Chapter 19
VICTORIA
The video the sitter sent of Cat should disgust me with how cheesy it is, but it doesn’t. I shouldn’t care that I’m not home, but I do.
I want to be right there in my apartment, not in fucking Canada, facing the absence of something I never asked for but got used to.
“You’re pathetic, Victoria,” I mutter to myself, shoving the phone into the hotel safe, wanting nothing to do with it anymore. It makes me feel even sicker, and this is the last thing I need right now. I have more important things to do.
The hotel room I rented is three floors above the kill zone. Not a literal zone, but I like the sound of it. ‘Kill zone.’ So professional.
It is nothing special, just the usual too clean-too soulless room, cold light, and monochromatic curtains, but the line of sight is perfect, and the walls are thick enough to scream without consequence.
I unpack everything. Tools, backup tools, three changes of clothes, one burner and two pre-sets with GPS cloaking. I even brought the bottle of wine I was supposed to drink two nights ago.
Still unopened. Still mocking me. I hadn’t touched a drop in over a week. That alone should’ve told me something was off.
I am off.
I’d prepared for this more than I usually do, if that was even possible, conditioning myself to suppress every thought that shouldn’t be there.
I have to stick to my plan, to keep the same routine: I eat the same things before a job, do the same stretches, wash my face with lukewarm water twice, use cleanser twice, and brush my teeth once.
No music. No caffeine after nine o’clock.
And definitely no contact with Alex until the job is done, except for confirmation of coordinates.
My head is all over the place. I can’t seem to focus on what’s right in front of me, and it’s starting to freak me out.
I’m pacing the room like a maniac. I took the elevator down to the lobby and back up three times just to time it.
I’ve gone over the schedule so many times I can see it when I close my eyes.
I checked the target’s file again, too, just in case I missed a detail.
I didn’t. He is clean. Perfectly, irritatingly clean.
Which means the flaw isn’t him.
It is me.
I hadn’t felt like this in years. Maybe ever. Useless, almost pathetic, and quite…fearful? No, it cannot be, I don’t do fear. But whatever this is, whatever Azrael ignited in me, is something I don’t recognize.
I pace again. Twice clockwise, once counterclockwise. I know better than to act like something isn’t wrong, but I also can’t afford to admit it either. That would make it real. That would make me compromised.
The night arrives, and the job is scheduled for 8:05 p.m. sharp, give or take fifteen seconds. The target likes routine, bless his uptight soul. Same T-shirt, same sneakers, same protein drink. He makes it too easy. It got to the point that I can trace his path without GPS.
The equipment is ready, so now I wait. I’m positioned three floors up in the building next door, tucked back in the shadows. The kill point is set, my exit is timed, and I’ve checked the wind. I have a perfect view, a flawless trigger path, and a body count long enough to know that I will not miss.
I never do.
Minutes later, the target is in sight, walking toward the point I chose to be his final destination on earth.
Everything is ready, the operation is about to begin, just a few more seconds, and my gun and I are ready.
I finally have a visual on him, walking the same path he has hundreds of times, looking through the windows of the shops at street level.
Watching people inside, while he’s walking, and he’s alone. He’s alone. Alone. Lonely.
Now you have nobody. Not me. Not Alex. Not even your little Cat…
A few more seconds and he reaches the point where nobody can save him from my bullets…
…You’re alone in this, and nobody will save you.
And then he’s there, right where I want him, but somehow my fingers forget to react, and I don’t pull the trigger.
At first, I think it’s a glitch. A delayed reflex, maybe? It has to be, like when your body goes still before a sneeze. But five seconds pass. Then ten. My finger is still resting, fucking resting, on the trigger. My breath stalls and my pulse has the wrong rhythm.
I blink confused. It cannot be.
You’re just a pathetic, useless girl in a costume…
I can still see him. He’s walking away from the spot where his body should already lie dead.
A real person. A dumb, soft man. Not as a target, not an objective for my bullet.
He isn’t even scared. Why would he be? He doesn’t know he is on borrowed time.
His wife is waiting for him, his dog is waiting for him, and there is no reason for him to think he won’t get home to them tonight.
He’s going back home. Someone is waiting for him.
He’s not alone, and the contrast between us makes the situation worse.
