful. Even now. Especially now. Her crimson eyes blazed down at you through the tangled curtain of her black hair, which had long since escaped its ornaments and now hung wild and sweat-damp around her face. A bruise was purpling along her jaw where you’d caught her with an elbow. Her lower lip was split, beading a single ruby droplet that trembled with every exhale. The golden rose ornaments were gone — one lost behind the overturned sofa, the other crushed underfoot during the brief, brutal skirmish in the kitchen. Her cape had been discarded entirely, ripped from her shoulders when you’d used it to yank her off-balance and slam her into the bookshelf. The memory of her gasp, the way her spine had arched, the soft shocked jiggle of her backside as she’d impacted the shelves — it would have been arousing in any other context. Here, it was just another data point in a cascade of mutual destruction.

Your own body was a roadmap of her affection. A shallow gash across your ribs where her first knife had kissed you. A deeper puncture in your left shoulder from when she’d pinned you briefly against the mantelpiece, her face inches from yours, her breath hot and shuddering, her breasts pressed against your chest so that you could feel her heart hammering through the ruined bodice. She had hesitated then. Half a second. Her crimson eyes had flickered, something vast and agonized swimming up from their depths, and you had used that half-second to drive your knee into her stomach and reverse your positions. The memory of her pained grunt, the way her body had folded around the impact, the soft give of her belly against your knee — it sat in your chest like a stone.

Now she was on top again. The stiletto in her right hand shook with the effort of driving downward, its point a gleaming star of promised death hovering eighteen inches above your throat. Your left hand was locked around her wrist, arm trembling, bicep screaming, the muscles of your forearm corded so tight they felt like they might snap. Her left hand was clamped around your right wrist in a mirrored grip, forcing your pistol to angle away toward the ceiling, away from her face, away from the elegant line of her jaw and the vulnerable throb of her pulse. The gun was heavy. Your shoulder burned. The wound there wept fresh blood with every incremental struggle, hot and sticky, trickling down your arm to mingle with the sweat already slicking your grip.

The living room around you was a disaster zone. The coffee table had been the first casualty, shattered in the opening seconds when you’d flipped it as a barrier and she’d vaulted over it like a gymnast, all flashing thighs and billowing cape and the cold, sorrowful focus of her gaze. The sofa was overturned, its cushions slashed open, white stuffing vomited across the floor in drifts that looked obscenely like snow. The bookshelf had lost most of its contents, and a scattered library of hardcovers and paperbacks formed a treacherous archipelago across the hardwood. The decorative vase lay in pieces. The curtains had been torn down. There was a knife embedded in the ceiling — you weren’t sure whose — and another in the wall beside the hallway door. Blood smeared the floor in abstract patterns, some yours, some hers, impossible to distinguish anymore. The air tasted of copper and sweat and the faint, incongruous floral note of her perfume, which had somehow survived the carnage.

“Just—” Yukiko gritted out, her voice strained with effort, her thighs tightening around your hips in a way that would have been intimate if it weren’t actively trying to restrict your breathing. Her backside spread against your pelvis with the shift of her weight, the generous curve of it firm and flexing as she adjusted her leverage. The torn dress had ridden up dangerously high, revealing the lacy band of her stocking top and the pale, glistening skin above it. “Just give up. Please. I’ll make it quick. I promise. I’ll make it so quick you won’t even—”

The stiletto dipped another inch. Your arm buckled slightly, and you saw the flash of pained hope in her eyes, the desperate wish that you would just stop fighting, just let her end this, just release her from the unbearable weight of loving you. But beneath that hope was something else — a flicker of terror at the possibility that you might actually comply. She didn’t want to win. She had never wanted to win. That was the tragedy of it, the beautiful, unbearable tragedy that had sustained this marriage for years and was now tearing it apart.

The pistol inched toward her face. She grunted, her breasts swaying with the sudden effort of forcing it back, the torn bodice finally giving up its last thread of integrity. The black fabric slipped, and her left breast spilled free — full and round and gleaming with sweat, the nipple pebbled tight from adrenaline and the cool air of the destroyed room. Yukiko made a small, mortified sound, a flush rising to her cheeks even as she maintained her death-grip on your wrist. Even now. Even like this. The scatterbrained wife, embarrassed by her own body’s betrayal in the middle of a murder attempt.

