Page 129 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

What the hell? my brain screams back. He shouldn’t have been able to use his smart speaker to turn on those lights, not if the jammer was doing its job.

Pivot. Get this man under control, immediately.

I fumble into my left pocket and swap my tools. NCU is too slow. The pink bottle works fast. But I don’t hit Ray Overton right in the face with a massive dose of Pell’s compliance spray.

No, I hit Ray Overton right in the CPAP mask with a massive dose of Pell’s compliance spray, then watch as it beads on the plastic before harmlessly dripping onto his baggy T-shirt.

Foiled by sleep apnea.

My misstep gives Overton time to fully wake up, and he rips the mask off his face, his legs tangling in the sheets as he launches himself out of bed, knocking the bottle out of my gloved hands.

“The fuck are you doing here?” he growls, that meaty hand shooting out to grab me.

I dart backward, recalculating. The compliance spray is out of reach, and no way is he letting me NCU him and then wait around until he shuffles off the mortal coil.

Pell’s big-daddy dial-a-dose it is. A guy this size’ll need two clicks to lock his muscles down. Then again… I eye the beast in front of me and consider dialing up three clicks just to make sure he’s on the fucking floor. But even Pell’s chemist doesn’t know what that would do, and I don’t want to risk actually killing him with a substance neither of us fully understands.

I set the dial to two and swing the injection pen toward his arm, but he jerks away, popping me right in the cheek as he flails.

The impact knocks me back, out of injection range, and even though I know it’s not a physiological possibility, he seems to get even bigger, like rage and fear are inflating his muscles.

So much for anything resembling natural causes. Keeping the dial-a-dose pen in my left hand, I pull my knife from my right-hand pocket and dart forward, slicing upward in a smooth arc that catches Overton across his left hip.

“Bitch,” he hisses, swinging at me again as blood wells along the eight-inch slice in his faded boxers. I dodge the blow and step into his body, jamming my knife up toward his armpit. But his baggy shirt catches the edge of the blade, preventing it from piercing one of the arteries there.

At least the second thrust cut something, and he tumbles onto the bed, half rolling, half crawling away from me, leaving blood in his wake. I take the chance to grab the pink bottle because no way am I leaving it behind.

When I straighten, Overton’s unsteady on his feet as he faces me across the king-size mattress, hand pressed to the cut under his arm. “Who are you?”

“Death,” I snarl as I stalk around the foot of the bed toward him. “Justice.”

His eyes widen, and under my mask, I smile. He’s bigger, much bigger, but he’s bleeding. And I’m trained, I’m armed, I’m pissed, and my cheek fucking hurts.

“Lindsay Marie Carruthers,” I say. “That was your wife’s name before she made the mistake of marrying you, correct?”

I walk past the windows overlooking the dark backyard, and that’s when I’m hit with a flicker from earlier tonight: dark. The jammer’s charging light was dark when I pulled it off the dock, and I read it as full. But a dark light on a dead strip means it hasn’t charged in weeks. Means I likely burned the last of the battery crossing the lawn. Means the jammer’s⁠—

“What about Lindsay?” Overton’s eyes dart from side to side. “I haven’t heard from that bitch since she ran out on me.”

Oh good. This is how we’re playing it.

“Liar.” I come to a stop just out of arm’s reach. “She’s dead. You killed her. We both know it.”

“What?” He gasps theatrically. “My wife is dead?”

I roll my eyes. “Don’t spend your last minutes on earth pretending to be a decent husband, you piece of shit.”

When I take another step toward him, he flinches, and yeah, I’m loving this. Usually they’re too incapacitated to show real fear, but this makes me feel fucking powerful. And since he’s already dripping blood in two spots, I put away the dial-a-dose and let the lights play over the wicked edge of my knife so he can take a look at what’s going to end his life.

“Lindsay’s not the first person you hurt,” I remind him. “You even attacked someone at the women’s shelter, too.”

Overton’s face goes blank, then he throws his head back and fucking laughs.

“That little prick?” Overton sneers. “I barely touched him, and he went down like a bitch.”

White-hot static crackles through my brain as this worm of a human laughs about hurting Hugo, my Hugo. As I battle my temper, his amusement fades to awareness.

“Oh, this isn’t about my whore wife, is it?” he says, watching me closely. “What’s this guy to you?”