Instead, I watch. The lights in the large colonial are on, downstairs and upstairs. One car in the driveway since the mark is single. No children, no wife, just an endless bank account that he stacks with money from lobbyists and illegal stock trades. A total piece of shit, per usual. I flex my fingers in the cold, my leather gloves creaking with the movement.
What is Mason doing tonight? Maybe he’s cooking that soup he seems to like so much, the Italian penicillin he called it while chattering during Reid’s convalescence. He’d been painstakingly careful as he’d cooked, fingers nimble as he’d chopped, the spoon held in a loose grip. Something about him had felt so familiar, yet so very strange at the same time.
Stop thinking about Mason.
The downstairs lights turn off, lights for the stairs flicker fast, and finally only the light in the bedroom remains on. Now’s my time. I jog across the street, finding the back door unlocked like Robin said it would be. Idiot. The alarm is still readying to turn on, so it doesn’t catch the door opening or closing. No dog either. The man lives totally alone, making him ripe for killing.
It’s easy to get from downstairs to the second floor without being noticed. No pictures on the walls, nothing to show an ounce of humanity in the man who spends his life stealing from the poor, doing everything he can to punish his constituents for daring to be born.
Pausing outside the bedroom door, I take a deep, quiet breath, then kick the door open with my boot. The senator is in the middle of undressing, a dress shirt hanging off his broad shoulders as he takes off his ostentatiously expensive watch. We stare at each other for a few stilted moments before he lunges for the dresser that likely contains the pistol Robin warned me about.
I point my gun at his head, and the senator freezes, eyes wild and pissed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“It can be easy if you don’t make any wrong moves. Piss me off and you die slowly, crying for your dead mommy. If you’re a good boy, you’ll just take the handful of pills in my pocket and go right to sleep.”
He snorts. “You’ve got another thing coming if you think it’ll go that way.”
“I think it will,” I say with a cruel smile. “You see, there’s a folder on your computer that contains images of young girls in compromising positions, yes? Take the pills and I wipe the computer so no one knows exactly how much of a piece ofshit you are. Require me to put a bullet in your head and the computer stays the way it is.”
The man swallows slowly. “Who the fuck are you? What do you want?”
I nod at the bed. “Get on the bed. I’m the angel of death.”
He climbs onto the bed, barefoot, pants halfway undone, eyes watching my every move. “I’ll give you more money than whoever is paying you. I’ve got millions, I swear. Anything, just let me live.”
Snorting, I roll my eyes. “If you think I’m doing this for money, then you’re stupider than I thought.” I pull out the prescription bottle with his name on it from my pocket and shove it at him. “Take the whole bottle.”
He curiously spins the bottle around in his hand a few times. “How’d you get my prescription for Xanax?”
“I don’t really think you’re in the position to ask questions. Take them.”
“You don’t want anything from me except for me to kill myself?”
I grin down at him in the warm lighting. “All I want is you dead. Be good and do as I say, so your legacy can remain as a piece-of-shit conservative instead of a piece-of-shit child abuser.”
He dumps the pills into his hand and stares down at them, then tilts his head back to swallow the fifteen pills like Tic Tacs. The room is silent as we wait, the pills slowly starting to take over. Just as his eyes are closing and he slumps on the bed, I lean over him to grin like the nutjob I really am.
“By the way, that was all total shit. I’m going to unlock your computer, open up that fucking folder, and leave it forthe cops to find so that everyone can know you were a waste of space on this earth. If there’s a hell, you’re going.”
He makes a frightened gurgle, attempting to lift his hand to grab me, but I stand back and spend the next ten minutes setting his computer up to the folder that holds enough pictures to make most people vomit. Men like him belong hung from the rafters of every warehouse in the country, depraved pieces of shit. And all of them somehow find their way to powerful positions to lord power over the weak.
The body on the bed is still, so I slink over, pressing a gloved finger to his neck to ensure he’s dead. Thank god. I sneak down the stairs like a ghost, unseen and unheard, and turn the alarm on before fleeing the house. Pretty quick mission for a weekday. I take the highway back home, listening to NPR on the way to catch up on the news I missed throughout the day.
The road home leads me by Mason’s, and I don’t know why I’m shocked to find the light to his bedroom still on at eleven in the evening. I pull the car over to the side, spending a few moments staring up at the curtain-covered window. Is he awake? Maybe he’s asleep. He seems the type to sleep with the light on. Too many ghosts in the dark.
Grabbing my phone from the cup holder, I scroll through the application for the alarm system I installed back when I was protecting him. There’s a clip of him passing the front door camera to disappear up the stairs. Everything has been armed since he traipsed to his bedroom an hour ago. He’s safe and sound. For some reason, knowing that little bit of information settles my soul enough I can head back home and sleep myself.
CHAPTER 2
PARKER
I’m walking along the snowy midwinter pathway with my nose in a book when I feel the prickle of being watched. The hairs on the back of my neck rise and that squirmy, hot feeling in my stomach threatens to make me vomit.
“Hey!” the person behind me shouts when they almost slam into my back.
“Sorry,” I mumble, not feeling any remorse at all.
Pushing my glasses up my nose, I look around to find the object of my now pretty furious scorn. With a loud huff, I keep walking when I realize it’s just Reid staring at me from his spot across the quad. Since he’s quit smoking, he’s taken up sucking on lollipops, and he annoyingly pops the bubble gum that remains once he’s sucked all the candy away. Dante really needs to do better about regulating Reid’s behavior.
