One week.
Most guys just bring home the wrong girl for Thanksgiving. I had to go fall for an assassination target.
Seven days to kill her, or come home with something that justifies why I haven’t.
Kill her. Put my hands around the throat I was kissing an hour ago and squeeze. She’s out with Ronnie right now, probably laughing, probably thinking about coming home to me, and I’m supposed to be planning her murder.
I drop onto the top step before my legs give out completely.
I can’t kill her.
The thought arrives like a reflex, and I don’t know what to do with it.
BecauseI can’t kill heris not a plan. It’s not even the beginning of one. It’s just the thing that’s true sitting in the middle of everything else that’s also true: the deadline, the cash in my hand, my father, a war that won’t pause because I caught feelings for the wrong woman.
I need to think. I need to figure out what comes next, what I tell Paolo tomorrow, what I do when the week runs out and the only answer I have is the same one I have right now.
I scrub both hands over my face.
This is bad. This is so fucking bad.
I don’t know whether there’s any version of this that doesn’t end in blood.
A car door slams somewhere up the road.
My head jerks up so fast my neck protests.
For one panicked second I think she’s back already. But no. Too far. Wrong direction. Somebody else.
Still, the sound shoves me to my feet because I can’t have Natalia come home and find me on the steps with puke in the sand and panic on my face.
My legs feel strange, like they belong to someone who has run too far on too little sleep.
I make it as far as the screen door before I have to stop again, palm flat against the frame. Going back into that house suddenly feels impossible.
The kitchen still smells faintly like coffee and the soap Natalia uses on the dishes. Her medical textbook is on the counter. Her hair tie sits beside the sink. The whole place is full of her in a hundred small ways. Soft ways. Ordinary ways.
Ways that make the kill order feel monstrous.
I stand there staring into the dim kitchen, waiting for a plan to show up.
Nothing comes.
Just the same hard truth, over and over.
I can’t kill her.
22
NATALIA
The buzz from girls’night carries me all the way home.
We danced until my calves burned and my dress stuck to my back. Ronnie spun me into a dip that almost sent us both to the floor. She’d laughed so hard she snorted her margarita, and I’d laughed because she laughed, and for three whole hours, I was just a normal girl at a bar with her friend.
She noticed, of course. “You’re glowing,” she said while we waited for our drinks. “Like, annoyingly glowing. Spill.”
I told her it was the sea air. She told me I was full of shit.
