And then it was just me and Merrick.
Fucking Merrick.
He had his hand pressed to his shoulder, blood dripping onto concrete in thick drops that looked black in the dim light. But he was still smiling. Still playing whatever game he thought he was winning.
"You say we took everything from you," he said, voice tight with pain but laced with something darker. Something that sounded like satisfaction. "But you have no idea, do you?"
Ice slid down my spine.
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
He laughed again, quieter this time but somehow worse. More genuine. The laugh of someone who knew they'd already won something I didn't understand yet.
"Spit it out," I said, raising the pistol again and aiming at his other shoulder, "or I'm putting another round in you."
"I was the one who set your parents' building on fire," Merrick said.
The world stopped.
Everything stopped.
"What?"
"Your mom and dad," he continued, and his smile widened at whatever he saw in my face. "That 'tragic accident.' The faulty wiring story everyone believed. I did it. Poured the gasoline myself in the stairwells where it would spread fastest. Lit the match and watched it catch. Watched the whole thing burn from across the street. Pretty sure that was your mommy screaming."
Horror exploded through me like a grenade going off in my chest, shrapnel tearing through everything I thought I knew.
"It wasn't fast," Merrick added, his voice almost gentle now. Almost kind. "They tried to get out. I could hear them screaming from where I stood. But by then the exits were already engulfed. So they went back inside. And then the whole thing came down."
He tilted his head, studying my face like I was an art piece in a gallery.
"The look on your face right now," he whispered. "That's exactly what I've always wanted to see."
I didn't remember deciding to move.
Didn't remember crossing the distance between us.
One moment, I was standing by the door, trying to process words that couldn't possibly be true. The next, I was standing over him, the pistol bucking in my hand, rounds punching through flesh and bone and cartilage, each shot obliterating a little more of the face that had haunted me for decades.
The magazine emptied.
Click. Click. Click.
I kept pulling the trigger, anyway, the mechanical sound barely registering over the ringing in my ears.
Merrick's body lay sprawled on the concrete, limbs at unnatural angles, blood pooling dark and thick beneath what was left of his head.
He was very dead.
32
MILA
Watching the sunlight fall across the studio tables in angled stripes, I felt alive in a way that made my hands shake.
Tomorrow night.
Élodie had said it like it was nothing. Like a show appearing out of nowhere on a deadline that ridiculous was an ordinary inconvenience. Like the wordopeningdidn’t rearrange a person’s entire internal architecture.
