But it never hurts to expand your portfolio.
I step back, watching him sobbing on the floor. My hand is a mess and I hunt for a bathroom, running the tight skin under the cold tap until it goes numb.
Not numb enough to dull the pain shooting through the joints and muscles, but it retreats a little. Sitting in the corner now, baring its teeth rather than sinking them in to the bone.
Violence seems such a cheap thing to use on such an expensive debt, but it’s amazing how effective it is. The richer the target, the more persuasive it becomes. Wealth insulates people so well from the physical pains of life that to have it intrude, especially when delivered with malice, is shocking.
I flex my hand and it moves a little more easily, so I walk back to the bedroom. Inside, the man is propped against his son’s bed. His face is a mess.
Unbidden, Robbie swamps my mind again. His staring eyes. The pulp left once Lilac finished unloading the gun into him.
She’d been steel and glass in that warehouse. Until the moment she couldn’t pull the trigger, whereupon she melted into my arms.
Five minutes later, when I thought she’d collapse into a puddle on the floor, she’d reformed. Turned sharp and ferocious.
If asked, I would have said that was her true nature. Vicious. Vengeful.
Not the bunny rabbit hunched inside a black hoodie that walked into school today. She’d stared at me with wide eyes, prey not a predator.
Then she’d fled.
The man groans and I feel sweat running down the side of my face. My back itches, my hand pulses with sickening regularity, and my mind fills with memories that shouldn’t still be hiding in my brain.
“You got the message, right?”
He wobbles to the side and after a moment, I realise he’s trying to run away. The bits of his body don’t work right any longer. Twitching instead of propelling him upright.
I stare at my broken fist, my nostrils flaring. How hard can you hit someone before they’re brain damaged?
When I leave the house—through the front door, leaving it open so the son can come in there rather than having to brave the broken shards around the back—I pull a burner phone out and dial for an ambulance. Once it’s confirmed, I break the SIM card into little pieces and toss them down the grate, then get into my car.
After driving for five minutes, I toss the actual phone out the window, watching in the rearview as it bounces across the tarmac, disappearing beneath the wheels of the car following.
There’s no need to text my boss with confirmation. Once Stefan issues an instruction, he expects it to be fulfilled.
I pull over when my hand throbs enough to grab my attention. While I massage the tightening muscles, poking and prodding to ensure nothing too dire has happened, my thoughts drift back to Lilac.
She needs to go. Perhaps she didn’t realise before she turned up, but McKenzie is my school and I laid it out clearly on the night.
No contact.
At the time it was because of worries that someone had tracked her, and a world of hurt would fall upon my shoulders. Now, I can’t handle the nightmares. The flashbacks. The intrusive thoughts.
I text an associate and wait ten minutes before an address is sent back, then point my car towards Lilac’s new flat.
She needs to go, or she needs to make it worth my while.
CHAPTERFOUR
LILAC
It doesn’t surpriseme when I open my bedroom door to find Zach standing inside the room, the open window behind him showing how he got there. Although I tried to fool myself into thinking he might not have seen me, I knew.
That’s why my stomach was tight all day long. It’s why I could barely respond to Mrs Kuzmanic’s friendly chatter during my shift at the dairy. The four hours usually fly by, but today they dragged; her cheerful story about a family road trip in Latvia that went appallingly wrong flew straight over my head.
A relief, then, to face the challenge I knew was coming.
Relief mixed with a greedy helping of dread.
