Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
Hayden
It's not even been a week since I put a bullet in his father, and Leo Holt’s been walking around this campus with not a care in the world. He doesn’t look like he’s upset about his dad, nor does he look worried that someone is going to come for him.”
Asshole.
Then again, a part of me thinks, does he even know about it yet? I told Cain as soon as it was done, I have no idea what he did, it's something I should be asking him, but I’m not going to.
Either way, it doesn't matter. Leo's not going to have long to think about it.
I've been watching him for days now and the pattern is so clean it's almost offensive.
He's never had to be careful. That's the thing about people like him, with the money, the name and the father who made problems disappear, it means the instinct for self-preservation has never had to develop. He’s never had a reason to.
Why look over your shoulder when nothing has ever come from behind?
I sit two tables back in the coffee shop on the third morning and I watch him scroll his phone, he doesn't look up once.
This is becoming too easy. Can it really be this easy?
I know the building by heart now., I’ve looked through everything, every corner, every camera angle, every rotation, and noted every blind spot.
There’s the side entrance lock that Miles cracked in under an hour.
The stairwell where the motion sensor only kicks in on the second floor landing.
The corridor on the third floor where you can't be seen until you're already at the door.
Last door on the left, that’s his.
I've walked it three times now at different hours, different configurations, building the map until it lives in my body instead of just my head. That's what Cain always said. You don't think your way through it, on the night, you've already thought your way through it, you just move.
So, that’s what I’ve done I've thought my way through it. I know every exit., every variable, and every second between the side entrance and his door.
I know it all.
I'm ready.
It’s Thursday night and my body is shaking with adrenaline, this is it. Tonight is the night.
Leo's light is on when I reach the building. Third floor, right on schedule. I wait for a moment before I exit my car, just staring at the light. I look around to make sure there’re no new cars parked anywhere, making sure nothing has changed.
If it has changed then I need to abort. But everything looks perfect.
Walking over to the building, I move to the side entrance which takes me four seconds to unlock.
The stairwell is quiet, which is a good sign, it has always been quiet.. I move through it the way I've moved through it in my head a hundred times: measured, unhurried, every step placed exactly where it needs to be.
Once on the third floor, I look around to get to Leo’s door, and the lock takes me seconds to break through.
Stepping into the room, I softly close the door behind me, and I hear him before I see him.
I hear the low sound of something playing on the TV or on his laptop, I’m not sure, but the sound is echoing in the silence of the room.
I come around the corner. He's on the sofa with his back to me, feet up on the coffee table, phone in his hand, and the blue light of whatever he's watching moving across the ceiling.
I take a step closer, and he must feel the shift in the room, because he begins to lower his phone, then looks over his shoulder, and his eyes widen when he sees me.
The confusion moves across his face first, that's always first, the brain buying itself seconds while it assembles what the eyes are telling it.
"Crawford." His voice is still trying to be even. Still trying to be Leo Holt, the version with the money and the certainty and the father who fixes things.
Except his father can't fix anything anymore.
"Hey, Leo," I say.
He's on his feet fast, the sofa shifting behind him, and his eyes going immediately to the door where I'm standing between him and the exit.
"Wait—" The evenness is already cracking. "Wait, just—"
I don't move. I don't need to move. I have all the time in the world, and he has none of it and some part of him is starting to understand that.
"She cried at the graveside," I say.
He goes still, then his lips curl up, and it builds up the anger in me. The fucker is stopping himself from smiling.
"Her mother's graveside." My voice is completely level. It’s not raised, not shaking, just there, putting every word exactly where it needs to land.
"She held herself together through the whole service.
Through every single minute of it. And then they lowered the coffin and she couldn't anymore.
" I look at him. "That's what you did. You got behind a wheel, you drove it into her parents, and you walked away.
You kept sending her notes while her mother was in a hospital bed dying.
You watched her fall apart from a distance and you enjoyed it. "
Something moves across his face.
“Did she cry the way she did in the bathroom?” Leo takes a small step back, and it takes everything in me not to react.
I know that’s what he’s doing. He’s trying to get me angry, trying to make me make a mistake.
But it won’t happen. “You know, I always like virgin pussy, and hers— He stops talking when I lift the gun to him.
“If I was you, I would stop talking now,” I warn him.
“Whether I stop talking, or I carry on, there is only one thing happening here tonight, and that’s you pulling the trigger.” Leo looks around his apartment again. I’m not sure what he’s looking for when the asshole doesn’t have any weapons in here.
“Well, at least I know you’re not one hundred percent stupid.”
“She begged, you know. She screamed your name hoping you’d hear her.” He shakes his head a little, a smile on the bastard's face. “She put up a fight, but it only made it harder for her.” He stops and walks to the side, hands in his pocket smiling as he walks a little further away from me.
His mouth opens again, but I shoot him in the leg to shut him up, because the fucker is pissing me off now.
And I see it, the thing I've been waiting for. Not remorse. Leo Holt was not built for remorse. But the real him. Finally, stripped of every layer he's been hiding behind. There’s no one here now to protect him, no words are going to save him.
He looks small, mean and frightened, which is all he has ever actually been.
Every terrible thing he’s ever done traces back to that smallness, to the fear underneath it, and to the desperate lifelong need to be the most powerful thing in whatever room he’s standing in.
He always knew that somewhere underneath everything he was given, that without any of it he was nothing.
He's nothing right now.
"Hayden—"
"Don't." The word comes out quiet and absolute. "Don't say my name."
He tries to walk, but the bullet in his leg is making that a little hard for him.
"Please—"
He stops when I bring the gun up to him again, and this time I smile listening to him beg.
Begging.
Something moves through me that I don't try to contain.
“She begged in the bathroom. She begged you to stop and you didn't stop.” I tilt my head to the side a little, as he watches me, but I see the fear in him. “And then you threatened her to lie, to save yourself, she’ll never beg people like you again ever.”
Olivia Banks spent years on her knees in front of people like Leo Holt.
“Then you came to college and thought I would forget what you did to me. You thought I would forget the nights behind bars, for something I never did.” I take another step closer to him. “I never forgot, I planned, I planned for this very moment.”
I want to hear the word. I want the last sound out of his mouth to be that one single word, that small broken please, because she said it too and nobody gave it back to her and he’s going to know what that feels like for every second I decide to let him stand here.
“Pl…ease.” The word stutters, and it makes me smile.
I let him say it a third time.
Then I raise the gun.
He squeezes his eyes shut. His hands are trembling now, the please dying on his lips, and I look at him over the sight and I feel completely, entirely clear.
He has always been so small.
I pull the trigger.
The sound disappears into the silencer.
Leo Holt goes down and I stand over him in the silence that follows, my gun still raised, and I breathe once. Then again.
Lowering the gun, I stand in the apartment for a moment longer.
I don’t feel relief. Just the absence of something that has occupied space for so long it stopped feeling like a presence and started feeling like weather; constant, atmospheric, and just the condition of being alive.
It's gone now.
Leo Holt is gone. The notes are gone. The calls to his father, the pattern on the road, the version of my life that started unraveling the night he decided Olivia was something he could hurt and get rid of.
He’s gone.
All of it.
I turn around and walk out of the door, down the corridor, down the stairwell and out through the side entrance into the cold night air and I don't look back.
It's done.
That was always the only thing that mattered.