"What if I dream about her again?"
"Then you'll wake up, and I'll be here, and we'll get through it together."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
I closed my eyes.
The darkness behind my lids was soft and warm, and I let myself drift. Not sleep. Not yet. Just... floating. Waiting for whatever came next.
15
The Wall
The apartment was small and dark and it smelled like me.
Not the me I used to be—the me I couldn't remember, the me who might have been Lilah or someone else entirely. This was the me I was becoming. The one who slept with a knife under her pillow and a gun in her nightstand. The one who woke at odd hours and stared at the ceiling and counted the cracks in the plaster until the sun came up. The one who was building a wall.
The wall.
It covered the entire far end of the studio, from the floor to the ceiling, a patchwork of photographs and documents and handwritten notes held in place with pushpins and red string. I'd started it three weeks ago—or maybe four, or maybe just last week, time had stopped meaning anything except the space between kills.
The first photo was Gabriel.
I'd printed it from a psychology conference website, the only image I could find of him that wasn't grainy or blurred or taken from an angle that hid his face. He was younger in the photo—maybe by five years, maybe by ten—but his eyes were the same. Storm-grey. Intense. The kind of eyes that saw through you and didn't flinch at what they found.
Beneath his photo, I'd written his name in black marker.
Gabriel Mire.
Below that, a question mark.
Where is he?
Why did he leave?
Is he alive?
Is he dead?
I didn't know.
I couldn't know.
But I was going to find out.
The second photo was Mercy Logistics.
I'd taken it with my phone, standing across the street from their headquarters, hidden in the shadows of a doorway. The building was nondescript—glass and steel, the kind of office that could have housed any company, any industry, any front for something darker. But I knew what happened there. I'd seen the shipping manifests. I'd read the encrypted messages. I'd followed the money.
Beneath the photo, I'd written a list.
*Shipment 47-B.*
Dispatch schedules.
Names of drivers.