“D-don’t look!” she yelled, her ears going crimson.

The stiletto dipped another inch.

And then, impossibly, bizarrely, a phone rang.

The sound was so incongruous, so utterly out of place in the blood-slicked silence of your mutual destruction, that for a moment neither of you moved. It was a cheerful, tinny ringtone — a generic default jingle that sounded like it belonged in an elevator or a department store. It was coming from the kitchen, where Yukiko’s phone had skittered under the breakfast bar during the initial chaos.

Yukiko’s eyes widened. Her grip on your wrist slackened by a fraction. Her whole body, which had been coiled with lethal intent, suddenly went rigid with a different kind of tension. She knew that ringtone. You knew she knew that ringtone, because in six years of marriage you had never once heard it. It was the ringtone she had assigned to exactly one contact.

The organization.

“Time out,” she said abruptly, and the shift in her demeanor was so sudden and complete that it was like watching a different person step into her skin. The assassin’s focus drained from her face, replaced by something sharper, more urgent — the look of a professional responding to a priority override. She released your wrist and rolled off you in a single fluid motion, her bare breast swaying with the movement before she absently tugged the ruined bodice back into approximate position. Her stiletto vanished into some hidden sheath. Her bare feet made soft, tacky sounds on the blood-spattered floor as she padded toward the kitchen, stepping over the wreckage of your home with the casual grace of someone navigating a familiar obstacle course.

You lay there for a moment, chest heaving, pistol still in your hand, the ghost of her weight still pressing against your hips. The ceiling stared back at you, impassive, marked with a single knife wound that had scattered plaster dust across the overturned sofa.

From the kitchen, you heard her answer.

“Yes. This is she.”

A pause. The faint, indecipherable murmur of a voice on the other end of the line. You couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was clipped, professional, utterly devoid of the warmth that Yukiko’s voice usually carried. This was not a social call.

“Yes. I understand.”

Her voice had changed. The strain was gone, the sorrow was gone, the barely-contained heartbreak that had throbbed through every word of her pre-combat speech had vanished entirely. In its place was something neutral, something alert, something that was listening very carefully and processing information with the cold, efficient precision of a woman who had been trained to analyze threat vectors before she had been trained to read.

Another pause. Longer this time. You heard her shift her weight, the soft creak of the kitchen floorboards beneath her stockinged feet. A drop of your own blood rolled down your temple and into your ear.

“Yes. I can confirm that.”

Something in her voice flickered — a note of confusion, maybe, or surprise. The professional mask slipped for just an instant, and beneath it you heard the woman you had married, the woman who burned toast and laughed at her own failures and held your daughter on her hip with the exaggerated care of someone who still couldn’t quite believe she was allowed to have this. Then the mask sealed over again, smooth as still water.

“Understood. Yes. Yes, I’ll — yes. Of course. I’ll await further instructions.”

Another pause. You pushed yourself up onto your elbows, wincing at the scream of protest from your injured shoulder. Yukiko was standing in the kitchen doorway now, her back half-turned to you, her silhouette framed by the muted gold light bleeding through the kitchen window. Her black hair fell in a tangled cascade down her spine. The curves of her body — the soft swell of her hips, the rounded fullness of her backside against the tight black fabric of her dress, the long elegant lines of her legs in their thigh-high boots — were limned in that same golden glow. She was holding the phone to her ear with one hand, and the other was pressed flat against the doorframe, her fingers splayed as if she needed the support.

“No. That won’t be necessary. I’ll handle it personally. Yes. Thank you.”

She ended the call. The phone dropped to her side. For a long moment she simply stood there, her back to you, her shoulders rising and falling with breaths that were growing faster, shakier, less controlled. The professional mask was cracking. Whatever she had just heard, it was working its way through her emotional defenses like water through stone, finding every fissure, every fault line, every hidden pocket of the woman she kept buried beneath the killer’s stoicism.

Then she turned around.

Her crimson eyes were wet. Tears — real tears, the ones she had sworn she wouldn’t cry — were spilling over her cheeks, cutting clean tracks through the blood and the sweat and the grime. Her lower lip was trembling. Her ruined bodice had slipped again, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. Her breasts rose and fell with the hitching, uneven rhythm of someone trying very hard not to sob and failing utterly.

