47. William Scott-Evans
WILLIAM SCOTT-EVANS
Missy Hale wasn’t my first. Nor was she my last. But she was by far my favorite.
Not because of what I did—people always get that wrong—but because of the way she refused to disappear quietly. There was a defiance in her that irritated me. A refusal to understand how the world worked. How men like me didn’t ask. We took.
They think the thrill is in the chaos. The noise. The moment when everything stops.
Idiots.
The real pleasure is in the certainty. In knowing, before it even begins, that there will be no consequences. That no matter how hard someone fights, the system will eventually step in—not to stop you, but to clean up after you.
I knew that before the car ever slowed.
I knew it when she ran.
The other girl bolted the second things shifted. Panic makes people predictable. Missy didn’t follow. She turned instead, like she could bargain with momentum. Like she could talk her way out of inevitability.
I remember thinking she was brave. And stupid. But later, I realized she was buying enough time for her sister to get away.
The field was dark, uneven, loud with insects. There was no need to rush. She was already trapped—by geography, by fear, by the simple truth that no one was coming.
She fought. That was what made her different.
She didn’t scream or beg. Instead, she fought with everything she had, even when it was clear how this would end.
Her nails broke skin. Her voice cracked.
She spat in my face, and that just made me harder for her.
Her defiance made me delirious with desire, because most people don’t put up a good fight.
When it was over, there was a moment—a brief, hollow pause—where I felt nothing at all. No triumph. No satisfaction. Just a flatness, like finishing a task I’d done too many times before.
I remember being annoyed at the mess. Annoyed at the time it took and that we’d have to wait until the next day to go to the festival.
That’s what people never understand. It isn’t rage that drives men like me. It’s boredom.
I cleaned up. I left. I adjusted. I moved on.
By morning, the world was already doing what it always did—softening the edges, misplacing details, redirecting blame. By the time her name reached the news, the story was already losing weight. She was a headline for fifteen seconds. Then a whisper. Then nothing.
I watched the investigation from a distance, amused by the theater of it. The interviews. The concern. The promises that justice would be served. When I knew better.
Justice is a performance. And I had front-row seats.
Her sister survived. That was unfortunate.
Survivors complicate things. They remember details other people are quick to forget. But even that didn’t trouble me for long. Money closes mouths. Influence redirects blame. Silence is bought, not earned. And institutions prefer resolution over truth.
So the problem corrected itself.
Time passed. Names blurred. The story shrank until it was nothing more than a cautionary headline people stopped reading halfway through. That’s how these things end when the right people are involved.
But I remembered Missy Hale.
Not out of guilt. Not out of regret.
I remembered her because she didn’t comply.
She fought when she should have broken. She resisted when resistance had no value. For a brief, irritating moment, she forced my attention—made me adjust, recalibrate. That kind of interruption is rare.
Interesting, but temporary.
In the end, she changed nothing.
And that is all she ever was to me: an interruption that didn’t last.
Until Rowan Hale took it upon herself to try to kill me.
The bitch poisoned me.
She was careful enough to stop short of finishing the job. She wanted me afraid. Wanted me weak, and aware that she was watching me.
I woke up disoriented, my body betraying me in ways it never had before.
Muscles refusing orders. Vision narrowing.
My heart pounding like it didn’t know who it belonged to anymore.
Doctors hovered. Questions were asked. Too many of them.
And for the first time in my life, I couldn’t buy the room into silence fast enough.
I survived. Of course I did.
People like me always do.
But something had shifted. I could feel it in the way eyes lingered too long. In the way conversations stopped when I entered a room. The protection I’d relied on—effortless, automatic—had developed cracks. Small ones. Hairline fractures. But fractures all the same.
Rowan Hale had done that.
She hadn’t come at me screaming. She hadn’t made accusations. She hadn’t begged the world to see me for what I was. She’d done something far more dangerous.
She’d acted.
Quietly. Intelligently. Without witnesses or confession. She didn’t want justice. She wanted consequence. And she didn’t care if she lived to see it.
That’s what unsettled me.
Missy Hale had fought. That had been irritating. Rowan Hale hadn’t fought at all. She’d waited. Watched. Learned. And then she’d reached into my world and reminded me—briefly—that I wasn’t untouchable.
I won’t forgive that. And I sure as hell won’t forget. Because I know the truth. She didn’t poison me to end me. She poisoned me to announce herself. And now that I know she exists, she’s made the oldest mistake of all. She’s become visible. After that, I couldn’t stop seeing her.
Rowan Hale slipped into everything. Every silence. Every shadow. Every moment my phone rang and stopped too quickly. I started noticing patterns where there were none. Or maybe where there were some and I’d just been too arrogant not to look before.
I changed my routines. I stopped trusting the same people. I watched exits. Counted faces. I slept lighter. Poorly. My body still remembered the poison, even after the doctors insisted it was gone. A lingering weakness. A reminder.
I don’t like reminders.
What she did wasn’t reckless. That was the problem. Reckless people get caught. Reckless people brag. Rowan Hale did neither. She disappeared back into her life like she hadn’t reached across a table and nearly ended mine.
That kind of restraint isn’t accidental.
It’s learned.
I started digging. Quietly. The way you do when you don’t want your name attached to anything. I wanted to know how she’d done it. Where she’d learned. Who she’d spoken to. Whether she was alone—or if this was something larger.
The answer unsettled me.
She wasn’t part of anything. No organization. No mentor. No network. It was just her. Pure. Focused. Untreated grief with nothing left to lose. That’s when I understood she was more dangerous than her sister ever had been.
Missy Hale fought because she thought someone would save her. Rowan Hale acted because she knew no one would.
I couldn’t allow that kind of person to exist in my orbit. Not someone who had already crossed the line once and lived to tell the story. People like her don’t stop. They escalate. They wait. They improve.
So I did what I’ve always done when a problem refuses to correct itself. I outsourced it.
No connection back to me. I didn’t want spectacle. I didn’t want noise. I wanted certainty. A clean end to a loose thread that had already frayed too far.
I gave instructions. Specific ones.
I wanted it to look random. It couldn’t be quick, because I wanted her to suffer. And I wanted to make sure she didn’t see it coming-just like what she did to me.
I didn’t feel anger when I made the call. I felt relief. Because once Rowan Hale was gone, the balance would be restored. The world would make sense again. Cause and effect. Action without consequence—my natural order.
She’d taken something from me when she poisoned me. Control. Certainty. The illusion of invulnerability. And I intended to take everything back.