Chapter 10 Milo
MILO
Something was wrong.
I felt it the way you feel the barometric pressure drop before a storm.
I was parked two blocks from The Silver Table with my engine off, watching Raven's bus pull up to the curb.
She stepped off first, snapping her cane out and lifting her chin as she began to walk confidently toward the restaurant.
The city parted around her like water around a stone.
The evening crowd didn't slow her. Nothing slowed her.
But tonight, I wasn't watching her.
I was watching the man who was watching her.
He was across the street, half a block behind. Gray hoodie, hands in his pockets, moving when she moved, stopping when she stopped. Matching her pace with the kind of disciplined patience that said this wasn't his first time following someone.
He wasn't one of Viktor's. I knew Viktor's people. This guy was alone. Unaffiliated. A predator who picked targets the way a hyena picked off the limping gazelle at the back of the herd.
And he'd been studying her.
I sat very still in my car and watched him watch her cross the intersection.
He knew the timing of the crosswalk. He knew which direction she turned.
He knew how far she had to walk. I knew because of how he adjusted his pace to gradually catch up to her, which told me he'd done this before.
Maybe not today, but enough times that he knew her routine almost as well as I did.
He lingered at the corner, then pulled out his phone and typed something. Noting the time, maybe. Or logging her route. The screen lit up his face as he did, showing me that he was mid-forties, with gaunt, sharp, hungry features.
My back teeth began to ache and I consciously relaxed my jaw.
I'd been watching Raven for weeks. I knew her patterns better than he ever would. But this was different. I watched her because I couldn't stop.
He watched her the way a coyote watched a rabbit with a broken leg.
I pulled out my phone and took three photos of him through the windshield. Then I got out of my car.
I stayed on him for two hours.
He followed her to the restaurant, then stood outside for forty minutes, chain smoking, watching the golden glow of The Silver Table through the plate glass like it was a movie screen.
I studied him from a distance, cataloging details.
Noticing the way he positioned himself behind a mailbox to break his silhouette and the way he angled his phone, taking pictures through the window.
Of her.
Rage sat high and hot in the back of my throat, but I swallowed it down. I needed to keep my head on straight.
Then he walked the perimeter of the building, paying particular attention to the alley. He noted the exits, then tested the service door handle. Which was, of course, unlocked.
I knew exactly what he was doing. He was building a plan. A timeline. Finding the gaps in her routine where she was most alone.
When he finally left, I tailed him to a shitbox apartment twelve blocks south of Raven's building.
Ground floor. No security cameras. There was a rusted fire escape clinging to the brick like a dying vine.
His blinds were drawn, and outside his window there was a window AC unit that rattled like a smoker's cough.
I memorized the address, then I called a contact who owed me a favor.
Twenty minutes later, I had a name. Derek Scodal. He was forty-one, and had two prior arrests for stalking women.
My grip tightened on the phone as my contact rattled off the information.
Derek had one restraining order, which he'd violated more than once. But the charges had been dropped both times because the women were too afraid to testify.
The women. Plural.
I thanked my contact and ended the call, then set the phone on the passenger seat and stared at his darkened window. I thought about the photos on his phone he took tonight. Raven at the piano. Raven walking to the bus. Raven with her white cane, tapping her way through a world she couldn't see.
He's not Bratva. He's not your problem. Call in an anonymous tip and let the cops handle it.
That was the smart play. The clean play.
But the cops would take a report. Maybe they'd talk to him.
Maybe they'd issue a warning. But he hadn't actually done anything yet, so they wouldn't arrest him.
And then he'd wait a few weeks, adjust his pattern, and try again.
Because men like Derek didn't stop. They just got better at not getting caught.
I knew, because I'd cleaned up after men like him.
I got out of the car.
***
It took four minutes.
I won't say it was quick, because quick implies I rushed. I didn't rush. I was precise. Methodical. The same way I approached every job.
Afterward, I stood in his bathroom, washing my hands in his sink. The water ran clear. I hadn't been sloppy. I'm never sloppy.
My hands were steady.
My heart was not.
