“What, you don’t want a drug trafficking operation?” Kit teased, and was unsurprised when Darius grimaced. Trafficking involved too many people for Darius’s lone wolf style.
Lone wolf. Good at compartmentalizing. Kit barely knew anything about the late Felicity Carrow, but her fingerprints were clear in Darius’s psyche.
And Kit finally had Darius alone.
“Hey,” Kit said quietly. “Are you okay?”
Darius’s sudden tension was answer enough.
31
balance of trust
“I’m doing just fine,” Darius said, but knew as soon as the words left his lips that Kit wouldn’t believe him. Perceptive little bastard.
Kit shifted, almost casual, but it left him backed against the arm of the couch, facing Darius. The better to observe. “How did you meet Felicity?”
That strange nostalgia surged again.
“When I was eighteen, a man tried to rob me on my walk home from school.” Darius felt the anger, the out-of-control helplessness, like it was yesterday. The feeling he wanted to avoid more than anything. “I killed him accidentally.”
Kit nearly dropped the phone. “Wait, that is not how I expected that to go.”
Chuckling, Darius set Felicity’s laptop aside. Story time. “I was pissed off. If he took my laptop, I wasn’t getting another one. Money was tight.”
That was a hell of an understatement. They’d been upper middle class before Darius’s teen years. Then Dad got sick and couldn’t work. Mom’s coping mechanisms were stupid and expensive. The debt was crushing.
“So, I flipped out and punched him in the head,” Darius continued. The guy had been younger than Darius was now. He’d looked shocked when Darius lunged for him. “He fell and hit his head on the curb. Next second, I was standing over a dead body in the middle of the fucking street.”
“Holy shit,” Kit breathed. “What did you… Wait, you covered it up, didn’t you?”
“You know me too well,” Darius said, and that might have terrified him once, but maybe he didn’t mind being known. Telling this story felt right. “Self-defense, but no witnesses. If I’d been a rich white kid, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but I wasn’t. Thankfully, this was before everyone had doorbell cameras. I dragged him behind a dumpster. Then I borrowed a friend’s truck to move the body to the campgrounds. It was the off-season, and nobody found him until he was too decomposed for it to matter.”
“Holy shit,” Kit repeated, eyes wide. Not nearly as horrified as he should look. “That’s so logical. Like something Holden would do.”
Darius wanted to deny that. Holden killed for pleasure. For rage. But Kit was right, as usual. That one day was the most like Holden he’d ever been. The pure satisfaction of his fist colliding with the man’s skull…
Unfortunately, it was followed by the panic of improvisation. Darius never wanted to be caught without a plan again.
“Did it work?” Kit asked. “I mean, I assume so, you didn’t go to jail or anything.”
That might have been better.
No. Darius rejected the idea even as he thought it. A better man might have regrets about how his life turned out, but Darius didn’t.
“I got caught,” Darius said. “But not by the cops. My dead guy worked with a woman who worked with Felicity Carrow, and she reached out a week later. She was impressed with how well I hid the body.”
“Overachiever,” Kit muttered.
Darius grinned. “She offered me a deal. Training, education, and keeping my secrets—if she could use my services whenever she needed them. I said yes out of fear at first, but after a few months… I liked the training. I liked the job. I liked making money.”
“What was the catch?” Kit asked.
“If I ever crossed her, she knew where my sister lived.” Darius’s grin faded. “Felicity never liked loose ends. I always knew that if I wanted to retire for good, I would have to kill her.”
The disinfected coffee table loomed large. Felicity had been such a force of nature. Darius hadn’t expected her corpse to look so small.
Kit pressed his sock-covered feet against Darius’s thigh. “How do you feel now?”
