Chapter 22
RETH
Flashback
It takes four seconds.
That’s all a life is when you strip it down to the mechanics of it.
Four seconds, and the thing that was a person becomes a problem I’ve already solved and moved past. I’ve done this enough times that the math is automatic—angle, pressure, duration—and my hands know what to do before my mind has finished the sentence.
The target is a small-time dealer who thought he could skim product from the wrong supplier.
He’s mid-sentence when I close the distance, phone still pressed to his ear.
I don’t bother with stealth. He doesn’t see me until my left hand clamps over his mouth from behind, right arm snaking around his throat in a rear naked choke.
His body jerks, instinctive, but the geometry is already wrong for him.
I drop my weight, sink my hips, and crank.
His larynx collapses first—a soft, wet crunch like stepping on a plastic bottle.
Air stops moving effectively in both directions.
His free hand claws at my forearm, nails raking through the sleeve, finding no purchase.
His phone clatters to the concrete. I twist harder, and cartilage gives.
The second vertebra pops out of alignment with a muffled crack that vibrates up my arm.
His legs buckle, and I lower him slowly, knees first, keeping the choke locked until his eyes roll back and the frantic kicking turns to twitching, then stillness.
Four seconds.
Blood trickles from his nose in two thin streams, dark against the alley grime. The smell of urine and copper mixes with wet asphalt, and I release the choke, check the carotid—nothing. This was an easy job, just as I knew it would it be.
But then the universe decides to fuck with me, and I hear something I’m not supposed to.
A service door. The one that isn’t on the building schematic I memorized, the one that opens outward into the alley from the inside, the one that swings wide at the exact wrong moment and lets out a woman carrying a bag of trash.
She stills.
Mid-thirties, tired eyes, hair pulled back in a messy knot, apron still tied from whatever late shift she just finished. Her eyes flick from the body to me, then back.
I don’t move.
Neither does she.
The silence between us stretches, taut as a tripwire, then she inhales—sharp, ragged—and the scream starts to build in her throat.
The scream never makes it out.
My hand is already moving before my brain catches up. Left arm snakes around her waist like a steel band, right hand clamps over her mouth while the karambit kisses the soft skin under her jaw. One wrong twitch, and the blade opens her throat like a zipper.
She freezes against me, body rigid, the trash bag dropping from her fingers and splitting open on the concrete with a wet slap of coffee grounds and broken glass.
I drag her backward into the shadows of the alley, her sneakers scraping uselessly against the ground. Her heart is hammering so hard I can feel it through her ribs against my chest.
“What did you see?”
She shakes her head frantically, tears already spilling, and I loosen my grip on her mouth just a little.
“N-nothing,” she gasps against my glove, voice muffled and broken. “I swear to God, I didn’t see anything—”
She’s lying. I can tell by the way her pulse spikes. The way her eyes dart toward the body like she’s already memorizing details for the cops.
She’ll talk. They always do.
I tighten my grip, the karambit biting deeper. It’s Halloween, which means if she screams, no one will think anything about it.
She’s shaking like a leaf, and her knees buckle. “Please,” she sobs, the word wet and desperate. “I have a kid. He’s only five. Please… he’s waiting for me. I won’t say anything, I swear on his life, just let me go home to him.”
My stomach twists so hard I taste bile. A kid. Five years old. Waiting. The words burrow under my skin, sharp and hot, and for a second, the knife at her throat feels heavier than any blade I’ve ever held.
I’ve killed more people than I can count.
Not all of them evil or corrupt. Some might just be rivals, politicians, or obstacles, or poor bastards who were standing in the way.
But never this sort of collateral. She’s just a night-shift worker who opened the wrong door at the wrong second.
She’s nobody on anyone’s list. She’s nobody at all.
Except someone’s mother, which makes her everything to at least one person.
Panic is loud inside her, louder than her muffled cries. The desperation is familiar; everyone wants to live. But parents? They want to live harder.
The thought comes unbidden, a cruel little joke at my expense, and my head fills with the memory of my own parents. They didn’t get to live harder or longer. And we didn’t get to grow up in some warm, hopeful way either.
I breathe slow through my nose, steadying my grip.
Kill her. That’s what the logical side of my brain’s saying.
