“I don’t believe you,”Emmett states, and I can’t help the roll of my eyes. He’s been spoon-feeding me doubt since the shed, and he’s still acting like I can’t read the room. “He was skilled enough to look around instead of walking straight into the middle of the shed and getting shot like that.”
“He acted before he thought. Bad things happen when you move on impulse,” I say, my fingers brushing over the pendant in my pocket.
I was the last to leave the shed, and I couldn’t resist the urge when I leaned down and snatched the pendant from Owen’s neck. His death was more satisfying than Ezra’s, and right now, the little souvenir grounds me as I touch it.
Estella and I move toward the van seats, ready to close this scene and leave it behind. Emmett lingers at the trunk, hands hovering over the fabric that hides our arsenal as if he’s trying to solve a puzzle with pieces that never fit.
“Look, you can whine on the road,” Estella suggests, acid-soft, her palm flat against the van’s cool side. “We need to get out of here.”
The way those two dithered still puzzles me. They dangled performance over purpose—more interested in posture than practice. Disorganized, unimaginative, dull as the blunt edge of a blade. A parody of what assassins should be.
“I need a moment,” Emmett says at last. He snaps the trunk shut and leans his palms into the metal, head dipping as he chews his bottom lip like a man trying to swallow his failure whole.
Estella and I exchange a look before we slide into the van—her in the driver’s seat, me beside her. The doors close around us with a practiced hush, sealing the world out until only the interior and its small truths remain.
“I killed him,” I confess, a weight lifting off my tongue. Carefully, I pull the pendant from my pocket and show it to her. “He annoyed the fuck out of me.”
Estella’s face remains still, a mask that reveals nothing, as she looks at the pendant before shifting her eyes to mine. Slowly, a grin cracks through—small and knowing, teasing at something hidden. She leans back, the leather beneath her shifting witha soft sigh, and a quiet laugh escapes her, bright, sharp, and dangerous, curling through the space between us.
“I know,” she says, a note of pride coloring her voice while I shove the pendant back into my pocket. “I felt it.”
Without breaking eye contact, she lowers her window and tilts her head toward the opening. “We’ll start the van to warm it up,” she tells Emmett before turning the key. The engine coughs and swells into a throaty growl that vibrates through the metal.
Her eyes drift upward to the rearview mirror, and mine follow, drawn as if by an invisible thread. Our gazes meet there, colliding and locking me in place. My breath thins until it halts entirely.
Her eyes are soft, deceptively calm, yet a spike of something lethal glints within them—sharp and hidden like a blade beneath silk. I hold her stare, the dark temper reflected there matching the harsh lines at the corners of my own eyes, raw and carved from too many sleepless nights.
Silence thickens around us, swelling until it feels alive. Beneath it, a subtle, confusing current of recognition threads through me, the slow awakening of a feeling I cannot name.
We hail from opposite edges of the world, and yet beneath the hard veneer, there is this strange, uncanny kinship. A flicker of familiarity, a delicate comfort that should not exist where blades and blood are our companions. The sensation is both wrong and right, like an old scar that remembers warmth.
She glances back, catching Emmett as he steps away from the trunk and stamps out the cigarette with a lazy kick. He straightens, shoulders bunched, ready to get in the van. In the same instant, her foot finds the pedal and the van lunges.
The impact is a brutal punctuation, sending a heavy thud that ripples through metal and marrow. Emmett’s raw scream rents the air, and for a moment it is all sound—a jagged, animal keening that climbs into the sky.
I am frozen, lips parted in shock, as the van rides over him. The chassis judders, a violent staccato of flesh and bone against rubber. There’s a close, sickening crunch that would set a normal person’s teeth on edge. His cries taper, breaking up into thin, ragged sobs as motion and breath struggle for purchase.
She eases forward, glances over her shoulder at the mess of broken bones under the tires, then backs up with a mechanical calm. The van rolls again, deliberate and clinical, flattening movement into certainty. When she finishes, she leans her back against the seat, a ghost of fake remorse taking over her face.
“Oops,” she drawls, the word soft and mocking, eyes widening in an exaggerated show of surprise.
Something in the innocence radiating off her and in that one hushed word makes me laugh—the sound shaking my chest before it turns into a snort.
At the dash, she finds a disc already seated in the player. With one finger, she presses play, and the first song blooms into the cabin.
Insane in the BrainbyCypress Hillfloods the space, the bass thumping against the metal frame of the van, vibrating through my chest and rattling the air like a pulse. I can’t stop the smirk that curls against my lips, a low, hot thrill spiraling through me and knotting warmth and adrenaline together in one sharp coil.
“Teamwork sucks,” Estella mutters, shooting me a glare that’s half irritation, half amusement. Then her lips twitch, a smile breaking through, the familiar psychotic gleam lighting up the depths of her eyes. “But at least he’s got good taste in music.”
Her laugh blends with the beat, and for a moment, the van feels like the only world that matters—a moving bubble where chaos, blood, and the thrill of the hunt collide.
Alaska
“Are you sure you’re not mad at me for it?” I ask, my voice low and a little slurred, the alcohol softening the edges of everything. The half-empty glass of amber liquid sits on the table beside me, the taste of whiskey still clinging to my tongue.
I didn’t plan to get drunk, and I’m not truly. Just a little tipsy. No matter how many glasses I drown, it’s never enough to silence the noise in my head. I’ve always thought that was its own kind of curse—being unable to let go, even after chugging a whole bottle down. I can’t relax naturally, can’t drink myself intooblivion. All I ever manage is a muted blur of thoughts, tangled together like the paint-streaked chaos of a madman’s canvas.
Right now, I feel exactly that. I’m worn to the bone, adrift in the hazy quiet of this hotel room, my thoughts buzzing faintly in the background. Estella’s laugh cuts through it, the sound sharp, bright, and alive. My eyes focus on her, and for a moment, I just look, my mouth twitching into a faint smile.