But she was smiling. It was the biggest, brightest, most radiant smile you had ever seen on her face, bigger even than the smile she’d worn on your wedding day, bigger than the smile she’d worn when Anya took her first steps. It was a smile that erased the bruise on her jaw and the split in her lip and the exhaustion in her eyes. It was a smile that made the last hour of attempted murder feel like a distant, absurd nightmare.

“We don’t have to fight anymore,” she said, and her voice broke on the words, shattered into a dozen pieces and reassembled itself into something giddy and incredulous and brimming with joy. “It’s over. The order’s been rescinded. We don’t — we don’t have to do this.”

She took a step toward you, then another, her bare feet crunching on the scattered debris of your destroyed living room. The phone was still clutched in her hand. Her other hand came up to wipe at her eyes, smearing blood and tears together in a gesture that was so quintessentially Yukiko — clumsy, earnest, utterly without pretense — that it made your chest ache.

“It’s a really long story,” she said, answering the question you hadn’t asked yet, her words tumbling over each other in their eagerness to escape. “Really long. Like, sit-down-with-snacks long. I’ll explain everything, I promise, I just — I need a minute, I need to process, this is —” She laughed, a wet, hiccuping sound that was half-sob and half-giggle.* “This is insane. This is absolutely insane.”

She stopped in front of you, swaying slightly, looking down at where you were still half-sprawled among the wreckage. Her bare breast was still partially exposed, the soft flesh gleaming in the muted light, and she seemed to finally notice because she made a small, flustered noise and tugged the bodice up again, her ears going pink even through her tears.

“Anyway,” she said, sniffing hard, “the point is — the point is we don’t have to kill each other. We can just —” She spread her arms, gesturing vaguely at the ruined room, at the blood, at the two of you. “We can just be married. Normally. Or whatever we were before. Before the thing. You know.”

She paused. A new thought visibly struck her, and her eyes went wide with excitement.

“Anya,” she breathed. “We can bring Anya home. We don’t have to — she doesn’t have to — oh my god, when should we bring her home? Should we bring her home tonight? Tomorrow? I don’t want to wait too long, she’s probably so confused, and Yuri’s been feeding her nothing but junk food, I just know it, and —”

She stopped. Her gaze drifted slowly across the living room, taking in the overturned sofa, the shattered coffee table, the holes in the TV, the blood smeared across the floor in patterns that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting if Jackson Pollock had worked exclusively in shades of crimson. She took in the bullet holes in the wall. The scattered books. The stuffing from the cushions, drifting lazily in the afternoon light like the world’s most depressing snowflakes. The knife still embedded in the wall by the front door. The second knife in the ceiling. The third knife she couldn’t even see but knew was somewhere behind the television stand.

Her smile faltered.

“Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh, no.”

She turned in a slow circle, her bare feet leaving faint pink prints on the hardwood, her expression shifting from radiant joy to dawning horror as the full scope of the destruction registered. Her backside swayed gently with the motion, the fabric of her dress stretched taut across its generous curve, and there was something almost comical about the contrast between her lethal assassin’s physique and the housewife’s dismay spreading across her face.

“The floors,” she whispered. “The walls. The — That’s a bullet hole in the ceiling. Do you know how to fix a bullet hole in the ceiling? Because I don’t. I can kill a man in four hundred different ways but I can’t spackle. Oh god, the sofa. The sofa. That was the nice sofa. We saved up for that sofa.”

She pressed her hands to her cheeks, a gesture of theatrical dismay that was so perfectly, absurdly Yukiko that it almost made the last hour feel like a fever dream. The blood on her fingers smeared across her cheekbones, adding war paint to her expression of domestic catastrophe.

“We’re going to have to clean all of this up before Anya comes home,” she said, her voice climbing toward something approaching panic. “We’re going to have to clean it and fix it and maybe repaint and probably buy new furniture and —” She turned back to you, her crimson eyes wide and wet and suddenly, impossibly, hopeful. “— and we’re going to have to do it together. Because we’re not trying to kill each other anymore. Because the order’s been rescinded. Because —”

She broke off, and the smile crept back onto her face, smaller this time, more fragile, but no less genuine.

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