Page 160 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

She looks over her shoulder at me again. “You never know when someone might need patching up.” Her eyes don’t linger on me, but I feel them long after she’s turned back around, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life at her back, by her side, in her arms. Wherever she wants me, I’ll be there.

Timms, though, sneers as he tosses her love note to me on the ground so he can examine the lipstick.

“Who the fuck brings makeup to a murder?” His laughing sneer is directed at Joe, his audience of one. “What’s wrong with these vain cunts?”

Rue waits a beat, then says, “Did you want an answer, or was that rhetorical?” She makes a sympathetic little noise. “Sorry, do you know what rhetorical means?”

His face goes red, and he ratchets back his arm, the lipstick clutched in his fist. Rue and I both brace, her to take the hit and me to kill him for it. But that’s not how to keep the night on track, so I let her go and step between them.

“Aristotle, man,” I say evenly. “Proportionate anger toward the appropriate target.”

Joe doesn’t understand Greek philosophy very well.

Lester Timms understands it even less.

“You’re right. She doesn’t deserve my strength.” He unclenches his fist and thrusts the lipstick at her. “Here. Make yourself pretty before you try to kill me.”

She takes it gingerly. This asshole’s just taken the dial-a-dose and clenched it, jostled it. The opposite of delicate. And now he’s pointing a gun at her, ordering her to paint her mouth with it.

“Quit stalling,” Timms snaps.

Rue’s hands shake as she uncaps the tube and touches the creamy red bullet to her lower lip, applying the first stroke of color. Timms watches raptly, his arms over his chest and his eyes fixed on her mouth. I watch in horror, prepared to snap Timms’s neck and sprint for help with her in my arms at the first sign of hemlock paralysis.

When she finishes stroking the color over her top lip, she caps the only weapon she has left and slides it back in her pocket.

“How’s that?” she simpers, blowing him a kiss.

He swaggers forward and grabs her by the chin, roughly tilting her head up and running his thumb along the edge of her mouth to even out the lower line.

“You’re awfully pretty for an alleged murderer,” he says in a low voice while I struggle to remember that I promised Rue I’d keep my cool.

“Well, you look terrible, Les. I turned you down for drinks when you still had a little muscle mass, but now?” She eyes his arms, his gut, his skinny legs. “Yeah, it’s an even easier ‘no.’”

His hand whips out to grab her cheeks, squeezing until her ruby-red lips jut into a painful-looking pout. Then he shoves her to her knees. She gives a small cry that I feel down to my atoms when she lands hard, catching herself on her hands. She’s mostly recovered from her jump out of Overton’s window, but she doesn’t need any more strain on her joints.

“For the record, there’s no ‘alleged,’” she says, looking up at him calmly. “I’m a murderer. I killed your friend Marcus.”

Timms crouches to wipe the lipstick on his thumb down the front of her shirt, going nose to nose with her in the process. “That was an accident.” His tone is dismissive, but when he stands, his eyes cut to me.

That’s right, asshole. Joe did mention the conspiracy theories running around your precious forum.

She sits back on her heels and folds her gloved fingers in her lap. “Not at the end when I stabbed him in the dick with a six-inch shard of glass.”

Timms and I recoil. Even Pell gives a low whistle over our comms. This fact is news to all three of us.

“Oh, and you were right,” she continues. “I also killed my ex.”

Timms scoffs. “Sure you did.”

“I killed my ex—a goddamn Cook County assistant state’s attorney—and made his body disappear without a trace.” She continues to gaze steadily up at him. “So you have to ask yourself, how good a killer am I to have pulled that off?”

“You… you…” he sputters. “How?”

“Maybe I used my feminine wiles, Les.” Every time she calls him that, he flinches. “It’s like you said the other week. I’m the woman who used to keep Greg’s dick wet.”

He fucking… he said what? Joe’s starting to think his hero isn’t such a great guy after all.

“Okay, fine,” Rue says with a sigh. “I actually tranqued him, moved him into my kill chamber by wheelchair, and cut off little pieces of him until he died screaming.” She smiles. “Or maybe he’s on a beach in Belize drinking Bellinis. Who can say, really? Either way, I’m here to kill you now.”