The way a song gets into a person without them noticing, until one day they realize they’ve been humming it for years and can’t remember when it started.
Is that too much to want?
It’s probably too much to want.
I want it anyway.
22
RETH
Flashback
It takes four seconds.
That’s all a life is when you strip it down to the mechanics of it.
Four seconds, and the thing that was a person becomes a problem I’ve already solved and moved past. I’ve done this enough times that the math is automatic—angle, pressure, duration—and my hands know what to do before my mind has finished the sentence.
The target is a small-time dealer who thought he could skim product from the wrong supplier. He’s mid-sentence when I close the distance, phone still pressed to his ear. I don’t bother with stealth. He doesn’t see me until my left hand clamps over his mouth from behind, right arm snaking around his throat in a rear naked choke. His body jerks, instinctive, but the geometryis already wrong for him. I drop my weight, sink my hips, and crank.
His larynx collapses first—a soft, wet crunch like stepping on a plastic bottle. Air stops moving effectively in both directions. His free hand claws at my forearm, nails raking through the sleeve, finding no purchase. His phone clatters to the concrete. I twist harder, and cartilage gives. The second vertebra pops out of alignment with a muffled crack that vibrates up my arm. His legs buckle, and I lower him slowly, knees first, keeping the choke locked until his eyes roll back and the frantic kicking turns to twitching, then stillness.
Four seconds.
Blood trickles from his nose in two thin streams, dark against the alley grime. The smell of urine and copper mixes with wet asphalt, and I release the choke, check the carotid—nothing. This was an easy job, just as I knew it would it be.
But then the universe decides to fuck with me, and I hear something I’m not supposed to. A service door. The one that isn’t on the building schematic I memorized, the one that opens outward into the alley from the inside, the one that swings wide at the exact wrong moment and lets out a woman carrying a bag of trash.
She stills.
Mid-thirties, tired eyes, hair pulled back in a messy knot, apron still tied from whatever late shift she just finished. Her eyes flick from the body to me, then back.
I don’t move.
Neither does she.
The silence between us stretches, taut as a tripwire, then she inhales—sharp, ragged—and the scream starts to build in her throat.
The scream never makes it out.
My hand is already moving before my brain catches up. Left arm snakes around her waist like a steel band, right hand clamps over her mouth while the karambit kisses the soft skin under her jaw. One wrong twitch, and the blade opens her throat like a zipper.
She freezes against me, body rigid, the trash bag dropping from her fingers and splitting open on the concrete with a wet slap of coffee grounds and broken glass.
I drag her backward into the shadows of the alley, her sneakers scraping uselessly against the ground. Her heart is hammering so hard I can feel it through her ribs against my chest.
“What did you see?”
She shakes her head frantically, tears already spilling, and I loosen my grip on her mouth just a little.
“N-nothing,” she gasps against my glove, voice muffled and broken. “I swear to God, I didn’t see anything?—”
She’s lying. I can tell by the way her pulse spikes. The way her eyes dart toward the body like she’s already memorizing details for the cops.
She’ll talk. They always do.
I tighten my grip, the karambit biting deeper. It’s Halloween, which means if she screams, no one will think anything about it.
