Chapter 10 Lucian The Third Victim
LUCIAN: THE THIRD VICTIM
The third and final act of my mission had been the hardest.
I’d thought the killing would be the challenge.
It wasn’t. The hard part was her - the one who never stayed where she was supposed to be.
Every time I closed the distance, something shifted.
Buses left early. Classes were rescheduled.
Doors locked seconds before I reached them.
Fate - or whatever passed for it - kept dragging her out of my reach.
She wasn’t like the others. Stacy and Rita had begged to be found.
This one moved like she’d been warned. Quiet.
Careful. Absent from the noise of the city.
She didn’t post. She didn’t drink. She didn’t draw attention.
She folded inward and lived small, and that made her harder to see. Harder to touch.
But I had work to finish. Three girls. Two already gone. The last one wasn’t going to slip away forever.
It took weeks before I found the pattern. Every afternoon, she went to the same coffee shop - small, dim, forgettable. She sat in the same seat, ordered the same drink, held the cup like it was keeping her alive. That was where I moved in. Not with violence, but with patience.
I took the stool beside her and ordered black coffee. I didn’t speak. I let her get used to my presence, a quiet shape at her side. A face that didn’t demand to be remembered.
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t move away. Eventually, she accepted it, much like the same way people accept background noise. That’s when she started to let me in. Not into her life, but into her silence.
We never exchanged names. Never talked about the past. We just existed side by side as two people keeping their ghosts close.
For weeks, I watched her. But it wasn’t like before. This wasn’t strategy. It was curiosity I couldn’t shake. She was a mystery the world kept saving, and I didn’t know why.
One afternoon, I lingered in the doorway. She sat alone, same seat, same cup between her hands. The neon light outside flickered through the window, cutting her face in flashes of red and white.
Her hair was loose, a little messy, her eyes tired. She didn’t look like a monster. She didn’t look like someone who’d ruined a life. But I’d stopped believing in appearances long ago.
I took my seat. Watched. Waited.
She didn’t look up. Just stared into her drink, shoulders drawn tight like she was bracing for something that never came. For a second, I wondered if she felt it too, that magnetic pull between us. The thing that had kept her alive this long.
The space between us felt fragile, too easy to break if I pushed, so I said nothing. I’d learned how to wait—how silence could do more work than words ever could.
She finally looked up. Not startled or curious. Just aware. Her eyes met mine, steady and unreadable.
“You come here a lot,” I said.
Her lips curved, faint but not unfriendly. “So do you.”
Her voice was soft, lower than I expected. Controlled. It had that practiced calm of someone who’d learned to hide behind the walls they’d built around themself.
“Coffee’s good,” I said.
She studied me for a moment, like she was measuring her words before she spoke and how far she wanted to take the conversation. “It’s the best in the city, I think.”
I tried for a smile, but she didn’t notice because she lowered her head until her eyes were fixated on her cup again.
The barista called another order. Steam hissed from the machine. The world went on around us like it didn’t care we were building something dangerous in its corner.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She hesitated, then shook her head. “There’s no scenario in this world where you need to know my name.”
Her response confuses me. “Why’s that?”
“Names make things complicated.”
“Maybe I like complicated.”
“I don’t,” she said, eyes dropping back to her cup. But there was a flicker—something in the way her shoulders eased. Like she wasn’t ready to leave yet.
So I stayed.
We didn’t speak again for the rest of that afternoon. We just sat there, breathing the same stale air, our elbows almost touching. When she got up to leave, she paused beside me.
“I guess I’ll see you around,” she said.
The words shouldn’t have meant anything.
But as she walked out, I realized they did.
Every plan I’d made, every line I’d drawn, started to blur.
She wasn’t supposed to survive this story.
But fate, once again, had other plans.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her sitting there in that cafe.
I saw the steam from her cup, the faint tremor in her hands, the calm that didn’t match her eyes.
It was an image sketched into my psyche that I just couldn’t shake.
She was supposed to be another name on a list. Another job finished.
But the thought of her didn’t sit like the others. It didn’t burn. It lingered.
I told myself it was frustration. That it was about closure. But the lie didn’t hold.
The truth was simpler and worse: she’d gotten under my skin.
I watched the city from my window. The streets were slick with rain, lights bleeding across the glass.
I’d spent months learning how to erase people. How to step into their lives and take them apart piece by piece. But she made it impossible. Every time I tracked her, something interfered. A last-minute detour, a delay, a stranger stepping in her path. That kind of luck doesn’t happen on its own.
It almost felt like someone - or something - was protecting her.
Fate.
The word sat in my head like a sliver. I didn’t believe in it. Not until she kept walking away from what should’ve been inevitable.
I poured a drink and didn’t touch it. The clock kept ticking, and I kept staring at nothing.
The others had been easy. Their deaths had been executions - clean, righteous, necessary. But this one… this one was different. Every time I got close, the anger dulled. I couldn’t see Billie’s ghost in her face anymore. Just a woman trying too hard to stay invisible.
I hated that it mattered.
I hated that her silence felt familiar. That she carried herself like someone who’d lost something too.
Some nights, I caught myself wondering what she dreamed about. What she was running from. And that was the problem. I wasn’t supposed to wonder. I was supposed to end this.
But for the first time since Billie died, the line between justice and morality started to blur.
Tomorrow, I’d go back. I’d find her. Maybe I’d finish it. Or maybe fate would get in the way again. Maybe fate wasn’t protecting her. Maybe it was warning me.