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CHAPTER ONE
DANTE
Celeste Flores. Mytarget.
I watched her through the scope of my rifle where she sat perched on the narrow ledge of her shitty apartment where a supposed kingpin’s daughter should never live. Her pale visage glowed like a sacrifice under the moon’s darkened hue.
Cold air kissed her skin as it did mine, a shared experience, though she didn’t know I watched her as I had for weeks, my obsession building.
She’s just a job.
I was simply doing my homework.
On the top of a building, with a scope, and a loaded rifle.
And a named mark.
But my eyes were drawn to her in a magnetic way, like she linked to me somehow. And so tonight, like many other nights, I wouldn't pull the trigger.Not yet.Instead, I devoured her with my sight alone.
Fine-boned hands curled around a precariously tilted glass of red wine eking up its bowl. A slim wrist, a toned arm. Hair like moonbeams flicked around her face as the night air lifted the translucent strands as she looked out over the night cityscape. Her expression tasted of melancholy and the bitter seeds of her ennui spread across the hundred yards from my rooftop hideout to her small window.
Gravel dug into my belly through my tactical wear, brutal shards of shattered glass and grit and gravel, though I relished the pain. A short breath rather than a hollow one and my finger feathered the air above the trigger, a shot I had taken a thousand times before.
But as every other night this month, watching her.. something stopped me.
She's just a job.
Perhaps it was the carolers beneath, wending their way across the city, or the gritter of cheap tinsel wound between street lamps, their banners proclaiming a season of peace.
Perhaps there is no season of peace.
I could keep telling myself that lie, but it wouldn’t stick anymore than it had for the last three weeks.
Get your shit together, Beaufort.
Her father, kingpin of the outlying city limits, gave me a job. A simple one.
Get rid of an asset.
Easy, right?
An asset, a deadly one...who happened to be his daughter.
Fucking delightful.
Fucking family actually, by my standards. I left mine alone a long time back, walking from the bodies of my mother and father and their crew who planned to gang rape a girl tied to the table with tinsel where we ate every night.
That sort of experience tended to ruin Christmas.
Shifting on my spot, I lost her for a moment, then swore, berating myself for both speaking and for letting my tarnished memories fuck with my focus as I readjusted my scope.
Her window–when I finally found it, the wind picked up slightly, and I made another adjustment–that window I had become obsessed with was empty.
What the actual fuck?
I watched her for the last weeks while her father griped at me about not getting the job done. She always had the same routine. It never varied. Predictability made for easy prey, but it also made for pretty watching with an innocent girl who sat in that window, staring out at the city like she floated above it. Or perhaps she should be beneath it with me, walking in the darkest of shadows, where light couldn’t penetrate.
But she was always in that window, starlight illuminating her face, her never drunk wine glass dangling listless in her hand. The window where nothing on the other side stopped her from falling if she did. A single misstep, a hard wind or a gentle push, and her life would spread over the filthy alley below, without even a fire escape to break her imminent plummet.
