Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
Hayden
Cain sent over all the information on Tuesday, everything I needed to know was there for the hit.
I read them once, in the kitchen at two in the morning while the house slept, and then I burned the paper the way he taught me, and I carry everything in my head from that point forward the way I always do.
It’s the important part of the family business, remember everything, make sure there’s no trace you were ever there.
It’s Thursday night and I've been waiting for it. My body’s been full of adrenaline, waiting for the moment I can finally pull the trigger.
Patrick Holt has a routine, the way men like him always do, because men like him have never once believed anything could touch them.
He leaves his office building at nine. He drives himself on a Thursday, no driver, ever.
That's his one night of the week he probably calls freedom and goes to a private members’ club forty minutes outside the city.
He stays until eleven, sometimes eleven thirty. He takes the same road home every time.
He's never varied it once in the fourteen months Cain’s been watching him.
Arrogance.
It'll be the last thing he ever relies on.
The night is cold and clear.
I've been in position for an hour by the time his car turns onto the road. I know its shape before the headlights reach me. The make, the color, the small dent above the rear left wheel arch that tells me definitively it's him and not someone else.
I breathe.
In. Out. In. Out.
This is the part where I become something other than Hayden Crawford.
This is the part where Hayden goes somewhere quiet and what's left is just the job, just the variables, just the careful and methodical execution of something that’s been planned and prepared and is now simply waiting to be finished.
I'm good at this part.
I've always been good at this part.
Tonight, though.
Tonight it's different.
The car settles into the dip in the road. Trees crowd close, branches knitting overhead, turning the lane into a narrow throat. The camera on the pole ticks through its sweep, then turns away. Four seconds. I count them as it passes. One. Two. Three. Four.
The engine dies.
Silence presses in. Leaves scrape. Somewhere deeper in the trees, something small breaks and runs.
Patrick Holt steps out of his car.
He doesn’t hesitate. One hand smooths down his jacket. The other shuts the door with a soft, clean click. He walks like the dark belongs to him, like nothing in it has teeth. He doesn’t glance over his shoulder. He doesn’t pause to listen. His eyes stay forward, fixed on the stretch of road ahead.
The camera begins to turn back.
I step out of the dark. I watch his face move through stages: confusion first, then the blankness of a man whose brain is rapidly gathering information it doesn't want to, then finally something that might be the beginning of fear.
"Who are you?" His voice is even. Controlled. He's used to controlling things.
I don't answer, and I have to stop myself from laughing, because he knows who I am.
I look at him instead. Look at the man who stood across a bed from a seventeen year old girl whose mother was dying and told her what it would cost to keep her alive. Who looked at Olivia, seventeen, terrified, completely alone and saw leverage. He’s the man who took everything that was mine.
He’s been sleeping just fine every night since.
Something moves through me.
Not rage. Rage is loud and hot; I know how to wait it out. This is something quieter. Something that’s been sitting in the basement of everything for three years, patient and certain, knowing that one day it would be standing exactly here.
I think about Olivia in the pale blue dress at her mother's graveside.
I think about her hand tightening in mine at the hospital.
I think about everything her mother never got to see.
Patrick Holt opens his mouth.
"Whatever they're paying you—"
"This isn't about money," I say.
He goes quiet.
"This is about a girl," I say. "And what you did to her, what you did to me." I take one step closer. "And the fact that you’ve been walking around for three years like none of it happened.”
My hands are steady. They always are. That's the thing nobody tells you, it isn't shaking hands and racing hearts, not when you've been trained properly, not when the thing is done with precision and purpose and every variable accounted for.
It's just quiet.
I look at the sky for a moment. The darkness between the stars.
I think about the first time Cain put a file in front of me. What he said. These are men the world has decided to protect. We've decided differently. I was nineteen, angry and I understood it completely, and I understand it now.
Patrick Holt, has spent his entire life being the most powerful person in every room he’s ever walked into, but he’s not powerful at this moment.
Right now, he's just a man in the dark, on an empty road, and there’s nobody coming to help him, and he knows it.
"Wait—" His voice is different. The control is gone. Underneath it’s something smaller, something afraid. "Wait, whatever you want, I can—"
“She was seventeen years old,” I say. “Her mother was dying in a bed three floors up, and you stood in that corridor and told her what it would cost to keep her alive. You didn’t touch her yourself. You just made sure the man who did walked free, and that I took his place.
