My lips press together as I fight back a smirk. “Somebody pissed you off, huh?”
“That… was a personal matter.” His eyes dart to the open bag, then to Julian’s lifeless body. “Now why the fuck would he snoop around in my bag? This fucking idiot.”
A laugh escapes me, rising from deep in my chest, impossible to hold back.
Sometimes, the universe has a sense of humor. Sometimes, problems solve themselves.
Cane turns away, phone pressed tight to his ear, muttering orders to whoever’s on the other end. His voice fades into background noise, a dull hum against the crackling silence.
My attention lingers on Julian’s body, on the way his arm bends unnaturally, on the faint gleam of the bottle still caught in his fingers. This is exactly what every man looks like to me in the end: weak, stupid, and incapable.
Everyone except Dante.
Cane broughtme Dante’s file early in the morning, and since then, time has lost all meaning. Hours blur into each other as I sit buried in the pages, dissecting every sentence, every comma, reading between the lines until my eyes sting. My mind keeps drawing pictures, sketching faces and scenes where words fallshort, and then I draw them again on paper, trying to make my imagination sharper, more alive.
There isn’t much in the file. Cane never bothers with deep analysis or psychological profiles—he deals in facts, not motives. A name, a date, a kill. That’s all he needs. But I’ve always been good at filling in the blanks. I have a vivid, useful imagination.
A strawberry gummy bear melts on my tongue as I chew, the artificial sweetness coating the taste of ink and paper that lingers in the air. My fingers trail over the slightly yellowed sheets, tracing the faded type as my feet dangle off the chair, crossing and uncrossing absently. I’ve been rereading the same paragraph for what feels like an eternity, each repetition twisting the words into something new.
Heavy, layered, relentless theories build in my mind like storm clouds. The file is full of broken facts that refuse to fit together, and what I know from Dante himself is even more fragile, like ancient parchment crumbling under too much pressure.
Take his parents, for example. The file labels him an orphan, nothing more. No names, no records. From what he told me, he killed them, but the file doesn’t even include a description of that. It’s maddening, and yet, at the same time, that void gives me room to breathe, to imagine, to theorize.
There’s always a reason. There has to be.
I’m not sure if people are born evil. I’ve thought about it too many times to count, and I still can’t find an answer that satisfies me. Maybe it’s not something you’re born with—maybe it’s something that grows, like a seed you never planted but that takes root anyway.
When I think back to my own childhood, I remember being impulsive, wild in ways that didn’t make sense even to me. When my parents punished me, I remember feeling nothing. Not anger, not guilt, not even fear. Just… emptiness. Like someonehad tied chains around my tongue, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t say I was sorry. I couldn’t care. I just stood there, absorbing their disappointment in silence.
They told me I was bad, wrong, and broken, and I certainly was. I did things I shouldn’t have done, not because I wanted to hurt anyone, but because I didn’t understand why I shouldn’t.
I never wanted to kill anyone at first. Not until I grew older.
Sometimes, when insomnia digs its claws into me, I wonder what would’ve happened if things had been different. If someone had tried harder. If love could’ve changed me, softened the sharp edges, rewired something in my head. Maybe I could’ve learned how to be normal.
But I guess we’ll never know that.
Dante’s parents were assholes—I’m sure of it. I saw it in his eyes the first time he talked about them, back when we started working together. That flutter told me everything words couldn’t.
The way he described killing them didn’t carry the hollow chill of indifference, the numb detachment of someone recounting a story from another life. There was a rhythm to it, a cadence that hinted at somethingearned, something carved out of necessity and choice rather than chaos. I can feel the reasoning pressing beneath the surface, a dark logic that demands to be understood.
And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the thing that gnaws at me most fiercely, clawing at my mind with a persistent, insatiable curiosity that refuses to be soothed.
What was his childhood like? Was he bullied? Did he fight back? What kind of grades did he get? Did he ever have a true friend who didn’t end up betraying him?
The questions spiral in my mind, a violent whirlpool dragging me under, each new thought crashing against the next until I can barely breathe beneath their weight.
I wonder how much of him mirrors me.
My fingers slide toward his photo, the edges of the paper soft under my touch. I trace the faint texture of the printed image, brushing my fingertips over the shape of his face. The photo Cane picked is almost absurd—Dante in a prison guard uniform, that ridiculous fake mustache sitting above a mouth that looks like it’s seconds away from curling into a smirk. A bad disguise for a man too sharp to hide.
My touch lingers, brushing over his lips, tracing the angle of his jaw. Without the full beard, he looks younger—disarmingly so. But with it, he looks exactly his age, maybe even older. Weathered by experience, hardened by something deeper. And that stirs a strange, magnetic pull that tightens deep in my core.
A knock at the door snaps me out of my thoughts. I jolt upright as if the mattress suddenly caught fire, the heat in my cheeks burning through the cool air. For a second, I freeze, wondering if I imagined it. But the knock comes again.
I scramble to collect the papers, shoving them into the folder with frantic precision. Flipping it over, I make sure his name faces down against the bedspread. Another knock echoes through the space, and I rake my fingers through my hair, trying to tame the mess.
My eyes flick to the window. The moonlight spills through the glass in soft, eerie ribbons, bathing the room in a milky haze that makes everything feel suspended. I blink, realizing how many hours have passed since I first opened his file.
