Kasien （Present）
Kasien
Present
Rodrigo hangs from the ceiling by his wrists, his toes barely brushing the concrete floor.
I made sure the angle of his arms would keep his blood pressure steady.
I need him to be conscious. Unconscious people are useless, noisy, and they drool.
My basement is spotless. No splatter. Not a single drop on my shoes.
Rodrigo’s breathing rattles in his chest, shallow and wet. His shoulders are already burning from the strain, sweat running down his ribs in clean, thin lines.
I spread out the plastic wrap under his dangling body, smoothing the wrinkles with my foot until it’s perfectly flat.
If there has to be a mess, it will be contained. I haven’t touched his torso yet. That would get messy.
I start with the places that don’t bleed much. Under the fingernails. A shallow line behind the ear, just deep enough to hit a nerve but not a vessel. He’s shaking, but all his blood is where it should be.
Still inside him.
“Your pulse is too fast,” I murmur as I step in front of him, scalpel dangling loosely in my fingers. “If you pass out, I’ll bring you back and do this again. So don’t.”
His eyes dart to me—terrified, pleading, stupid.
“Who ordered her hit?” I know the answer, but I need to start somewhere. I ask calmly, like I’m asking for a weather report.
He keeps his mouth shut. I don’t sigh, don’t roll my eyes. I simply take the scalpel and draw a line down the side of his forearm.
A perfect cut.
He screams like I’ve gutted him. Why is he screaming so loud? It’s just a cut. The nails were worse.
“Lucien,” he spits out immediately, words tangled with saliva.
I step back so he doesn’t spit on me.
Disgusting.
“And who else knows about the assignment?” I continue, dropping the scalpel into the tray with a soft metal click. I grab his jaw, thumb pressing into the hinge just enough to feel it shift.
“Just twins, nobody else.”
I shove his jaw aside, done with his babbling. The twins are idiots. No wonder Lucien gave the assignment to Rodrigo.
“What confirmation was Lucien expecting and when?” I ask, leaning closer, checking the cut.
Still no dripping. Nice.
Rodrigo swallows hard. “Photo,” he whispers. “With her face. He wants it by Wednesday night at the latest.”
Wednesday.
I have two days to think this through, that’s fine.
“Thank you,” I say softly.
Like this was a conversation, not a death sentence. For a second he looks relieved, like he thinks cooperation buys redemption.
“I don’t like noise, so calm down,” I warn him before I walk behind him, place both my hands on his skull, one on the back of his head, the other on his chin. His sweaty hair sticks to my palms.
I tighten my grip, feel the small tremor in his neck muscles as his body realizes what’s coming a second too late. He starts to inhale—the beginning of another scream, but I don’t let it finish.
One twist, a sharp, loud pop—and finally, silence. The weight of him pulls against the cuffs, his head lolls forward at an unnatural angle.
I watch him for a moment. When his body stops twitching, I let my hands fall to my sides, then turn off the light and lock the door behind me.
Michael will clean it up. Now I need to think.
?
I’m sitting at the huge round oak table in the main living room, zoned out, my cigarette dangling between my fingers, a long trail of unbroken ash hanging from it.
“Kas,” Adrien urges me to break out of my trance, but his voice is muffled in my ears as I’m overwhelmed with thoughts.
She feels the same as she did six years ago. Her little body fits into my arms like a missing piece of a puzzle. Her hair still smells like warm vanilla.
I couldn’t stop inhaling it even after her body was already limp in my arms. The last look she gave me is annoyingly engraved in my mind now.
I fucked up.
She wasn’t supposed to see me. I was supposed to stay dead.
Why did the drug take so long to knock her out?
My plan was perfect.
She never saw me walking around her apartment, trying to scare her off so she’d finally shut her mouth and go back to writing about history and whatever.
But every time I tried to intimidate her, take away that false sense of safety in her apartment, push her into rethinking every stupid article she wrote, she just turned the music up and acted like the place was mildly haunted, not breached by a killer.
I should’ve put the officer’s head on her kitchen table. Maybe that would’ve finally gotten through to her. Not that she would’ve recognized him. Not after I split his face in two.
Pathetic bastard. Begged like they always do when they realize who they crossed.
However, I did the police a favor. Got rid of a cop who hands out classified files to journalists just because they crawl into his bed.
She drinks too much. It made things easier.
There were nights when the alcohol had her so heavy I could’ve wrapped my hand around her throat and ended it. Part of me wanted to. Her small neck would break in my hands like a stem.