I dried my hands on his towel and looked at my reflection in the cracked mirror above the basin. Same shaggy blonde hair. Same green eyes. Same surfer-boy face that made people trust me. Same hoop earring catching the fluorescent light.
But the emptiness I was used to seeing behind those eyes was gone. The man staring back at me had just discovered exactly what he was willing to do for a woman who couldn't even see his face.
I'd made bodies vanish for people who killed. I'd scrubbed arterial spray off ceilings without blinking. I'd bagged dismembered limbs and driven them to disposal sites and eaten a sandwich on the way home.
That was work. I'd done it for as long as I could remember.
This was different, because I'd never actually taken the life from a body before.
And I hadn't killed Derek because someone paid me. I killed him because he'd looked at her. Because he'd followed her. Because he'd stood outside a restaurant with his phone in his hand and taken her picture without her permission.
Because he thought she was prey.
But she wasn't prey.
She was MINE.
The thought detonated behind my ribs like a bomb.
MINE.
I gripped the edge of the sink and breathed deep.
"Fuck," I whispered.
My father's voice surfaced, cold and sharp. You killed a man for a woman. A woman you barely fucking know. You dumb fucking kid. That's how you end up in a ditch.
I cleaned the apartment. Erased the evidence. Made Derek Scodal disappear the way I'd made a hundred other problems disappear.
Except this time, my hands shook while I worked.
Just a little.
***
The city slid past the windshield like a film reel I wasn't watching.
Red light. Green light. The mechanical rhythm of intersections, and my hands on the wheel at ten and two like I was following a driving manual. Steady. Controlled.
The adrenaline had drained out somewhere around Tenth Street, leaving behind a flat, humming silence in my skull.
I should go home and shower. Stand under the scalding water until the bleach smell faded from my cuticles and the memory of how fast four minutes could erase a man faded from everything else. That was protocol. That was what the job required—containment, decompression, distance.
But this wasn't the job.
That was the problem. That was the thing lodged sideways in my chest like a broken rib, catching every time I breathed. The job had rules. The job was clean. The job didn't leave a ringing in your ears or a name in your mouth that tasted like ash.
I'd killed a man tonight because he looked at a woman.
My woman.
The thought settled into place like a round chambered in a gun, heavy, final, waiting.
I hit a red light on Riverside. My building was three blocks east. Her building was four blocks north. The blinker was already clicking left before I made the conscious decision to turn.
No. That wasn't true.
I'd made the decision in Derek's bathroom, as I stared at a stranger in a cracked mirror.
Maybe I'd made it in the alley that night she first pressed her fingers to my face and I forgot my own name.
Maybe I'd been making it every night since, sitting in my car outside The Silver Table, watching her from the service alcove, waiting in the alley for her to finish her shift, telling myself I was working when I was really just waiting for her to walk out a door.
The light turned green. I turned north.
The cleaner was supposed to go home, decompress, and disappear. The cleaner didn't drive toward the one person who could undo him with the innocent touch of her fingers.
But I wasn't the cleaner tonight. Hell, honestly, I didn't know what I was. Only that I was driving toward her, and my hands had stopped shaking.
It was past midnight when I parked outside her building.
I sat in my car for ten minutes, staring up at her dark window, and felt the last of the adrenaline burn off, replaced by that thing underneath. The thing that had been building inside of me all of these weeks.
The taste of her that I'd carried on my lips since the first time I kissed her, the fragile softness of her skin beneath my palm…it all replayed a thousand times until I could feel the heat of her body against mine in my sleep.
I got out of the car.
Taking the stairs two at a time, my boots were silent as I climbed to the second floor and walked to the end of the hall. I raised my fist to knock…
The door opened before my knuckles hit wood.
Raven stood in the doorway, dark hair loose around her shoulders, wearing an oversized black t-shirt that hit her mid-thigh. Bare legs. Bare feet. No cane. No armor.
Her head was tilted, those useless blue eyes aimed somewhere past my left ear. But she was seeing me. She was always fucking seeing me.
"I heard you stop at my door," she said. "I recognized your footsteps."
I didn't say anything. My throat was locked.
"You promised you'd wait for me tonight."
"I'm sorry," I told her, and I realized that I actually meant it. "I was unavoidably detained."