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“I didn’t mean to…didn’t fucking mean to…”

I did, though.

My chest seized up, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. I could see the terror in her eyes as I dragged her from my car to the storeroom in the basement of Moretti’s office. I heard her pleading with me to let her go and felt her blood splatter against my shoulder as I shot her.

She had trusted me, depended on me, and in the back of my head, I knew she had feelings for me neither one of us was willing to acknowledge. And in return, I put a bullet in her head.

Why did I do it?

There was no answer.

What brought me to that point, that moment?

The question was more metaphorical. I hadn’t started off so bad, so how did I end up where I was toda

y? Raised in a convent by a bunch of nuns, emancipated at seventeen, and left to my own devices, I had joined the Marines so I could serve my country as one of the best snipers ever trained. I was field promoted to Lieutenant in the middle of a firefight. All in all, not the worst start in life. But then I had lost my entire unit to insurgents, was taken prisoner, and tortured for a year and a half.

After I had been rescued, I came back with bruises, muscle atrophy to the point where I needed help walking at first, and a dislocated shoulder. Aside from those minor injuries, I was perfectly fine when they brought me back from the Middle East via a German military hospital outside of Munich. I remembered hearing the words on the television when my little soldier story was getting a lot of media play.

“Lieutenant Evan Nathanial Arden, Marine sniping expert, brought home with minor injuries and muscle atrophy, but otherwise unharmed.”

It wasn’t until after I came home that everything went wrong on the inside: kicked out of the Marines, based on a diagnosis from a doctor who mostly wanted to write a bestselling book, and eventually hooking up with a guy who led me into my current line of work—sniping for the Chicago mafia.

Catholic schoolboy gone bad.

My caseworker was nearby, talking to the unit manager of my cellblock about when I might be moved to the general prison population. I heard her say Mark Duncan, the name of the military shrink who was assigned to my case after my discharge. He had apparently been calling about me and was likely going ballistic because he didn’t see any of this coming. He took pride in his work, and he thought he had been helping me.

Maybe he had been helping; it just wasn’t enough.

Traci, my caseworker, was a chunky, blonde woman in her mid-thirties. She leaned over to look in my face as she spoke, but her words weren’t interesting enough for me to pay attention to them. Her hand touched my arm, and even though part of my psyche wanted to scream and flinch from the touch, I didn’t move.

I didn’t see the point.

How many hours or days had passed since I had been taken down and dragged from my apartment didn’t really register. I didn’t think it had been all that long, but time didn’t have a lot of meaning for me. My actions during that day replayed in my mind a lot—the look in Bridgett’s eyes as I fired my gun into her face, the desire to shoot everyone on a bus going up Michigan Avenue, and then eventually blowing the shit out of a noisy parking garage door; the terror of being shoved to the ground as the SWAT team took me into custody, begging someone to just kill me, followed by the relief I felt when I realized Odin, my Great Pyrenees, was all right; the ambivalence of seeing Lia in the hallway and knowing she was watching me as I was dragged off in handcuffs was enough to turn my brain inside out.

Lia Antonio.

She was the beautiful, dark-haired woman who found herself at my cabin in Arizona during my exile. She ended up in my bed and in my head far more than I expected or even wanted. Now, I clung to thoughts of her as much as I could—everything else I thought about was too full of gunshots, sirens, and blood.

I didn’t know how she managed to find me, and the serendipity of finding me at that place at that moment was fantastic.

As my thoughts raced around in my head, I heard the heavy footsteps of other inmates and prison staff as they moved around the infirmary, around beds and desks, and eventually out into the hallway. The things going on around me registered as they happened; they just didn’t have any meaning for me. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be a part of any of that.

I still regretted not taking a life—if I had done that, they would have killed me. If they had killed me, I wouldn’t be here now, wondering how the fuck I got myself into such a mess. I was supposed to go far—be smarter than this. I was supposed to have my whole life ahead of me.

“You’re a bright boy, Evan,” Mother Superior says.

I know she’s right. I’ve learned more in the past couple of years than she even realizes.

“You’re going to go far.”

“Just sign the papers,” I say as I push them across the desk and closer to her. As soon as her scrawl is over the bottom line, I bring them back toward me and slide them into a brown envelope. “Have fun with the next one.”

“Evan, you know-”

“Don’t,” I interrupt. “Just don’t do that. You know it’s crap as much as I do. You got what you wanted, and now I have what I want. Let’s leave it at that, okay?”

She sighs as she looks at her hands on the desk. I half expect her to start rubbing at the rosary around her neck, but she doesn’t.

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