"This isn't about money," I say.
He goes quiet.
"This is about a girl," I say. "And what you did to her, what you did to me." I take one step closer. "And the fact that you’ve been walking around for three years like none of it happened.”
My hands are steady. They always are. That's the thing nobody tells you, it isn't shaking hands and racing hearts, not when you've been trained properly, not when the thing is done with precision and purpose and every variable accounted for.
It's just quiet.
I look at the sky for a moment. The darkness between the stars.
I think about the first time Cain put a file in front of me. What he said.These are men the world has decided to protect. We've decided differently.I was nineteen, angry and I understood it completely, and I understand it now.
Patrick Holt, has spent his entire life being the most powerful person in every room he’s ever walked into, but he’s not powerful at this moment.
Right now, he's just a man in the dark, on an empty road, and there’s nobody coming to help him, and he knows it.
"Wait—" His voice is different. The control is gone. Underneath it’s something smaller, something afraid. "Wait, whatever you want, I can?—"
“She was seventeen years old,” I say. “Her mother was dying in a bed three floors up, and you stood in that corridor and told her what it would cost to keep her alive. You didn’t touch her yourself. You just made sure the man who did walked free, and that I took his place.
"You took three years of my life," I say, quietly. "You took her mother. You built the cage and locked us both inside it.."
His mouth opens.
"Now you pay," I say, happy knowing I’ll be the last person he sees.
I don't look away when I pull the trigger.
That's important to me. This is a choice I'm making, and I'm going to own it completely, with my eyes open.
The sound disappears into the trees.
The night absorbs it.
I stand there for a moment in the silence that follows, and I wait for the thing I'm supposed to feel; the weight, the conflict, and the complicated machinery of conscience that I know exists in me because I've felt it before.
It doesn't come.
And for this bastard, it never will.
What comes instead is something I don't have a clean word for. Not satisfaction, exactly. Not joy. Something quieter than both of those and more honest than either.
Relief.
The relief of a debt that’s been outstanding for three years finally being settled.
I exhale slowly.
I look at the sky once.
I take out my phone and send Cain a message.
Hayden
Done.
I walk back to my car without looking back, because Patrick Holt is not worth looking back at.
