Page 59 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

“Is this okay?” I ask.

“It’s heaven.” He’s quiet for so long that I assume he’s fallen asleep until he says, “Did I die in that accident?”

My laugh is soft, surprised. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re right,” he says in a thick voice, moments from sleep. “There’s no heaven for people like me.”

My fingers still. “Oh, Hugo. No. You’re not the one who⁠—”

He lets out a soft snore, saving me from wandering into a confession I’d never make if I were talking to this man on our driveway instead of curled around him on his couch.

It turns out I lied to Felicity. I’m weak. I’m so weak that I allow myself this one night.

Tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to kill Greg and hopefully also kill the tender side of myself that can’t tell a good man from a bad one. The one that could ruin this good man if I keep letting him get close to me.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, I need to keep checking his pupils.

I brush a soft kiss across his forehead and drift to sleep with his red blanket around my shoulders and his arms around my waist.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Rue

Islip out of Hugo’s half of the duplex before sunrise, leaving him asleep on the couch with a tiny frown on his lips.

It’s harder than it should be. But I have videos to watch.

I start the coffee and settle at the kitchen table with my laptop. The first two videos are pretty much what I was braced for: grainy images of the two of us, shot in low light from a static, too-low angle. Awful but survivable.

The third video sends me racing for the bathroom, where I vomit up the coffee I just drank.

Once my stomach’s empty, I wipe off my mouth, sit back down at the table, and watch it again.

My then-boyfriend is sitting on the edge of the bed, and I’m kneeling between his thighs, enthusiastically blowing him. But when he whispers sweet-hot things to me—how sexy I am, how good I’m making him feel—he looks into the camera hidden on our dresser and rolls his eyes.

When I take him deep enough to choke, he fakes a yawn.

When he shifts so my skin grafts are angled toward the camera, he cringes at getting serviced by someone with a visible defect.

I don’t need to watch the fourth and fifth videos to see more of him staging my humiliation. I’ve got a murder to plan.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Hugo

I’m going outside to talk to Rue, and I’m almost entirely sure I’m not going to throw up on her shoes when I do.

My headaches aren’t leaving me flat on my back anymore, and my nausea’s almost entirely gone, even without medication. But it wouldn’t matter if none of that were true. It’s Sunday afternoon, and Rue’s on her porch looking deliciously casual in denim. I’m not wasting the chance to talk to deliciously casual Rue, hideous head injury be damned.

“Howdy, neighbor girl,” I call as I cautiously navigate the sidewalk in her direction. I still feel a little unsteady, and my voice is rusty from lack of use.

“Well, hello.” An unreadable smile touches her lips as she takes me in. “Dr. Hugo Mohr, in the flesh.”

Her cool greeting isn’t what I expected. Not after our mailbox conversations over the past few weeks, and certainly not after she sat with me on Friday night—which I still have trouble believing actually happened.

“Uh, yes,” I say. “In the flesh.”

She props the broom against the side of the house and tucks her hands into the back pockets of her overalls, her gaze traveling down my body.