“The Moon,” she mused to herself, “symbol of deception and muddled thinking.” She paused, allowing the completion of her thought to surface from the depths of her unconscious. “Of allowing the emotions to rule the mind.”

She could have taken his life when he had wandered onto the balcony, his face turned upwards in adoration of the midnight sky and the diamond-like stars strewn through out its velvety depths. He was caught, hanging in time as the moon illuminated the whiteness of his face, his hair a shower of stars against the darkness of his cloak, which gently flapped in the breeze. Yet she was caught with him as she held him in her gaze, greedily drinking the beauty of him into her parched soul. In that moment, her apathy ceased to control her and she knew what it meant to feel once again. She was drawn to him, this man whom she had been sent here to kill, this man who stood for everything she stood against.

She needed him like a wilting flower needed the sun, or a dying man his last words of confession to release his spirit.

She wove her way through the throng of people chattering merrily in the ballroom, and silently moved onto the balcony, where she leaned against the polished railing, her hands clasped, and whispered that she had never seen anything more beautiful in her existence.

He looked down, the spell not broken, merely changed, and smiled the smile of a benevolent angel, his eyes sparkling like the ocean on a clear summer’s day. He asked her name, and she told him, then looked down as she berated herself. She never told a mark her name. Not her real one at least.

He introduced himself, and they both turned back to the scene of the heavens unfolding before them.

She had wanted to believe him ugly and cruel. She had not been prepared for him to tear her from her blanket of apathy. She could have killed him while they were in the garden, the scent of jasmine heavy in the air as he clasped his heavy cloak about her shoulders to shield her from the cold. And yet she merely smiled and told herself that she was playing a game, toying with her prey like a cat played with a mouse before it made the kill. She could have sheathed one of her daggers in his back as he bent to pick a flower. But he stood, unmolested, with a rose as white as his hands when they stripped the thorns from the stem and tucked it gently behind her ear.

She had looked at his hands, noted the drop of crimson welling from the tip of his index finger and clasped his hand to her face, placing the injured finger against her lips. She was an assassin, a killer trained in the ways of dealing death and pain.

She was a soldier in a holy war fought between good and evil. She had learned at a very young age to put her feelings away, for they made her weak and vulnerable. She had killed many a beautiful man and woman, ordered to do so in the name of all that was good and holy.

And yet she kissed the blood away as he later kissed her tears away, unknowing that she had orders to take from him his life.

She could have done so when they stood together in the darkened room to which she had led him, telling herself that she would end his life there. Instead, she let the pale silk fall from around her shoulders to her waist, and then to the floor, stepping lightly into the lone moonbeam illuminating the room’s depths. She allowed the pile of curls situated pristinely atop her head to tumble freely around her face and shoulder as she stood, beseeching him with haunted eyes to join her.

Afterwards, he had gazed at her in awe as he whispered what she already knew, that he had been the first to lay with her. She nodded, eyes bright as she told herself that she would end his life when he fell asleep.

She could have killed him after she had tied his arms above his head, her silk scarves looped securely around his starlight pale wrists and the elaborate iron headboard. Yet she did not end his life. Instead, she covered his body with tender kisses as the tears slid silently from her shadowed eyes and splashed against the tautness of his flesh like scalding wax.

When she unbound him, he held her against his chest, wiping the tears from her wet cheeks and placing kisses like butterfly’s wings on her eyelids.

As they lay entwined with each other, she stroked his hair and told herself that she would do it, soon.

He enfolded her in his strong arms and asked if he would see her when he awoke. She smiled, her throat dry, and almost mockingly asked him the same. He chuckled and told her that there would be nothing he would rather see than her, when he awoke, or any other time, and kissed her softly. She curled into the protectiveness of his arms and closed her eyes.

Even when she heard his steady, deep breathing indicating his deep sleep, she did not move. Finally, he groaned and rolled over, his arm hanging over the bed.

It was then that she slipped a cold hand under her pillow and clasped the dagger she had laid there before their meeting. She knew he was evil. She knew that he was the enemy of all that she believed in. They told her so. And yet she somehow thought that it would be different. It was she who had seduced him, not the other way around. It was she who had come here to kill this man. It was she who lulled him into a feeling of security, and she who held the dagger now.

He smiled gently in his sleep as he whispered her name and mumbled that she was the only one who understood, the only one who could understand. She kissed his forehead as she watched his face relax back into marble smoothness.

This angel before her, this vision of ethereal beauty, was to die by her hand this night. She was to place the cold steel against the smoothness of his throat and watch the life pass from him in crimson rivers.

“God help me, I can not do it! I can not take from this Earth one of his own, made in his likeness! Can one of such beauty be truly evil, when it is I who stalk my prey in the shadows? I will follow him, do what he wills. I will be what he asks of me, for it is I who am evil in the name of good. Now I will be good in the name of evil...for him. For me.“ The thud of the dagger as it sank into the wood of the door across the room echoed in her screaming mind, sealing her fate.

She wrapped her arms around him and nuzzled her cheek into his neck. “For you...” She whispered, and fell asleep.