Leave no witness and walk. Clean job, as always.
But there’s this fucking thread inside my chest that squeezes so damn tight with the thought, it’s causing me to think twice.
I never think twice. It’s logic, action, muscle memory, done.
Move on and repeat. Second-guessing gets you dead. Or worse…sentimental.
So why can’t I tighten my grip and finish it?
“Please,” she begs, tears spilling freely.
“Fuck!” I blurt, and the woman flinches, eyes pressed tight. “You weren’t supposed to fucking be here!”
“I’m s…sorry.”
“Jesus!”
Assassin 101: Never leave a trail. That rule is carved into my bones.
One witness, one loose end, one crack in the armor, and everything unravels.
If I leave this woman alive, she’ll sing to the first cop she finds.
She’ll describe the mask. The paint. The way I moved.
And Valeria will know. Her claws go real deep into the system.
She’ll know I hesitated. She’ll know I’m weak.
What’ll happen next is Valeria will kill this woman anyway.
She’ll clean up the cops. She’ll find every single person this woman whispered to—neighbors, coworkers, family.
And when she’s done with them, she’ll go for the boy.
Valeria doesn’t leave loose ends. She has no problem killing a five-year-old boy if it means tying off every thread.
She’ll do it cleanly, quietly, and she’ll make sure I know it was my hesitation that signed the child’s death warrant.
All because I couldn’t pull the blade across one more throat.
The thought sinks into me like ice water and gasoline at the same time—cold enough to numb, hot enough to blister. I look down at the woman. Her tears have soaked through my glove, her body quivering so violently the blade at her throat trembles with her.
Sweat breaks across my forehead, cold and sudden, then hotter, thicker, until it slides down my temples like something darker than water.
For one sick, dizzy second, I think it might actually be blood—like the sweat of a man who once knelt under the weight of a choice that could not be unmade, begging for any other path, only to bleed instead.
The weight of the decision isn’t in my bones anymore. It’s in every vein, every capillary, every cell that still holds a minuscule trace of humanity.
If I let her go, her son dies.
If I kill her, he lives.
It’s as simple as that. As fucked up as that.
“What’s your name?” I ask, letting go of her mouth some more, but not all the way.
“Allison.” Her voice quivers.
“Allison who?”
“Greene.”
“Where do you live, Allison Greene?”
She hesitates, and I press the knife deeper against her throat because fear is the best motivator. “Eight one five Oak Hollow Drive. Please, I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t kill me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No. No. No. No. Please, my son,” she sobs. “I’m all he has. I can’t…please.”
My jaw locks, her address committed to memory. “I’m sorry, Allison,” I bite out between clenched teeth, because it fucking hurts to say it.
Her eyes go wide, fear detonating in hazel irises like a chemical bomb. She tries to scream again, but I clamp my hand tight over her mouth, crushing the sound to a muffled howl almost too animal for a human.
“You probably won’t believe me when I say…” I lean in until my black painted mouth is at her ear. “I’m doing this…for your son.”
The blade moves—fast, clean, final. And the entire world reconfigures around the blood spilling down her neck.
Her body jerks once, a sharp, surprised spasm, then goes still.
The sound that comes out of me is a wet gasp, nothing more as blood pours hot over my hand, down my wrist, soaking the glove.
Her weight slumps against me, and I hold her there like I’m trying to keep her heart beating.
As if I have a choice of undoing an inevitable calamity.
I lower her gently to the ground, like she’s fragile even in death, and I don’t even realize I’m going down with her until my knees hit the concrete next to her hard enough to bruise, but I don’t feel it.
I don’t feel anything except the shaking—violent, uncontrollable, like my body is trying to tear itself apart from the inside.
The knife is still clenched in my right fist, slick with her blood, and I can’t make my grip loosen.
It’s fused to me now, part of the shaking, part of the ruin.
I stare at her face. Her eyes are wide open, locked on nothing.
The terror is still there, frozen in the pupils, in the way her mouth is parted like she was still trying to scream when the light went out.
The line across her throat gapes like a second mouth, red and glistening, the edges already darkening at the corners.
Blood has run down her neck in thick, syrupy trails, soaking into the collar of her apron, pooling in the hollow of her collarbone. It looks like spilled wine.
It looks like something I did.