Why do I even fucking care about?—
I bite down hard, not letting the question form. But the answer is already bruised across my teeth. Because it’s her. Sophia. The woman who’s been at the edges of my mind for too long.
The subtle spring chill bites through my jeans as I continue walking, letting the city’s filth and friction grind the edges off my mood. It should be simple—Sophia being sick. File-able. Irrelevant. Not my concern.
It isn’t.
After walking for fuck knows how long, I eventually end up at my apartment. It’s not too far from hers—two blocks, to be exact.
The door has no peephole, no number, no nameplate. Just a keypad I change every twenty-eight days. I punch in the current sequence and step inside, noting I’ll need a new code in six days.
The deadbolt clicks open with the precision of a gun being cocked, and the door swings open silently. My boots echo against concrete as I step inside, the sound bouncing off bare walls, the narrow hallway lit by recessed LED strips that run the length of the ceiling.
Eight steps to the end of the hallway and into the living space. There are no rugs, no art, no mail on the side table because there is no fucking side table. This is not a home. It’s a box I settle into whenever needed. Every apartment, every penthouse, every goddamn hotel room around the world is nothing but a pit stop on my way to hell.
Every inch of this place is deliberate. No clutter. No decoration. No trace of personality. It’s a vault. A place designed to contain a life that has no room for anything that can’t be replaced, repaired, or discarded.
A thin mattress lies in the center of the living room floor. One pillow and a black sheet folded military-tight. I sleep there when I sleep at all. The bedroom stays empty. Door closed. Unused. A room I don’t need and don’t enter.
I drop my coat on the only chair. Sit. Stare at the wall.
The quiet swallows everything. Thick. Engineered. No traffic hum, no neighbor noise, no echo of footsteps in the hallway. Just the low buzz of the fridge compressor and my own pulse knocking against my eardrums like someone trapped inside trying to get out.
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and the chair leather creaks under my weight. My hands hang loose between my legs. They should be steady. They’re always steady. I’ve had them steady while I cut throats, while I wired explosives, while I watched someone bleed out two feet away and timed how long it took. But right now, my left thumb is tapping the side of my knuckle. One-two. One-two. Like a metronome counting seconds I don’t want to count.
This feeling? I don’t like it. It starts in my chest, and it doesn’t stay there—it moves, spreads, gets into my jaw and my hands and the specific way I’m sitting in this chair like I’m about to get up… except I don’t.
The image of a sick Sophia loops behind my eyes.
What if the fever spikes? What if she’s too weak to get water? What if she’s lying on the bathroom floor right now, phone out of reach, breathing shallow, waiting for someone who isn’t coming?
“Shit.” I rake my fingers through my hair, lean back in the chair, and stare up at the ceiling. My pulse climbs like a gauge creeping into the red. I can feel it in my throat now, thick and hot, and it’s sliding into bone without permission.
I stand. Pace. Three steps to the window, three back.
She’s alone up there. No roommate. No boyfriend. Her mom’s dead. Her father doesn’t even know she exists. It’s just her, the flu, and whatever medicine she has left in the cabinet—if she even made it to the cabinet. My mind keeps supplying images I don’t want. Her curled on the bathroom tile, shivering, too dizzy to stand. Her phone dead on the nightstand because she forgot to charge it. Her breathing getting shallower. Slower.
She’s sick and she’s alone and she’s in a building two blocks away burning up with a flu that nobody knows about except a twelve-year-old I paid forty bucks and me, and I’m sitting here.
The coal in my chest ignites. Heat spreads under my ribs, up my throat, behind my eyes. My vision tunnels for a second, and I grip the windowsill until my knuckles bleach white. I shouldn’t care this much. I shouldn’t care at all. But the thought of her alone, burning up, no one to check her temperature, no one to bring her water, no one to?—
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”
I turn away from the window so fast the room tilts. My hand goes to the back of my neck, fingers digging into muscle, trying to squeeze the pressure out. It doesn’t work. Nothing works.
I pace again. Faster.
What if something happens to her? You hear about people dying of the flu every fucking day. What if her immune system is compromised? What if there’s some underlying health issue I’m not aware of? Who’s her doctor, anyway? What if she takes the wrong combo of medicine?
“Fuck!” My fist slams into the wall before I decide to move. Plaster cracks and pain flares—finally something I understand. I hit it again, and again. The sting is sharp, grounding, but it doesn’t touch the thing burning under my sternum. It’s chaos, it’s violence, it’s something I can’t control.
In my jacket pocket the little metal box peeks out, a reminder of a time in my life when white lines were my escape. A way to ignore the hole where everything used to be.
My first line wasn’t a choice; it was survival. One stripe on a cracked mirror in a motel bathroom and the screaming inside my skull went quiet. Just for a while. Just long enough for me to forget the dead body on the bed, throat slit, intestines coiled on the sheets. It wasn’t my first kill, but it was the first name in red, the first one she demanded to watch while I made it last for hours.
I chased that quiet for years, line by line. Until one night something cracked a door open in me that the drugs had been holding shut for a long time. Until I realized the quiet was a lie. The void isn’t something to escape—it’s the only thing I have that’s mine. The memories. The dark. The faces. I need them sharp. I need to remember every single one, because it reminds me I wasn’t born a monster. I was made into one.
I haven’t taken a hit since, but I always carry it with me to prove it’ll never leash me again.
