“But no one else.”
She’s quiet. She looks at the boxes across from us, at nothing in particular, and when she speaks again, her voice has dropped a register.
“Men can sense it. I know they can. Women who are… available. Easy. If you want to put it bluntly. They approachdifferently. Talk differently. It’s a frequency, and once you’re tuned to it, they find you.” She looks at me. “Is that what you thought? The first time we had sex?”
“No.”
“Oh, Kai.” She laughs. “You’re sweet.”
I’m not sweet. I’ve ended lives. I’ve spent every day before her running on rage for blood. But I don’t correct her.
“I’ve never had a serious relationship,” she says. “Never been with one man for any real stretch of time. The men I’m with are after one thing, and it doesn’t bother me, because I’m after the same thing. Strip away the gender and we’re all chasing the same animal need. Sex.”
“Would you try?”
She raises a brow.
“Go exclusive. With me. Only me. No one else.”
“Why?” she asks. “What about your revenge? I’m not useful to your plot anymore. Shouldn’t you be packing your bags and finding another angle?”
The plan is dead.
It’s been dead since I first heard her with that barrister. Maybe even before that. Maybe since the first time I saw her, and I was just too blind with rage to notice that. I open my mouth to tell her so, but she’s already speaking.
“I don’t go telling people about this, but I’ll let you in on a little secret.” She winks. “My biological father was a pedophile.”
My hand, the one resting on my thigh, goes still.
“We lived in a small apartment. We had a small attic above the living room. You could see the whole downstairs from up there… the kitchen, the front door, everything. Everything except the bedrooms. It was cramped and full of books and boxes and dusty. My mother never went up there.” She touches her own cheek, distracted. “He’d drag me up. Pin me down. Gag me, orcover my mouth with his hand. Then fuck me from behind, once, twice, three rounds. I was a little girl, Kai. Eight when it started.”
My throat closes.
My whole body locks down. The ache in my shoulder migrates to my chest, digs in, drills through the flesh. The pain is worse now. It is so much worse than a bullet.
“Sometimes we’d watch my mother from the wide slats. She’d come home from work. She’d hang up her coat. Start cooking, hum a song. Sometimes at night, when she was already asleep. And the whole time, he—” She makes a small gesture with her hand, a wave that dismisses the rest of the sentence. “He died of a heart attack when I was twelve.” She exhales through her nose. “That was a good day.”
Then she laughs.
“I hated every second of it. Every single one. But it’s funny now, in a way. I’m pretty sure that’s where I get my… inclination.” She rolls her wrist, searching for the word. “For rough. My body doesn’t know what to do with gentle. The wires got all tangled somewhere in that attic, and I’ve made my peace with it.”
I’m not breathing.
My teeth are locked together so tight a chisel couldn’t find the seam. There is a roar in my ears that has no source, and it’s deafening.
I want to break something in half. No. Not half. I want to reduce it to dust.
I want a name.
I want a grave. I want the address of the apartment and the location of the attic and a crowbar. I want to dig the man up and put him back together, only so I can take him apart again.
My hands on my thighs are not shaking. They have gone past shaking. They have gone into that other place I have no control over.
I want him alive.
I want him fucking alivenow, in this room, on his knees in front of me, because a heart attack was too kind. A heart attack was a man dying in his sleep next to the woman he raised in hell, and that is not justice.
I have killed before. I have killed men who deserved less than this one.
