Page 5 of How to Kill Your Rival

‘Her three kids now need to grow up without the one person who loved them most.’

‘We didn’t know about the kids,’ he whines.

‘You didn’t look, because you didn’t care. That’s on you.’

Silence.

I stand and look back at Allan. He’s managed to pull himself free of the shelving unit, but his leg looks twisted in a way no human leg should be.

‘Have you anything to say for yourself?’ I ask.

‘Just get it over with.’ Allan is clearly smarter than Dean and knows there’s no walking, or limping, away from this.

I take my knife from my pocket, throwing the metal pole out of reach.

Dean sees it and tries his best to scurry away like the cockroach he is.

‘It was Allan. It was all him. I just tagged along.’ His words are desperate as I stalk towards him, blade glinting.

He gets about two feet before I grab him by the collar and push him face down on the floor, one knee wedged between his shoulder blades, his face kissing concrete.

‘You’re going to want to be still,’ I say quietly. ‘This is going to happen regardless. You understood that when I walked in. I think we both know that.’

I make the cut across his throat quickly and neatly. Efficiency is the only mercy available in this job, and I try my best to apply it to those who deserve it. While Allan and Dean did something worthy of death, there were no signs of torture or anything sexual. A small mercy.

Allan starts to plead as I turn to him. It’s all well and good saying get it over with, but when you’re faced with the reality of it after seeing your friend paint the floor red, it’s another thing. Allan takes less than a minute to die, and then there’s just me and a tinny, radio version of ‘Mysterious Girl’ left occupying the place.

I’ll need to get my clean-up kit from the car and phone in for body disposal.

But first, a cup of tea and some more of those Jammie Dodgers.

3

ELIZA

Our family home is a stark contrast to my bolthole flat in London. The grandeur of the Hamilton Estate still takes my breath away whenever I’ve been away.

Sure, I grew up tearing about the halls with my siblings. I may have drawn on the stairwell with a permanent marker, and despite being made to scrub it off myself, a tiny childish caricature of my dad remains.

Where the estate has painted portraits spanning back generations, my flat has generic prints from the furniture shop made en masse. The intention to decorate properly, in a style chosen rather than inherited, nags at me. Unfortunately, the lure of lying on the sofa in my underpants, eating Chinese food when there’s no one around to judge me, is greater.

At the estate, I constantly need to be on. To be the sort of woman who can command respect, despite being twenty-five in a field dominated by older men. Even when the Death Council aren’t around, there are always staff or visitors, eyes and ears that might not be as loyal as we imagine.

The snug has three slightly battered leather sofas around a coffee table. A tight space compared to the grander rooms in the house, but one of my favourites. The smell of woodsmoke taints the furniture from hundreds of evenings with the fire roaring as we read, play cards or watch TV. A cosy nest in the towering granite home. Then there’s the sweet, buttery smell of Mrs Cairns’ biscuits, which are heaped into a dish on the table. While Maggie had been old enough not to feel the need for a mother figure after our mum passed, Mrs Cairns had always stepped up for Fraser and me in her quiet, unassuming way. Half house manager, half unruly youth wrangler.

In London, I can close the door and, for a little while, be anyone. The city can eat me up. Here, well, I’m the middle Hamilton kid. The one taking over from her dad, amongst a sausage party of killers.

James deals the cards onto the coffee table with small slaps as Priscilla sits on the sofa. She always looks so elegantly prim with the way she folds her legs beneath her like someone born of the fae. She joins us for cards to appease my dad and to find out any gossip.

Dad shifts in the armchair, his mouth pursing as he seeks comfort. The chair hadn’t changed, but he had. Cancer had come through and taken him from the force of nature he’d always been to a fraction of his former self. He tells me that the worst part of chemotherapy is how bony his arse has become. Like sitting on a bundle of twigs, apparently. I’m not sure I wholly believe him when he says it’s the worst bit, but his discomfort is clear. Priscilla tried to present him with a cushioned ring, and he’d acted like she’d offered him a testiclectomy.

So he suffers his bony arse, and really he’s got nobody to blame but his stubborn self.

His colour is better this week. I hope that means improvement, and it’s not only because of the glass of whisky he’s nursing.

‘You’re cheating,’ he says, accusing Fraser, who rolls his eyes.

‘No, I’m bloody not. You losing doesn’t mean someone else is cheating.’