No grief.
Just emptiness. A vast, hollow space where something had once lived and died and left behind nothing but echoes.
I killed him.
Clean. Efficient. The knife sliding between his ribs, finding his heart, ending it before he could suffer anymore.
Gabriel would have been proud.
Or maybe he would have been disappointed.
Maybe he would have said I was too quick, too merciful, too willing to end it before I'd extracted every possible piece of information.
I couldn't remember.
I couldn't remember anything.
And that made me more angry than anything.
The basement was quiet when I finally stood up.
The man's body was still in the chair, his head lolling forward, his blood pooling on the concrete floor. The rope had cut into his wrists, leaving dark grooves in his skin. His eyes were open, but they weren't looking at anything.
Another body.
Another death.
Another name I wouldn't remember.
I tried to count them. The ones I'd killed since Gabriel left. Since I'd woken up in that motel room with clean hands and a gun on the nightstand and no memory of how I'd gotten there.
The handler.
The man in the warehouse.
The guard.
And before that—
I couldn't remember.
I tried to list them, to put them in order, to assign numbers to the faces that surfaced from the fog.
One. The handler. The one who'd been waiting for me in the apartment Gabriel had left me in.
Two. The man in the warehouse district. The one who'd known someone who might know.
Three. The guard. Harold or David or no one.
Or maybe there were more.
Maybe I'd killed four. Or five. Or a dozen.
I tried again.
The handler. The warehouse. The guard.
That was three.
