“Thanks,” I say, hoping he doesn’t read the falseness of my smile. He and Brooke wave politely and disappear deeper into the pub. I wait until the eyes have peeled off me to down the rest of my wine in a desperate gulp. “Oh my God.”
“Welldone, Emma,” says Lilly eagerly, swatting my arm. She’s grinning. “Deceit comes shockingly easy to you!”
I shudder. “I need another drink.”
“Hey, for what it’s worth, I actually think that helped.” Her eyes go around the pub, appraising. “Nobody’s really looking at you anymore.”
“Yeah. OK. Even so. I’m gonna step out. I need some air.” I scramble for my purse, wine-flushed, suddenly drowning in the heat of the pub. “Order me another?”
Lilly winks at me. “You got it.”
I manage to keep my smile up all the way out into the back alley. Then the humiliated, agonized tears start flowing. I root through my purse for the contraband pack of cigarettes I quit years ago, but took up again after the broken engagement. It’s almost full. I’ve only had two or three, and even then, couldn’t get through the whole thing without feeling guiltier, faultier, and more broken than usual.
But right now, I’m desperate. Thunder sounds in the distance, spring rain on the way. I struggle with the lighter as the wind blows.
Somewhere down the alley, an aluminum can bounces off the pavement, skittering to a stop. I scan the dancing shadows and thrown stars of lamplight, but no one is there. No one, at least, that I can see.
I shake myself, my wine buzz starting to really kick in, and light the cigarette. This time it catches, and I inhale a deep, desperate cloud of smoke. The release it triggers is instant, and I sag against the pub wall, closing my eyes, releasing the smoke through my nose.
A faint rain starts, half-hearted and wind-tossed. For a moment, there’s almost a sense of peace in the dark and solitude. I feel my guard drop.
And that’s when a hand clamps hard over my mouth. I open my eyes, but the assailant already has me spun around and pinned to the pub wall. I try to scream, but it’s no use—the hand over my mouth tastes cloying and acidic. I realize in dawning horror that there’s a cloth pressed to my mouth and nose. And it occurs to me, just before the black tide of unconsciousness comes soaring over my head, that what I taste is chloroform.
Is this all that I am?
The words of the poem stick in me like a knife as my body crumples. I expect to hit concrete, but I’m caught instead in powerful arms, and lifted.
There’s a face above me—a familiar one. I think. But the dark is closing in, and my mind is loose as smoke. The last thing I’m aware of is a heartbeat; my ear against a man’s strong chest, and the drumming sound of his life.
Impossibly, it’s a comfort.
2
Malcom
Rosehill once belonged to an immigrant Englishwoman of noble means. Over the centuries, it’s been a home, an orphanage, a sick house, a famine house, and then again a villa.
When I bought it at twenty-five, now near a decade ago, it was a ruin locally affronted as haunted. I liked the idea of living with ghosts. Of the supernatural guarding the walls against any who came knocking.
But in the years since I bought the place, no one has come to know it’s mine. It’s far from the big cities and even the rural towns, with the closest strip of shops and homes being nearly forty kilometers away. It’s the perfect place to live in secret, a hitman among civil people. It’s the perfect place to begin the next chapter of my life.
And somehow, she fits right into it.
Pete, my right-hand man, and Callie, the live-in housemaid, have made her comfortable. She’ll wake soon, though, and I want to be there when she does.
To justify—no, to explain—why. Why I chose her. Why I’ve taken her. Why she’s here, and will be—likely for the rest of her life.
“Sir.” Pete appears, dressed in fine but discreet black, as per usual. He worked for my father, a hitman before me, and his familiar, aged face is still a comfort. His gray beard is trimmed nicely, and his pale, water-colored eyes are as sure and steady as a ship on calm waters. “She’s stirring.”
I nod once, appraising the dark curtain of night still hanging over the dawn. The hills here are dew-wet and shadowed, and there isn’t another soul for miles. But from here I can still see the dark spires of Blicktenner, our only neighbor, a haunted castle ruin that howls in a storm. It sobers me, the cold stark sight of it. I turn in to face the girl I’ve kidnapped.
Rosehill has been empty while I’ve travelled. My jobs took me to Ireland, England, even overseas. My work has been in high demand. But the mafia my father once called his family has hit dire straits, and I knew if I wanted any part in its future, I had to return to Scotland. So Callie pulled the sheets off the furniture and lit the fires.
There’s a remaining stillness though, to the great villa. Even with Callie and Jen, the other maid, and me and Pete and now—her. I try not to let it get to me as I briskly take the stone stairs. Callie and Jen nod to me as I pass the kitchen, forever loyal and silent servants. What do they think, I wonder? Of the girl upstairs?
I try to ignore the rising sense of guilt, building like bile behind my ribs. Not for the first time, I resent myself and my skillset. I am a killer. But more so, I am a criminal. One who has learned to be invisible, to slide knives into vulnerable places. It was all too easy to make Emma’s kidnapping look innocuous. She’s recovering from a public separation, and I’ve been watching her, waiting for the moment to strike. It was the first night she’d gone out in months. And after encountering her ex, would it be so mad to imagine she’d fled town? Gone to travel, to find herself and escape her past?
I am cruel for framing the crime this way. But I am also cautious. For both of our safety, and for the success of this mission, I had to make sure no one will look for Emma Rosen. And because of the way I staged her house, leaving a brief note behind claiming she needed a moment of solitude and freedom—no one will.