…playing at control, hoping no one notices the tremble under the mask
“Victoria, what the fuck happened” Alex’s voice sounds somewhere in the corner of my brain, but it gets muffled by all the other voices: my own, Azrael’s, his. Voices all around me.
The smell of the wine. The cuts, deep in my ribs, the nail stabbed in my back. Alone in a room full of people, thrown aside like an object that is no longer needed.
Breathe in, breathe out.
I close my eyes, trying to reestablish contact with reality back in the present.
“Thirteen seconds to regroup. Plan B,” I say, and it comes out even and cold. It scares me more than if I had screamed.
Fucking Plan B.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Failure.
Not a technical problem. Not ‘the client changed the plan’.
Failure, and it is all mine.
I discard the gun, dumping it behind the ventilation shaft while I grab another one with the silencer attached.
I slip out of the building and turn into the dark alley, no longer hiding behind glass. My incompetence brought me out here on the street, following a target that should already be dead.
I have five minutes, five minutes to intercept and somehow correct that fucking mistake.
The mark is heading home at the same time he always does, following the same path. Always the same fucking path. Five yards from his front door, the alley between two houses, a 2.5 second window. That’s all I have.
I got here fast enough to have time to think, to wait. Deep down—although I will never admit it— I hope he will do something unexpected, reckless, and change his pattern.
Ten yards.
The waiting is killing me more than my bullet will kill him.
Five yards.
My heartbeat reaches an all-time high, making me feel like I might have a heart attack. Did he actually do it? Did he disturb his predictable pattern?
No, he didn’t. He did what he always does. I see him coming, and his body passes by me, close enough for me to reach and make my move.
One silenced shot, and he drops like a sack of meat, eyes wide open. The only expression I can read on his face is surprise, the surprise of suddenly feeling Death grabbing him by the throat.
I catch him under his arms and drag him deeper into the alley between the houses to clear the line of view from the street.
Once his body hides in the shadows, I turn around and allow him a few last moments of peace alone.
He deserves a quiet death, and my face should not be the last thing he sees. He should be alone. The irony.
“Forty-four,” I say, as I walk back to the hotel.
Ten seconds later, Alex’s voice breaks through the earpiece. “The cleaner is almost done.”
Silence. Breathe in, breathe out.
“Forty-four,” I repeat, more for myself, trying to wrap my head around the number.
Alex’s voice comes back after what feels like an eternity. “You’ve never needed Plan B before.”
And that monster, she’s mine now. You’re mine now. She’ll sleep in your skin, breathe through your ribs, and wake with you every morning. She’s never leaving. Not until the day you die.
I don’t check out of the hotel—another deviation from the plan. No polite ‘thank you’ to the front desk personnel, no trace-removal routine.
I let the “Do Not Disturb” sign hang like a limp flag of surrender and crawl back under the blankets in the same clothes now stained by his blood, still carrying the gunshot residue on my hands. My body and brain cannot process anything right now. I just…exist.
I couldn’t envision failure before, yet here it is.
There is no rage, no pleasure, no thrill, just a big nothing that silences everything. Void, emptiness, something that should have been here but isn’t.
Not thinking. Not not-thinking either. Void.
I’d never skipped a debrief before. Never left Alex hanging.
But that doesn’t stop me from taking the earpiece out and throwing it in the toilet.
I know he’ll call, repeatedly. He will try to go by the book, ask the questions and comment on the results.
But there is nothing I’d hate now more than hearing the consequences of the fragility Azrael inflicted on me with this stupid game we are—no, we were—playing.
They say you don’t know when something big happens until the moment passes.
Well, I can confidently say this is the precise moment my life got fucked up, and I don’t want to hear it.
I don’t want to hear myself explaining it or trying to come up with any made-up reason for tonight’s event unfolding the way it did.
There was no one else to blame.
No one but the pathetic, useless girl in a costume. And the monster, the one still curled up beneath my ribs, is purring softly, satisfied.
Instead, I open the safe and pull out my phone while staring at the unopened bottle of wine.
A new video is still in the gallery, and I tap play.
Cat is lying belly-up now, his paws flexing like he is dreaming about chasing something and not quite catching it.
His ears twitch at some invisible threat before he blinks, confused, and runs, probably in the midst of getting the zoomies.
That stupid little blink.