The scars on my hands are tightening as I’m clenching my fist in my lap.
“Kas,” Adrien urges me again and I finally lift my gaze up to him, sitting on the other side of the table.
He looks troubled.
“What’s the plan?” he finally asks.
I move my gaze back to my cigarette, not giving him an answer.
Plan.
I always have a plan.
Plan, execute, clean. Simple.
But with her, everything went sideways. She saw me. And from the way she talked to Adrien, she knew it was me.
Did she know I was alive this whole time? Why the hell was she digging into my business again? This woman can’t take a hint—she had to know someone would put a target on her back eventually.
I had to move fast. I had barely an hour to make a trip that should’ve taken ninety minutes. No time to think. No time to adjust the details.
“Who was assigned to kill her?” Adrien asks.
“Rodrigo,” I answer without moving a muscle, still zoned out on my cigarette.
I need to think.
“And where’s Rodrigo now?”
I bet he knows the answer.
“He’s dissolving in the basement.” I pause, still not moving. “Michael will clean it up,” I brush him off with a dry tone.
From all the people in this manor, Michael is the one I always trust the most with bodies. Adrien is too messy. He’s having too much fun when it comes to work. I like to execute my plans precisely, without unwanted mess.
“Did Lucien put the target on her?”
Why is he asking me such a stupid question? Who else would do that? No one moves in this city unless I say so.
Of course this was Lucien’s order. Or his father’s. Same thing.
My hands are tied. Lucien Devereaux is too powerful and his stupid snaky son is doing whatever the old man says. If he finds out she’s here and alive, he’ll question my loyalty and everyone will be in danger.
Fucking hell, I need a plan.
“You know, if he finds out, we’re dead,” Adrien basically repeats my thoughts.
I could just kill her and get rid of this problem once and for all.
“She’s dead to me anyways,” I mumble.
Adrien is watching me and a smile is tugging on his mouth.
“You made more than an hour-long trip into the city to Joey’s coffee corner for someone who’s dead to you.” He mocks me, smirking.
I lift my gaze at him and give him a warning look to stop messing with my nerves.
“I had to take care of something in the city anyway.”
That’s true, I needed more acid. Rodrigo is a big piece of meat.
My response doesn’t convince him, but he just lets it go.
His dark curly hair falls into his face as he shakes his head and laughs under his breath. He loves to tease me—and he’s good at it, so I let him. I catch myself smiling at him too.
For the last six years, he’s been the only person capable of shutting up the noise in my head for a moment. He has this sweetness that warms something inside me. When he’s not around, it’s just pitch black.
But the smile dies the second the flashbacks cut through my mind.
Warm blood on my hands. The way she looked at me—like I was already a monster.
I wasn’t the monster.
I know I wasn’t.
I just stopped pretending I wasn’t capable of becoming one.
And she left. She ran. She didn’t even look back. Not once.
She had me. All of me. And she just took it and ran away with it.
Whatever hope I’d been holding onto like an idiot, whatever stupid belief that someone like me could have something pure—it died the second she slipped through that gate.
I finally stopped pretending I could claw my way out of the dark if I just tried hard enough. Letting it swallow me was easier. It was honest. Because there’s nothing left to lose when the only good thing you ever had is gone.
She made her choice.
Now I’ll make mine.
And I’m going to take everything from her. Exactly the way she took everything from me.
“Kas, you’re—” he wakes me up from my trance. “You’re gone again.” He looks at me apologetically.
I rest my elbows on the table and drop my head to my palms, rubbing the scarred fingers on my face to get the hell out of the spiral I got in.
I don’t know what to do and I don’t want to admit it.
“What if we tell Lucien that she’s here, alive—”
“You fucking crazy?” I spit out.
It took too much work to keep her alive until today, so I’m not letting all that work go to waste.
“Let me finish,” Adrien continues as I hold back another swear. “We tell him that we are interrogating her, that we need to find out how she got the information, to give us names perhaps,” he explains, his idea actually making a little bit of sense.
“That way, we get some more time to figure out what to do with her.” He proudly spreads his hands like he just came up with the plan of the century.
“Or,” he pauses and gives me the—I just got a brilliant idea—look. “We can just kill her.”
He smiles and puts his hands behind his head to rest.
I’m surprised he doesn’t have burned holes in his face from my stare.
“Just kidding. I like her.” He shrugs. “But she’s a handful, she threw a vase on me. It's gonna be fun.” He gives me a huge smile.