Chapter 31
VICTORIA
Ididn’t want this. I didn’t want Azrael to end our game like this. Because that’s what this is, right? The end. That’s the only reason someone would hire me—to delete someone.
No, no, I really don’t like this.
“You don’t have to do this. Hell, you should not do this.”
For the first time in his life, Alex is right. I shouldn’t do this. I should just take the first flight back to Seattle, go back to my old life, and forget everything.
In fact, I don’t owe the Professor anything.
He’s had his fun, I’ve had mine, and now it’s time to part ways.
This train of thoughts would be amazing under normal circumstances, but not with him.
With Azrael, everything is stupidly different.
I don’t need a reason, I don’t need to know I will win.
All I need to know is that he’ll be there.
“You know I will, anyway.” And I can sense the defeat in my voice. This is it: defeat. I surrendered myself to the Professor and his theories, and now I’m paying the price.
“I have a list of at least seven lives you can ruin. At least one of them is far more interesting than this. Vic, listen. I know you have your own battles and have your own demons to fight, but this is not one of them. This is not how you have to do this.”
“Don’t.” I cut him off. “I’ve made my decision.”
“Okay. What’s the plan?” He asks, and I sense more than the typical ‘I need to know so I know what to clean’ in his voice. It’s almost like he is mad at me for doing this.
Well, he’s not the only one.
“There is no plan. I don’t know what I am getting myself into. I’m just going to roll with it and improvise.”
“Roll with it? Improvise? What the fuck, Victoria. No, this is not you.” Alex is basically screaming at this point. “You don’t have to do this.”
He is wrong, I do have to do this.
I don’t want him dead, but I also don’t want to live not knowing what would happen if I don’t have the guts to pull the trigger.
“I will handle it alone. And have a plan for Cat, the sitter will leave in three hours.”
The cat. Why am I planning like I will not come out of this alive? It’s a job, it’s not like Azrael will kill me. He’s had the chance many times, and he hasn’t taken it. In fact, I was the one who had the weapon pointed at him, and he always let me decide, not protesting once.
Then what is all this? What is this job? Why am I talking like I’ll not be alive to see the end of this?
I hear the soft exhale through his mic. That quiet sound of resignation, he knows this is the last time we’re talking.
“Call me after. Send my love to the Doctor,” he says.
“Don’t wait up,” I say, and I end the call.
He shouldn’t, to be honest. If I’m right, the man I shared a bed with way too many times has trapped me and is now about to kill me. Again. Chances are, I will not make it out of there alive. Fuck, I might as well say my goodbyes.
Alex’s message comes through.
Alex: Target location confirmed. Tonight, 02:45.
I stare at the screen, waiting for the message to start making sense. Istanbul tonight, mission. A mission, just like always, a mission to kill someone. But this time, it is not just someone, it is the Professor. My Professor.
Azrael.
Malek.
Or whatever the fuck he likes to call himself these days.
I press my forehead to the cold glass of the hotel window with Istanbul’s skyline blinking underneath. Despite the sea of blackness over the Bosphorus, everything is pulsing, alive around me.
I’m too lightheaded, incapable of focusing on reality. It’s like I’m watching my life from afar, a spectator to my show, and I can’t feel the ground beneath me.
I close my eyes, trying to summon hate. I try to feel the rage that should have ignited like wildfire when I realize why he left me. Lied to me. Played me like a pawn.
But all I feel is hollow. I see it happening, yet I refuse to believe it. What did they say? Right. “Psychologically incompatible with conducting experiments on humans,” and now I finally understand the reason.
Because I knew the truth long before Alex said it, long before the intel confirmed it.
I knew who Malek was. Ever since I’d done my research after the warehouse meeting.
I knew Azrael had changed his identity after his failed-not-failed government experiment.
I just didn’t believe he would put me in this situation, to fear for my life while willingly doing exactly what he wants.
Even now, I’m still not hesitating.
“I could walk away,” I whisper to no one.
But I know there is no way I could live with myself if I do that. I’ve made my decision, and I need to see it through to the end. If this is what will kill me, it is long overdue anyway. Fourteen years overdue.
My weapon collection is already on the bed, and I’m supposed to start the planning recap, but my mind is spinning.
I’ve done this dozens of times, haven’t I? But this time, it’s personal. It’s not about the money, nor is it about the thrill of killing or the pleasure of the reward wine at the end. This is about me.
If Malek—Azrael, fuck—wants the bullet to go straight through his brain, then who am I to deny him the wish?
I pick up a gun. The cold metal on my fingers feels too mechanical. I’m not killing just any target, I’m killing Azrael, and the weapon should fit the job.
But like every other time in the past twenty-four hours since I left my apartment, the idea of him, dead, freezes the blood in my veins.
I simply don’t. I can resist anything, but am I really prepared for a world in which the only person who makes me feel alive is gone, deleted from existence by my own weapon?
That single thought makes me vomit. I want to go back in time and shake his body until the neurons are working again.
What the fuck is he thinking? Making me kill him?
No, I can’t. And even if I can, I don’t want to. But what can I do? The fucker signed his death sentence when he contracted me to kill him.
You could say no.
The fuck I can. It will just prove I’m more attached to the Professor than I wanted him to know. I need to keep him alive in a way that would not make me desperate.
So I do the only thing that makes sense: take the gun and load it with blank bullets. If he wants danger, I will make sure he gets the best performance, but I’m not about to stain my hands with the blood of the one who is mine.
