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 his voice anymore. The words were there, but the tone kept shifting—proud one moment, cold the next, indifferent always. I couldn't remember if he'd ever been kind. I couldn't remember if I'd ever believed he was.
The floor was cold.
I was sitting on it. I didn't remember sitting down. My back was against the filing cabinet, my knees drawn up to my chest, my hands resting on my thighs. The knife was on the floor beside me, the blade dark with blood that was already starting to dry.
The man was dead. The lead was cold. He didn't know where Gabriel was—didn't know who'd helped him disappear, didn't know where he'd gone, didn't know anything except a name and a rumor and a fear that had followed him into the dark.
Someone who might know.
I'd killed him anyway.
Clean.
Efficient.
Meaningless.
The tears came without warning. Hot and sudden and silent, tracking down my cheeks in paths that felt like burning. I wasn't sobbing—couldn't remember the last time I'd sobbed—just crying, water leaking from my eyes while my face stayed still and my hands stayed limp in my lap.
What was I crying for?
Gabriel?
The girl with the blonde hair?
The woman I used to be, before the Institute, before the contract, before I signed away my name and my memories and my ability to tell the difference between love and ownership?
I didn't know.
I didn't know anything.
I sat on the cold floor beside a dead man's body, and I cried for reasons I couldn't name, and the sun rose higher outside, and the world kept turning, and I stayed perfectly still.
The phone buzzed.
I didn't look at it. I couldn't. The screen was a sun, too bright, too demanding, too full of information I didn't want and couldn't process. I let it buzz until it stopped, then waited for it to start again.
I left it in my pocket.
The warehouse was quiet when I finally stood up.
My legs were stiff. My back ached from the cold floor. My hands were dry—the blood had flaked off, leaving red-brown stains in the creases of my palms, under my nails, between my fingers.
I should wash them.
I should clean the knife.
I should find a motel, sleep for a few hours, let my body recover before the next hunt. Wait, I should go home to my apartment. It's in the city. I know where it is.
But I didn't move.
I stood in the center of the small office, looking at the man's body, looking at the blood, looking at the photographs on the walls—women I didn't know, women I'd never meet, women who'd been processed and shipped and sold while I sat in a pink room and learned to beg.
The other girl.
