They may not be as “fun.” That’s Kross’s word. He’s the type who gets off on this shit. Gets a little extra thrill out of the unexpected. He’d laugh like he’s the only person in the world who understands the joke. But the ones that go exactly as planned, those are the ones I like because they’re simple. Low risk. You get in, you get it done, and you’re gone before anyone knows anything even fucking happened.
That’s how you don’t get caught. How you keep your face off the eleven o’clock news.
You keep a low profile, you don’t make it a game, and you sure as fuck don’t chase afeeling.
You finish it.
Little miss track star should’ve been that. Quick, clean and then fucking finished.
By morning, it should’ve just been another night filed away—another body that wouldn’t be traced to us, and a reminder of how easy it is to get away with murder when you don’t fuck around.
Instead, I’m standing in the middle of a warehouse full of sweaty doped up idiots and bass so fucking loud my skull hurts.
I’ll give it to her though, bitch could fucking run, and she did. Of course she fucking did. They always do.
People like to pretend it’s bravery or desperation, but it’s just reflex. Legs moving before the brain catches up. Speed feels powerful right up until it doesn’t mean shit. The chase doesn’t do anything for me. Control does. You let them burn themselves out, watch the exits disappear, then you end it. Clean. Efficient. Over.
I expect the panic. The bargaining. The moment their breathing goes wrong and their eyes finally understand the math. Everybody gets there eventually, no matter how special they think they are.
She fought first. Tried to twist away. Tried to get clever. Standard bullshit. Noise. It all funnels to the same place in the end.
Unlike my brother, I don’t sit around replaying it afterward. I don’t romanticize it or turn it into some fucked-up story I tell myself to feel something. For me, the act is a release—short, contained, necessary. It shuts my head up. Narrows the world down to one problem with one solution. I’m good at it, and I don’t lie to myself about that.
What I actually enjoy is what comes next.
The quiet. The cleanup. Making sure nothing points back to us. No witnesses suddenly growing balls. No evidence waiting for some bored asshole to stumble across it. I like watching chaos get folded back into order and walking away like nothing ever fucking happened.
Invisible, and untouched. That’s the fucking payoff.
That’s how nights are supposed to go.
Kross lives for the mess in the middle—the reactions, the uncertainty, the way people fall apart when the rules stop protecting them. He stretches moments until they bleed, and I’ve spent most of my life making sure his impulses don’t turn into sirens and mugshots.
It works. It’s always worked. We stay breathing. We stay ghosts.
Then Aeri happened.
Which pisses me off almost as much as the rest of this goddamn night.
A witness. A variable. A goddamn complication with a mouth, a pulse, and a brain that didn’t do what it was supposed to do. She saw enough to cause panic in any normal person, and instead of breaking, she fucking laughed.
It wasn’t nerves, or shock either. Just this calm, entertained little laugh like she was watching something unfold instead of standing in the middle of it. Like she wasn’t staring at two masked men with fresh blood still slick on their hands, but something interesting she hadn’t decided how to respond to yet.
That’s where it started to get under my skin.
Because then she had the balls to push it. Held eye contact longer than anyone ever has. Smiled like she knew exactly how far she could go and decided to step past it anyway. Like she understood the danger and chose to poke at it just to see what would happen.
I felt it immediately. The irritation flaring hot and sharp, my focus snapping tight, and my body going still in that way it does when something stops being theoretical. When instinct clocks a problem before logic catches up. My pulse kicked up despite myself, and that pissed me off almost as much as her grin did.
She wasn’t fucking scared, no, she was fucking daring us.
I hate how much attention that pulled. How my brain kept circling back to her like she’d tripped some wire she had no business touching. She didn’t act like prey. She stepped into it like she wanted the heat and the chase was part of the appeal.
Unlike miss track star, when she ran, she ran the way someone runs when they want to be followed.
And because my brother can’t let go once something gets under his skin, and because I’m not about to let some fearless, mouthy girl crack open everything I’ve spent years keeping contained, we followed.
Not because she won.
