Leo's light is on when I reach the building. Third floor, right on schedule. I wait for a moment before I exit my car, just staring at the light. I look around to make sure there’re no newcars parked anywhere, making sure nothing has changed. If it has changed then I need to abort. But everything looks perfect.
Walking over to the building, I move to the side entrance which takes me four seconds to unlock.
The stairwell is quiet, which is a good sign, it has always been quiet.. I move through it the way I've moved through it in my head a hundred times: measured, unhurried, every step placed exactly where it needs to be.
Once on the third floor, I look around to get to Leo’s door, and the lock takes me seconds to break through.
Stepping into the room, I softly close the door behind me, and I hear him before I see him.
I hear the low sound of something playing on the TV or on his laptop, I’m not sure, but the sound is echoing in the silence of the room.
I come around the corner. He's on the sofa with his back to me, feet up on the coffee table, phone in his hand, and the blue light of whatever he's watching moving across the ceiling.
I take a step closer, and he must feel the shift in the room, because he begins to lower his phone, then looks over his shoulder, and his eyes widen when he sees me.
The confusion moves across his face first, that's always first, the brain buying itself seconds while it assembles what the eyes are telling it.
"Crawford." His voice is still trying to be even. Still trying to be Leo Holt, the version with the money and the certainty and the father who fixes things.
Except his father can't fix anything anymore.
"Hey, Leo," I say.
He's on his feet fast, the sofa shifting behind him, and his eyes going immediately to the door where I'm standing between him and the exit.
"Wait—" The evenness is already cracking. "Wait, just?—"
I don't move. I don't need to move. I have all the time in the world, and he has none of it and some part of him is starting to understand that.
"She cried at the graveside," I say.
He goes still, then his lips curl up, and it builds up the anger in me. The fucker is stopping himself from smiling.
"Her mother's graveside." My voice is completely level. It’s not raised, not shaking, just there, putting every word exactly where it needs to land. "She held herself together through the whole service. Through every single minute of it. And then they lowered the coffin and she couldn't anymore." I look at him. "That's what you did. You got behind a wheel, you drove it into her parents, and you walked away. You kept sending her notes while her mother was in a hospital bed dying. You watched her fall apart from a distance and you enjoyed it."
Something moves across his face.
“Did she cry the way she did in the bathroom?” Leo takes a small step back, and it takes everything in me not to react. I know that’s what he’s doing. He’s trying to get me angry, trying to make me make a mistake. But it won’t happen. “You know, I always like virgin pussy, and hers— He stops talking when I lift the gun to him.
“If I was you, I would stop talking now,” I warn him.
“Whether I stop talking, or I carry on, there is only one thing happening here tonight, and that’s you pulling the trigger.” Leo looks around his apartment again. I’m not sure what he’s looking for when the asshole doesn’t have any weapons in here.
“Well, at least I know you’re not one hundred percent stupid.”
“She begged, you know. She screamed your name hoping you’d hear her.” He shakes his head a little, a smile on the bastard's face. “She put up a fight, but it only made it harder forher.” He stops and walks to the side, hands in his pocket smiling as he walks a little further away from me.
His mouth opens again, but I shoot him in the leg to shut him up, because the fucker is pissing me off now.
And I see it, the thing I've been waiting for. Not remorse. Leo Holt was not built for remorse. But the real him. Finally, stripped of every layer he's been hiding behind. There’s no one here now to protect him, no words are going to save him.
He looks small, mean and frightened, which is all he has ever actually been. Every terrible thing he’s ever done traces back to that smallness, to the fear underneath it, and to the desperate lifelong need to be the most powerful thing in whatever room he’s standing in. He always knew that somewhere underneath everything he was given, that without any of it he was nothing.
He's nothing right now.
"Hayden—"
"Don't." The word comes out quiet and absolute. "Don't say my name."
