I closed the tab. Opened a different one.
The forgery scandal had gotten Jerico Thorne dropped by his last twoinvestors. His face—everywhere, now—looked even worse than Wick's. Deflated. Caved in.
Again, emotions warred in my chest.
I pushed them down. The article said his office had been vandalized—someone spray-painted FRAUD on the glass doors, then posted the video to social media. I watched it a dozen times.
I let my head fall forward, eyes squeezed shut. My neck made a sound like gravel. My whole body felt hunched, coiled, like every muscle was bracing for an impact that never came.
I rubbed my thumb over the laptop trackpad, then typed in the last name.
Caius Valmont.
Nothing.
Or rather, nothing like the others. The first hits were all about some recent charity gala he'd attended with his wife, Celine. The photos looked like a magazine shoot. Celine's hair was perfect, her smile even more so. Valmont was in a navy tux with a hand on her back, always posed for the camera. Not a hair out of place. The captions called himphilanthropistandscion. There was no mention of anything darker.
I had this sudden urge to log on the platform and leave a comment of my own.
Rapist.
But that meant giving myself away.
My IP would be found out in seconds if any of his people were cleaning up anything online that didn't paint him in a good light. And I knew they did. I'd been one of those clean up jobs three years ago.
I searched deeper, tried every combination I could think of—scandal, rumors, fraud, even violence—but the results were all sanitized. Whatever Valmont did behind the curtain, the curtain was locked shut.
He hadn't suffered yet. The other two had.
It made me want to punch something, or maybe just curl up and disappear. I bounced between the two. I dug my thumbnail into the meat of my palm and stared at the screen until the words lost meaning.
I closed the laptop. The light vanished. My bedroom returned to darkness. The only brightness was the thin strip of city bleeding through the opening between the curtains. And the man in my life that went by Operative Seven.
Hesitantly, I reached out for the burner I kept on my nightstand while I slept. I wanted to call him and ask him about Valmont. No. It was a lie. I somehow cared more about hearing his voice than the progress of thejob. I held the phone in my hand for a few minutes, debating, recycling his words in my head.
The last target might take time.
I was getting attached, I realized. And it was the last thing I needed.
I put the burner back on the nightstand.
I ran in the mornings now instead of evenings.
For one, it was safer.
And secondly, I liked the feeling of owning the world before anyone else could mess it up. The city was a different organism at dawn—slower, softer, almost like it was pretending to be gentle. Only later the volume would ramp up and the streets would start acting feral.
It was always colder on the move. The air tasted like ice, sharp enough to hurt my teeth. The sky was still waking up, semi-dark but thinning on the east.
I ran south toward the same park.
For the first half-mile, my head was a mess of fragments. Images from the articles I'd read last night. Wick's ruined face. Thorne's thousand-yard stare. Valmont's hand at the curve of his wife's back, like a brand.
I tried to outrun them.
At the stoplight right before the entry to the park, I bounced in place, waiting for the crosswalk to clear. There were a few other runners out—one in a neon vest, earbuds jammed in, another walking a pit bull that looked more bored than vicious. It reminded me of the dog and the boy who lived next door to Margaret.
I could read the other people's body language with ease, all of them on autopilot, moving through the city like ghosts, trying to wake up. Same as me.
