I wonder where you are right now. What city. What hour. Whether it's dark there too or whether you're somewhere the sun is still up, doing something I'll never know about, being someone I'll never fully see.
I wonder if you think about me the way I think about you—constantly, involuntarily, like breathing. Or whether the work switches something off in you and I become a thing you carry quietly in a pocket somewhere and don't take out until it's over.
I hope it's the second one. I hope you're not thinking about me at all.
I hope you're focused and cold and completely unreachable because that's what keeps you alive, and alive is the only thing I need you to be right now.
Come back.
Nazareth,
Loving you is the loneliest thing I’ve ever done…
17
RETH
The café terrace is too bright. Too loud. Too full of normal, happy people who have no idea what it costs to sit among them.
I don't sit among them.
I stand in the shadow of the building opposite, back against stone, one foot on the wall behind me. My eyes move across every face on the terrace the way they always move—exits, angles, threats—because thirteen years of this means I can't look at a crowd without running it.
Four jobs in seven days.
All within a fifty-mile radius of where I'm standing now. Valeria running me like a machine that doesn't need rest, doesn't need recovery time, doesn't need human mercy of distance between one thing and the next. I can feel them—the four hits—sitting on my arms the way they always sit. Precise. Accounted for. One line each, already decided, already carried.
Valeria gave me no name. Just coordinates and a single text:Wait for my call. The target will be obvious.
She's keeping me close to something. I don't know what yet.
But that's Valeria. She doesn't do anything without a reason, and she doesn't telegraph her reasons until she's ready for you to understand them. Every job placed with the patience of a woman playing a board game three moves ahead. Every instruction stripped to the minimum because she knows I'll fill in the gaps—that my training will do her work for her, that thirteen years of this has made me efficient in ways that serve her without requiring her to explain herself.
She doesn't send me anywhere without purpose.
Four jobs. Same radius. No name on this one.
She's circling something. And she wants me close enough to close the circle when she's ready.
My phone vibrates against my palm. I let it ring, let her wait, then answer without saying a word.
Her voice pours into my ear like warm oil over broken glass. “Still waiting like a good boy?” A pause—the theatrical kind, the kind she savors. “How does it feel, Nazareth? Sitting there among all those happy families, knowing exactly what you are?”
I don't respond to rage-bait.
“Head to the underground parking. South entrance.”
Without a word, I cross the street, down the ramp, into the dark. The temperature drops immediately—the cold of underground spaces, recycled air and concrete and the smell of oil on asphalt.
My eyes adjust. I move to the support column nearest the south entrance and put my back against it.
“Here.”
“Your target will arrive in forty-eight seconds.”
I go very still.
Forty-eight seconds.
