AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation at all.” Lia put her head in her hands.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’ve said that a lot,” she reminded me.
“I know.”
She went silent, and I went tense. I waited for her to say something—anything—to give me an idea what she was going to do. I probably should have reminded her that if she wanted me to get her a ticket back to Phoenix, I would, but I wasn’t going to make that offer again.
“Well, Mom was right.” Lia sat back and looked at me. “I had no idea who you really were.”
I looked down at my clenched hand and the veins pulsing in my arm. Everything about her posture told me she had just changed her mind. She was going to leave, and I was going to have to figure out some way to accept that and move on.
Or do something far worse.
“Do you like it?” she asked. She placed her hand on my thigh and started moving it up and down, her touch relaxing the muscles there.
“I like that,” I said, indicating her hand on my leg.
“That’s not what I meant.” Her hand stopped moving, and s
he started to pull it away, but I grabbed it and held it in place. My fingers stroked over hers softly.
“Do I like what, then?”
“Killing people.”
“It’s a job. I’m good at it.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
I didn’t see any point in lying to her now, so I just spit it out.
“Yeah, sometimes. Some people deserve it.”
“But not all of them?”
“Everyone’s done something wrong,” I said with a shrug.
“And they deserve to die for it?”
“I don’t really think about it much, you know?”
“No,” Lia said as she raised her eyebrows and looked at me pointedly, “I do not know.”
“People die,” I stated. “They might get a disease, or get hit by a fucking bus, or get hit by me, but they all die. Sometimes no one even gives a shit, and the kind of people I kill mostly fall into that category. I definitely don’t care if they die, so I don’t think about it much.”
Lia was silent for a long moment. I struggled with wanting to give her a little time to process all the shit I’d thrown at her. I also needed to deal with my own nervousness at being in the same location as long as we had been.
“What are you thinking?” I finally asked.
“I’m trying to figure out how you can be so nonchalant about it,” Lia said. “I don’t understand how you can reconcile what you’re doing.”
“Like I said, I don’t think about it. It’s usually from far away, and I only see my target through the scope. It’s just like playing a video game.”
“It’s not a game,” she said quietly.
“I know it isn’t.” I took in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Really, I swear we can talk more about it later, but we have to move now.”
