We stared at each other.
"Milo." His voice was calm. Steady. Even now, even with a suppressor dimpling the skin between his eyes, Viktor Smirnov didn't flinch. I'd give him that.
"Viktor."
"This is because of the girl." Not a question.
"Yes."
Something shifted in his expression. Like some part of him had almost expected this. "What now?"
I didn't answer right away. I looked at him the way I'd looked at a hundred crime scenes—assessing the evidence, reading the story, understanding what had happened and how it ended.
But this wasn't someone else's scene.
This was about to be mine.
"You sat in that chair and watched," I said. The words came out flat and even, like I was dictating a report. "You watched me beat her. You listened to her scream."
His jaw tightened. "I was following orders."
"I hope it was worth it."
I tightened my finger on the trigger. Viktor's body jerked once and went still. His pale blue eyes stayed open, staring at the ceiling, and I wondered if that was the last thing Raven had seen before her world went dark. Just a ceiling. Just nothing.
I stood over him for a moment. Waiting for something. I wasn't sure what. Satisfaction, maybe. Relief. Some kind of catharsis that would make it all worth it, that would ease the burn in my chest and the permanent ache in my jaw and the image of Raven curled on a concrete floor that was permanently tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.
Nothing came.
The hollowness was still there. The same hollowness that had lived inside me since I was eight years old, standing in a motel room, watching my father mop a dead woman's blood off linoleum while telling me it was just a mess.
But it wasn't all there was now. The hollow wasn't completely empty anymore. It was full of her. Full of the sound of her voice, and the way she'd pressed her forehead against mine, and the memory of her hands—those perfect, unbroken hands—cleaning my knuckles with the same careful precision she used to play a piano.
She was a part of me and she was alive, and the world was three bodies lighter, and the Bratva's Austin cell was a smoking ruin, and none of it changed what I'd done to her.
I searched the house. Took his phone, his laptop, a safe behind a painting in the study that contained enough cash and documents to bury the whole operation twice over. Then I cleaned. Not because anyone would connect this to me—they wouldn't—but because I couldn't help it.
I changed my clothes and wiped the surfaces. Picked up the brass. Checked the bathroom, the kitchen, the porch. Erased myself from every room I'd touched with the practiced efficiency of a man who'd been doing this since before he was old enough to drive.
It was just a mess. Clean it up.
Just a mess.
But I left the body in the bed.
On my way out, I caught my reflection in the hallway mirror.
Same shaggy blonde hair falling over my forehead. Same mossy green eyes. Same hoop earring. Same face that made people think I was harmless, that made women smile back and men lower their guard and everybody underestimate the thing that lived behind the surfer-boy mask.
But there was something different now. Something behind the eyes that hadn't been there before. Not emptiness. Not the flat, dead nothing that had stared back at me from a thousand bathroom mirrors in a thousand crime scenes.
The man looking back at me was a killer. Not a cleaner. Not a man who mopped up after other people's violence and toldhimself it was just a job. A killer who'd chosen his targets and planned his approach and executed with the cold precision of a man who thought he was above the laws of god.
I'd crossed a line I couldn't uncross.
And I'd do it again. Tomorrow. Every day. For her.
I winked at my reflection. The guy in the mirror winked back.
