But the emptiness I was used to seeing behind those eyes was gone. The man staring back at me had just discovered exactly what he was willing to do for a woman who couldn't even see his face.
I'd made bodies vanish for people who killed. I'd scrubbed arterial spray off ceilings without blinking. I'd bagged dismembered limbs and driven them to disposal sites and eaten a sandwich on the way home.
That was work. I'd done it for as long as I could remember.
This was different, because I'd never actually taken the life from a body before.
And I hadn't killed Derek because someone paid me. I killed him because he'd looked at her. Because he'd followed her. Because he'd stood outside a restaurant with his phone in his hand and taken her picture without her permission.
Because he thought she was prey.
But she wasn't prey.
She was MINE.
The thought detonated behind my ribs like a bomb.
MINE.
I gripped the edge of the sink and breathed deep.
"Fuck," I whispered.
My father's voice surfaced, cold and sharp.You killed a man for a woman. A woman you barely fucking know. You dumb fucking kid. That's how you end up in a ditch.
I cleaned the apartment. Erased the evidence. Made Derek Scodal disappear the way I'd made a hundred other problems disappear.
Except this time, my hands shook while I worked.
Just a little.
***
The city slid past the windshield like a film reel I wasn't watching.
Red light. Green light. The mechanical rhythm of intersections, and my hands on the wheel at ten and two like I was following a driving manual. Steady. Controlled.
The adrenaline had drained out somewhere around Tenth Street, leaving behind a flat, humming silence in my skull.
I should go home and shower. Stand under the scalding water until the bleach smell faded from my cuticles and the memory of how fast four minutes could erase a man faded from everything else. That was protocol. That was what the job required—containment, decompression, distance.
But this wasn't the job.
That was the problem. That was the thing lodged sideways in my chest like a broken rib, catching every time I breathed. The job had rules. The job was clean. The job didn't leave a ringing in your ears or a name in your mouth that tasted like ash.
I'd killed a man tonight because he looked at a woman.
My woman.
The thought settled into place like a round chambered in a gun, heavy, final, waiting.
I hit a red light on Riverside. My building was three blocks east. Her building was four blocks north. The blinker was already clicking left before I made the conscious decision to turn.
No. That wasn't true.
I'd made the decision in Derek's bathroom, as I stared at a stranger in a cracked mirror. Maybe I'd made it in the alley that night she first pressed her fingers to my face and I forgot my own name. Maybe I'd been making it every night since, sitting in my car outside The Silver Table, watching her from the service alcove, waiting in the alley for her to finish her shift, telling myself I was working when I was really just waiting for her to walk out a door.
The light turned green. I turned north.
