It wasn’t supposed to be him. It was supposed to beher.
But I’m adaptable.
The knife went in cleanly enough. Right up under the jaw, buried to the hilt before I yanked and slid it to the side. Fast. Efficient. Professional, if you want to be gauche about it. He staggered, made a wet little sound I almost didn’t hear over the alarm, and went down in the hay like a felled steer.
We looked at each other for a second, me and Miguel. He with his eyes wide and full of all that surprise—oh, this is happening to me—and me with the sudden, bright irritation of a ruined take.
“You shouldn’t have come out here,” I told him.
He gargled something that might have been a prayer, might have been a name. Didn’t matter. The light left his eyes all the same.
I stepped over him and kept going. I had a house to reach. A window. A girl.
But the alarm was too loud, the system too good, the people inside too fast. Whatever Irish bastard set up that security knew what he was doing. The lights came on in too many windows; headlights swung around the curve of the drive quicker than Iliked. I caught a glimpse of someone—tall, dark, carrying a gun like he’d slept with it for years—cutting across the yard toward the barn.
And just like that, the scene was over. Cut.
A younger version of me might have forced it. Might have stayed in the shadows, waited for a better angle, taken a second or third body just to prove I could.
But I’ve learned.
You don’t throw yourself at the brick walls a fortress.
So I slid back into the dark, past the line where the cameras stopped sweeping, through the trees, down to where I’d parked off the service road. Boots muddy, hands sticky, breath fogging in the cold air.
I didn’t look back at the house.
I didn’t have to. I could hear it: the shouts, the doors, the wail of sirens converging like wolves finally catching scent. Somewhere in the middle of that chaos, Tallulah Gentry would be standing in her socks on polished hardwood, staring at the blood on someone else’s shirt and realizing that I could reach into any life she touched.
That I could take things from her that weren’t even mine to take.
So it wasn’t a total loss.
Themotelisalreadyruined by the time I get back to it.
Not physically. Physically, it’s the same sad line of doors and peeling paint, the same humming ice machine and buzzing neon VACANCY sign. My key still works. The chain still slides on.
But the space has changed because I stayed in it too long.
Patterns are important. Not just mine. Theirs.
I saw the way the police moved last time. How fast they were willing to respond forher. The local sheriff, Brady, with his clenched jaw and his stubborn insistence on doing it “by the book.” The Irish cousin in the shadows. That hulking fucking mob guy.
They’re all paying attention now.
Which means I have to let this place go.
I hate that. I put work into this room. Time. Little anchors. Extra clothes in the drawer, cash taped behind the tank in the bathroom, a razor and toothbrush lined up next to the sink. A second phone under the mattress, turned off and waiting, a spare handle and login scribbled on the paper backing of the motel Bible’s dust jacket.
I sit on the edge of the bed for a moment and look around, cataloguing what stays and what comes with me, what I can burn and what I have to abandon.
The blood on my hands has gone tacky. I flex my fingers and watch the skin crack.
Miguel was clumsy, but he bled well.
I wash at the sink, methodical, scrubbing until my knuckles go pink. The water runs dark, then lighter, then clear. I clean under my nails with the toothbrush, then toss it. I change shirts, change jeans, pull on the soft flannel I picked up two towns over because the woman at the register told me it brought out my eyes.
She smiled at me when she said it. Tucked her hair behind her ear. Told me her name without me asking.