"You took three years of my life," I say, quietly. "You took her mother. You built the cage and locked us both inside it.."
His mouth opens.
"Now you pay," I say, happy knowing I’ll be the last person he sees.
I don't look away when I pull the trigger.
That's important to me. This is a choice I'm making, and I'm going to own it completely, with my eyes open.
The sound disappears into the trees.
The night absorbs it.
I stand there for a moment in the silence that follows, and I wait for the thing I'm supposed to feel; the weight, the conflict, and the complicated machinery of conscience that I know exists in me because I've felt it before.
It doesn't come.
And for this bastard, it never will.
What comes instead is something I don't have a clean word for. Not satisfaction, exactly. Not joy. Something quieter than both of those and more honest than either.
Relief.
The relief of a debt that’s been outstanding for three years finally being settled.
I exhale slowly.
I look at the sky once.
I take out my phone and send Cain a message.
Hayden
Done.
I walk back to my car without looking back, because Patrick Holt is not worth looking back at.
He never was.
The kitchen light is on when I let myself in. Not the main light, he small one above the counter.
I wash my hands at the sink and stand for a moment looking out at the dark garden, the treehouse is just a shape against the sky, and I breathe.
Then I turn around, they're all in the living room. All three of them. Mason on the sofa with his arms folded, ankles crossed on the coffee table. Miles in the armchair, and Declan on the other end of the sofa.
Nobody says anything for a moment, and I lean against the doorframe.
"You didn't have to wait up," I say.
"We didn't," Mason says, not missing a beat. "We're just all coincidentally awake at midnight for completely unrelated reasons."
Miles doesn't look at him. "Shut up, Mason."
"I'm just saying—"
"How are you?" Declan asks.
"Fine," I say. He holds my gaze for a moment, questioning me. "Good fine," I say. "Not just fine."
He nods once. Satisfied.
Miles exhales slowly, leaning back in the armchair. "Cain texted," he says. "Just said it was done. That's all we know."
"That's all you need to know."
"I know." A pause from the three of them. "We know, H."
Mason is looking at the ceiling. "So," he says breaking the silence. "Patrick Holt—
"Mason," Miles says.
"I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying the name. Patrick Holt." A pause. "Awful shame."
Despite everything, something moves through me. I start laughing.
"You're an idiot," I say.
"I prefer unbothered." Mason tilts his head toward me. "You eat? Mum left a plate."
I look at him.
This is Mason Crawford, my brother in his purest form, unable to sit with something heavy for longer than thirty seconds before he has to do something practical or stupid or both. He's been this way since we were kids. It used to drive me insane. Right now, I could not be more grateful for it.
"Yeah," I say. "I'll eat."
He's already up toward the kitchen, Miles stands, and comes over to me, puts his hand on my shoulder, and then he goes to the kitchen too without a word.
Declan is last, and he looks at me, and he says very quietly. "She's okay. Checked on her an hour ago. She's asleep."
I look at him.
"Thank you," I say.
He nods. Then he follows the others.
I stand in the doorway for a moment longer, listening to Mason argue with Miles about whether the plate needs to go in the microwave or not, listening to the ordinary, familiar, completely grounding sound of my brothers being my brothers.
Then I push off the doorframe and join them.
After I’ve eaten, I make my way to my bedroom. Olivia’s in bed, curled on her side, her dad's cardigan still around her shoulders, one hand open on the pillow beside her. She’s not asleep. I can tell by her breathing.
She doesn't ask where I've been.
I get in beside her, and she turns without a word and presses her face against my chest, and I put my arms around her, and we lie in the dark. I stare at the ceiling and breathe.
I close my eyes.
Patrick Holt is gone.
Leo is still out there.
It won’t be long, until I get rid of him.
I start moving Olivia’s stuff into my place, her books go on the shelf beside mine. Her spare charger on the desk. The small photograph of her parents goes on the bedside table on her side, and I put it there carefully and don't say anything about it and neither does she.
I move all her stuff in while she’s at the hospital, not wanting her to fight with me about why we shouldn’t move it together.
"You moved my things in," she says.
"Noticed that, did you?"
"Hayden."