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Chapter1
Brian
Summer has just slipped into fall. The morning is finally crisp enough for my favorite black leather jacket. It’s warm and comforting and carries so many fond memories. I’ve killed so many people wearing this jacket.
I sit in a nondescript black sedan, parked a few yards away from a cul de sac in a nice suburban neighborhood, sipping my black coffee. Ordinarily this car wouldn’t exactly be considered nondescript; I look like an agent from the government. But in this Upper Middle Class Pretending To Be Rich neighborhood, there are at least twenty other cars that look just like mine.
In fact, I’m currently parked in a driveway that normally has the same make and model, so it’s perfect. Like fate.
The occupants of the house are at work. I'm just within receiving distance from the listening devices I have planted in the two-story house that sits nestled in the middle of the cul de sac.
I turn up the volume on the wireless receiver when I hear Aidan’s aunt start to scream at him again. I flinch, pushing back the flashback to my own childhood. This feels all too familiar.
I’ve been watching this bitch for two and a half months, waiting, deciding her fate. And she is testing the very limits of my patience.
After all my plans blew up on the Fourth of July, and Mina and I had to go in and kill everybody by hand like we were running a murder craft fair, Aidan was the sole survivor. The kid hasn’t spoken a word about what happened no matter how many nice police officers with milk, cookies, and a fake smile ask. I will never acknowledge it to anybody, but I kind of like this kid. He’s tough for a little guy.
His father wasn’t even declared dead because we took care of those bodies.
He’s simplymissing. The police have their suspicions, of course, but no body, no crime. Plus, this isn’t exactly a crackpot top team of brilliant detectives like you see on TV. They’re just normal people, made bitter by how many jackasses the world contains and the limits and constraints on their crime solving budgets. More than half the time when they send evidence off to a forensics lab, the results come back inconclusive or don’t match anything on file. And then what?
All those fingerprints and DNA samples and other sundry clues are only useful if the bad guy is in a database somewhere, and I’m not. Neither is Mina. In real life, law enforcement relies on the dumbness of the average criminal to get caught doing some petty Starter Crime and end up “in the system”. Until such stupidity is committed, the authorities are usually shit out of luck. It’s not magic.
Sure, things like facial recognition software and the fact that everybody’s phone is a spy camera and listening device now can make things tricky, but not impossible if you know what you’re doing. And I do. So I doubt the mysterious disappearance of Stryker will ever be more than an unclosed case file collecting dust in the back of some filing cabinet.
But I haven’t been watching Aidan to make sure he doesn’t talk. Even if he talked, the police still wouldn’t be any better off than they started when it comes to leads. I mean, he’s five. Come on. They aregraspingat straws here.
No, I’m watching his fucking caretaker. Eliza Snow is his mother’s sister and seems to suspect Aidan’s dad killed her. And she is very bitter about this supposed fact. I’m about eighty-six percent sure he didn’t, but it is true that without Stryker’s unsavory dealings, the mother would probably still be alive. So in his own way, maybe he did kill her. But my money is on one of his enemies. It’s always one of the enemies.
There are two ways to go as a career criminal. You either stay out of relationships altogether so nobody has leverage on you, or you build a family to make you look respectable, always knowing and accepting they may eventually become collateral damage. Actually, there is a third option: you put an impenetrable security detail on your loved ones. But no security detail is truly impenetrable, so realistically you’re working with the first two options.
Getting attached to anyone your enemies can use against you is the cardinal sin, and it appears that Aidan’s father may have committed it. Either way, this bitch has hit Aiden on three different occasions in the space of two months. Eliza Snow isn’t the name you would associate with the evil stepmother of the story, she sounds more like the princess lost in the woods.
She resents being thrust into motherhood when that wasn’t her life plan. And Aidan looks a bit too much like his father for her tastes. She has a high-powered career and no husband—otherwise known as… nobody who will miss her.
Mina doesn’t even know I’m doing this—watching this house and this kid. I can’t bring myself to tell her about it yet—or if all goes well, ever. It would kill the very last bit of evil reputation I have with her, and I just can’t be her whipped puppy. I can’t. I am a killer, and any time I do something soft and nice that makes me seem like something more, I know I’m only misleading her.
I will never be more than a monster, and while maybe she’s grown darker, she’ll never be as bad as me. I don’t want to give her the false hope that we can ever have some fairy tale romance—some sweet happily ever after. I’m not that guy. I would say she knew that from the beginning, but it wasn’t as though she chose me. I chose her, and she had to mold herself around that new reality. Whatever feelings she may have developed for me since then, no doubt started as Stockholm Syndrome. And is it even possible for a relationship started that way to end in anything real? I have my doubts.
I hear a noise I can’t quite discern, and then Aidan is crying. I don’t know if she hit him again or just threw something in his direction. I tense.
“Pull yourself together, you’ve got school,” she hisses, her voice so inhuman it rivals mine. We’ll see how she deals with a grown up version soon enough. I grit my teeth and wait.
Everything inside me wants to run into that house and choke the fucking life out of this bitch. She’s too much like what made me this way, and she has no idea the fire she plays with by just existing on my radar.
I let out a slow breath when I hear the brakes creak on the school bus as it pulls into the cul de sac and stops, waiting for Aidan to come out so he can go to first grade. Normally they start them in first grade at six, but he’ll be six next month. It’s close enough. I don’t want to think about why I know these random facts about elementary school all of a sudden.
Back on the Fourth of July while I was helping the cleaners, Mina and I exchanged some text messages, half-joking about adopting the kid and me going to PTA meetings. That may as well be reality for all I know now about Aidan’s schedule and the life and times of an almost six year old.
“Go,” Eliza says.
He practically runs out the door. I can see him now on the front stoop, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. My jaw clenches. He looks sad and scared, but I recognize the anger that simmers underneath it all. He’s so young to carry that anger, but it’s there.
I know part of it is at me for killing his father. Fair. But Eliza has been filling his head with all sorts of ideas about how and why his mother may have died—all to justify her cruelty to the kid, the one innocent in all this. At this rate he won’t be innocent for long. In a decade he’ll be a teenager, and the first true indications of what he is will bubble to the surface amid shock from everyone—including those who made him that way.
I’m under no such illusions. I knew the moment I killed his father in front of him that someday he would be like me. I just wasn’t expecting him to re-live my entire backstory.
This is why I wanted to just let him blow up in the building. It would have been better for everyone. But because I chose mercy—for Mina—this kid is now locked into an unstoppable chain of events. And his current situation just locks him onto this trajectory with more finality.
