My mind was running a mile a minute. Of course, this was all speculation, but it was allvery fucking plausible.
When you run in the circles I do for as long as I have, you start to assume the absolute worst of people.
You know the terminnocent until proven guilty?
Yeah, well… as far as I was concerned, it’s guilty until proven innocent. The world is a vile place filled with people like Kyle fucking Bradshaw operating in plain sight… I would even consider myself one of the vile people that plagued this planet.
Not everyone I killed deserved to die. Many of them were just targets on a list, and I told myself that whatever they had done to get their asses put on said list was none of my business.
But… sometimes… sometimes I wished things were different.
Maybe that was why I had this hobby. It was my way of trying to balance out my karmic debt, considering the amount of innocent blood I probably had on my hands.
Or maybe it was just fucking revenge against the mother that I never got the chance to kill myself.
Either way, Kyle would be answering for more than just his own sins today… As soon as he answered my questions… and I suddenly had a lot of them.
“Hey, Kyle?” I asked, keeping my voice deceivingly light. “Where’s Amanda?”
You know how in TV shows, the serial killer always has the same persona they show the world, then the persona they have while they’re killing? I don’t really have that. I’m pretty much just Cal one hundred percent of the time unless you’reextraspecial and are somehow able toactuallypiss me off.
When I’m killing someone for Damian, it’s all business. It’s almost impossible for a mark to piss me off in those instances. They can say or do whatever they want, and it just rolls off my back because, honestly, I get it. I wouldn’t take my impending death lying down, either. So, if some nameless John Doe wants to call me a faggot, I let it slide. If you want your last words to be homophobic slurs, who am I to take that away from you?
When I’m killing someone like Kyle, I’m even more myself. Murdering scum like Kyle doesn’t make me angry. It brings meso much fucking joy.
So much so that I typically draw these kills out. I make them last. I think the longest I’ve ever taken to kill a child abuser was three days, and that was because I had literally caught the woman in the act.
That bitch lit up my dopamine centers like a fucking Christmas tree, and she had paid for it.
The only time Ireallygot mad was if someone stumbled across one of my triggers. For example, a big trigger of mine is Cass and Naomi’s safety (for obvious reasons.) I went full blackout on some dude from Apex once when he implied he was going to fuck Cass against her will.
I’m sure you can guess where that fucking guy is right now.
If you guessed six feet under, then congrats. Big fat, shiny gold star for you. No one has said a word about my sisters since.
Another big one for me is being called the devil. Anything biblical that’s meant to paint me as evil tends to make my brain go kaboom. My therapist says it’s because my mother was screaming those words at me when she died, but what the fuck do I know. I just know I don’t like it.
I also tend to get a little pissed off if someone puts me in a position where I might hurt a child.
Remember, I told you Damian had once tried to put me on a job where the child was a mark, and I had lost my shit?
Yeah. That was angry Cal.
You don’t want to meet angry Cal.
And right now, sitting at Kyle’s plastic-wrapped kitchen table, staring at the scans of ownership papers Vox had pulled up, I was doing my best to keep angry Cal in his fucking cage.
The trading number on almost all of these slips was 2739.
I wouldn’t have noticed it, but it had just occurred to me that if I wanted to find my next target, it would be a lot easier to hunt down the scum that ran this ring than camp out in parks using Naomi as a scout.
What is the significance of 2739, you ask? Well, it’s the same code that I use to confirm the completion of my jobs for Damian.
It could be a coincidence that my code was written on these slips… However, I didn’t believe in fucking coincidence. Not in my line of work.
Kyle groaned, snapping me out of the dark turn my thoughts had taken me, and I glanced up at him.
I had made good on my promise and cut out his right eye. He was also missing all his fingers on his left hand.
