“You’re gonna tell me everything later,” he says, hooking his arm around my shoulders as we head toward the stairs.
We make our way down together, both of us dragging our feet, yawning every few steps, the air growing colder the deeper we go. We open the basement door and find Sylvia standing by the door, on the phone.
A disgusting smell hits my nose. I turn my head and see the source.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I silently gag.
“Wha—what happened here?” I can barely talk as I’m holding the vomit.
“Javier went a little crazy with the interrogation. I need you to clean that, all the guys are in the city,” she tells us with such ease, not even bothering to look at us.
“Why doesn’t Javier clean this after himself?” Adrien argues, his voice angry and too loud.
He never learns.
Sylvia snaps her head toward him, ends the call, and walks up to Adrien slowly, looking at him like a cockroach she’s about to crush.
“Javier has more important things to do. Don’t make me remind you that you’re not even legally in this country. You should shut your mouth before I shut it myself,” she snaps at him through gritted teeth.
Her body is so small in front of us.
We could kill her right here.
We might.
If we just…
But instead, we stand there in silence before she walks around us and leaves.
Adrien drags his hands through his hair, frustration snapping loose in the movement before he drops into a squat, elbows on his knees, trying to calm himself down.
“Just one more year and we’re gone,” I murmur.
He gets up, exhales, and we both turn our gaze to look at the dead body.
“Just one more year,” he repeats after me more like he’s telling it to himself and exhales in surrender.
We grab gloves and pieces of cloth to tie around our mouths and noses, then get to work.
This is the first time something like this has happened inside the mansion. Sylvia hates having any dirty business done under her roof. She thinks it makes us look unprofessional. Too sloppy.
It used to be rare to deal with a body at all, and it was always somewhere far from here, behind closed doors in places nobody cared about.
But lately, things are shifting. I feel Adrien’s eyes on me when I crouch down. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to.
Something’s changing.
Varners are taking on jobs they never used to touch, messier ones and desperate ones. Work that drags blood closer to home.
Pieces of blown-out brain are scattered across the concrete basement floor.
I scrub the floor until my hands ache.
My mind is loud with Kiara’s voice from last night, keeping me from a breakdown as we move the limp body, the face unrecognizable, one of his eyes swollen shut, the other hanginghalf-open in a way that doesn’t look human anymore, as if the panic of his last minutes was still trapped there. The cheekbone beneath it is crushed inward, leaving a black crater where bone used to be. The top of the head is blown open.
My insides keep turning in that familiar, uneasy way, while Adrien moves with eerie calm.