I’m about to leave when my overthinking brain stops me.
He would never, but what if he wants the actual outcome of this situation, the blood and the last breath?
The thought itself is too much, but I am always prepared.
I need to face this, so I end up grabbing my blade—the special one, the one that has tasted blood only once—and I tuck it into my boot.
God, I want to believe this is just a sick game, but what if I’m wrong and I’m already losing?
The location is ten minutes out, in a remote area of the Asian part of the city. When I arrive in front of the building, there are no guards like I expected, no traps. The only unusual things are a candle in the window, and a single name taped to the door.
Victoria.
How poetic.
I pull out the gun and take a deep breath. I’m far from ready for this, but it’s too late. He should start counting his last minutes alive. Right, the same words I’ve thought of forty-five times already.
The door opens before I can knock, and there he is. Azrael, standing there in the middle of the room, unbothered by the gravity of the situation. Fucking psychopath, a psychopath that means more to me than the word itself.
The room is a hollow shell, rotting from the inside out.
The logs that make up the walls are a jumble of twisted, cracked timber, their surfaces slick with a green-black film of mold.
Dust motes are everywhere, and the only source of light illuminating the decay that coats every surface are candles lit in various places.
The place itself screams death, and nothing could be more metaphorical than this.
“Hello, Professor.”
His voice is just as flat as his expression. “Hi, love. You don’t look surprised.”
I curl my lips into a bitter smile. “Can you blame me? I’m really good at my job.”
“So… you’re not going after—”
He starts walking toward me but stops when he hears the answer.
“Malek. Yeah. At first, Alex was too sloppy giving me your profile, but after our very interesting first meeting, I dug deeper and found your papers. I know everything about you. You didn’t sign the earliest experiment with ‘AL’ but…” I point at him, “— ‘ML’. You.”
Someone would expect the revelation of information to scare him, but Azrael is not scared. In fact, he looks surprised, even amused. “So you’re saying you knew everything about me, and you still showed up every time, little ember?”
The nickname shakes something inside me. He’s not allowed to use it. That one is special, and I’ll not let him dirty it like this.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Call me that.” I answer furiously. He doesn’t get nickname privileges while he’s acting like a dumb bitch.
“Little ember? But Victoria, you are my little ember, and you always will be.”
I should hate him. How dare he? But now is not the moment to fight over sentimentalities.
“I said don’t. Anyway, at first, I only knew your name, but not that you were the one hiring me. That information came too late.”
“And you still accepted it,” he says with a note of challenge in his voice.
Now it’s my turn to be amused. “And waste a number? No, no, fuck no. I’ll be the one who kills you, for everything you’ve done to me.”
He exhales a laugh that doesn’t reach his eyes. “My little ember never disappoints.”
“But there is one thing I don’t understand.” I continue, ignoring what he says, “Why did you do this?”
Seconds pass before he answers, like he’s trying to find the right words.
“Initially, this was supposed to be your final test. I had something grandiose in mind.” He starts walking toward me, and I can’t flinch. I simply step into his path, letting his arms close around me, an embrace that feels like coming home.
“But you took all the space in my mind and made it yours. So now, my love, this is our final lesson. Our own shinjū.”
His mouth finds mine, and a soft, almost fragile kiss is pressed to my lips. It is too intimate for the situation unfolding in front of me. I stare into his eyes—my man, the man who yearns to die for me, to prove his love.
The word catches in my throat.
A double suicide.
Lovers who cannot exist apart.
One pulls the trigger; the other follows, falling with them. It’s the perfect ending for a story we wrote together in blood and desire and all the wrong kinds of love.
I look at the gun in my hand and then at him.
“So here, right now, you want me to die for you?”
I should be scared, although this is a feeling I’ve long since forgotten. But I’m finally calm. This finally makes sense. This target came with zero execution planning, and I was prepared for everything that might have happened. But certainly not for this.
“No, Victoria. I want you to burn for me, in the deepest circle in hell, right by my side.”
“Death?”
“A new beginning.”
There are clear signs when you know you’ve fucked up in life, such as the moment when the person you crave the most, the one who made you feel alive for the first time in many years, is asking you to die for them.
The normal answer under most circumstances is to say no, but nothing about Azrael or me is normal.
We are both twisted, our story was psychotic, and the ending was death from the very beginning.
It’s just that I didn’t expect death to come so soon.
“Weapon of choice?” Those are the unbelievable words that escape my mouth. I’ve just signed my own sentence.
“I have my gun. Take it. I’ll take your gun.”
This feels like a sickening ritual, asking for my hand in damnation, exchanging death weapons instead of promises. The sick part? I understand.
Azrael never wanted to escape. He wanted devotion in its purest, most brutal form.
He successfully took everything from me in a matter of months, and I let him, piece by piece, turn me into the product of his own imagination.
So what is left to take? My future. The part of me that could walk away and pretend he hasn’t changed everything.
Some get wedding rings and eternal devotion in front of sickening people at vowing ceremonies. I got a psychopath, a loaded gun, and a death wish.
For the first time since I left that hotel room in Canada, everything makes sense, everything is clear. I need to die for my darkest obsession.
“My dear Professor…” I move closer, looking straight into his eyes. “I’ll see you in hell.”
And I pull the trigger.
“Die b—” something screams in the background, but it’s too late.
BANG!
BANG!