Chapter 3: Eve Must Have Her Reasons
The night wind howled past her ears, teasing her silvery hair, tangling with the delicate lace of the maid headdress and the black bow upon it.
The steam train continued forward. At such speed, jumping out would be no different from suicide for an ordinary person.
Yet Eve rely adjusted her posture in midair. Physics had not entirely failed—at the very least, her skirt still lifted upward before she landed.
A fleeting glimpse of black mature-styled fabric vanished in an instant. Her knees bent slightly, and like a dragonfly touching water, she landed lightly, ignoring inertia entirely.
Her boots stepped firmly onto the gravel beside the railway, producing a series of crisp crunching sounds.
I have exited the cabin. Status: good (
The mont her figure stabilized—
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Urgent gunshots tore through the night. Bullets struck the gravel where she had just landed, exploding into sparks and flying fragnts of stone.
From the carriage window, furious and alard faces of bodyguards could be seen, along with muzzle flashes still searching for their target.
But it was already too late. Eve did not even glance back. She had already vanished like a shadow blended into the night.
…
After walking a while along a forest path nearly swallowed by weeds, she finally stopped and brushed the dust off her maid outfit.
“Tch… it still got dirty,” Eve shook her head helplessly, thinking she had grown rusty—but it did not matter.
She straightened her clothes as though nothing had happened.
Mission complete. Eve took a yellowed black-and-white photograph from a pocket beneath her skirt. It showed Klein at a podium while he was still alive.
She released it, and the night wind carried the photo away, stirring her silver hair and skirt as moonlight fell through the clouds, illuminating those inhuman red eyes.
She continued forward. The black-and-white figure gradually blurred until it completely rged into the forest path.
…
Two kiloters away, at an abandoned farm, an inconspicuous black car was parked. Beside it stood a middle-aged man in a dark old trench coat, pacing back and forth.
Under the moonlight, he looked at an old pocket watch, brows tightly furrowed, then anxiously toward the forest. The night chill made him rub his hands and breathe warm air into them from ti to ti.
Then, when he saw the white-haired figure approaching in the distance, he let out a long breath of relief.
“Did it go smoothly?” he asked while opening the rear door for Eve.
Eve could not help rolling her eyes, entirely losing the professional deanor of a maid despite still wearing the outfit.
She sat briskly inside, propping her head against the window. “Please refrain from asking
that question next ti.”
“Hah, the organization values you, after all. If anything went wrong, I would be the one getting beaten when I return,” the man joked, quickly returning to the driver’s seat and starting the engine toward the city.
In truth, it was for his own sake. This man was responsible for logistics, intelligence transmission, and extraction for each of Eve’s operations.
Almost every ti, he appeared in unexpected places—sotis the sewers, sotis an old lady’s backyard.
Eve could never understand it. Without prior notice, he could still accurately predict her location. She had long suspected he had so kind of uncanny perception.
He glanced at her through the rearview mirror. “You did not leave any traces, right?”
She produced a dining knife from beneath her skirt. The blade was unused, still spotless.
“No,” Eve said calmly, then added in complaint, “Lynn, I have carried out hundreds of missions, if not a thousand. Why do you always worry about pointless things?”
Without giving him a chance to answer, she added irritably, “Do not answer. I want so quiet.”
Honestly… the entire organization could not find a second handler with such capability.
She had long considered replacing him with soone less talkative, but obviously, he remained the most useful one available.
The man called Lynn opened his mouth as if to speak, but ultimately chose silence.
He knew Eve’s style—clean and decisive. It was why she had beco one of the organization’s top assassins in just three years, though her origins remained a mystery.
Perhaps only the leader knew.
anwhile, Eve leaned against the seat and closed her eyes to rest. Yet the faces of those girls surfaced in her mind—twenty young faces, twenty stolen futures.
She had requested to review that information herself, even though the organization usually advised the “Blade” not to learn too much about a target’s background.
“Emotion will affect judgnt.”
Her ntor had once warned her with those words.
But Eve could only ask less and do more. Knowing these things would only make her question whether what she did was right, even in a world where the law could not reach every dark corner.
When the car entered the industrial district at the city’s edge, passing smoke-filled streets, white steam still vented from pipes atop factory buildings.
Even at this late hour, capitalists maintained the twelve-hour shift cycle. Workers changed shifts, dragging exhausted bodies toward cheap rental housing.
The nation was in an era of technological and industrial growth, yet beneath the prosperous surface, people like Klein Master were far from rare.
However, Eve herself did not belong to the light. Her hands were already stained with countless blood. She only knew to carry out the organization’s missions—and dared not imagine anything else.
“We’re here,” Lynn parked before an inconspicuous apartnt building. “If there is another mission, I will pick you up here.”
Eve awakened from her rest and lazily stretched. Before stepping out, she added, “The bounty split remains the sa. No need to pass it through .”
Lynn naturally understood what “the sa” ant, though he could not comprehend it. “What is the point of you doing that? You have money with nowhere to spend?”
“Compared to , the children in the orphanage who cannot get enough to eat can probably use that dirty money better,” Eve said, shutting the car door and cutting off his complicated gaze.
She watched the car slowly drive away, then stood before the apartnt building, its depths pitch black. She touched the dining knife hidden in her sleeve; the cold tal kept her clear-headed.
Then she walked in the opposite direction from the departing car.
Because this was not her destination—rely a habit used as misdirection. An assassin must always conceal her movents, and besides…
Eve had another long-term workplace. That was also why she wore a maid outfit. Setting aside her other identities, she truly was a professional maid.
Before dawn, she had to return there—to the Morninglight Manor under the Hatherin family.
At the thought, Eve’s red eyes dimd slightly in the dark streets, and she deliberately avoided the range of streetlamps.
“So next ti, could you at least assign
a bicycle…”
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