Chapter 13

13

If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.

—Genghis Khan

Somewhere…

Now

A burning sensation starts in my nostril and moves through my body, the warm blanket I’ve been wrapped in suddenly ripped off. I’m ejected into the cold air, my skin ringing like an old bell. Then a sound: something hard and plastic hitting the floor. There’s so much to take in at once, my brain can’t keep up.

Instead it doles things out in phases.

My hands are bound behind me. Metal cuts into my skin.

There’s a song playing softly in the distance. Something familiar.

Smells like a pine forest, but we’re inside.

Deep breath.

The song that’s playing is “Ave Maria.” I’m sitting at the base of an enormous Christmas tree. The kind you know is expensive because it’s real and doesn’t have any kitschy ornaments. It reaches toward the top of the cathedral ceiling, and the white stars pulsing in the center are the only source of light in the room. Beyond the tree are floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. I catch a corner of Central Park in the panorama. I think we’re looking north. The sun has set but it’s a clear night and we’re so high up I think I can see the curvature of the earth.

Sitting across from me, bound to a chair, her face bloodied, is Astrid. She looks like she’s waking up from a nap. Probably coming out of whatever put me under.

She has a little red bow on her head.

I think I do, too—something’s tugging at my hair.

Seated to the right of us is Kozlov.

He’s not bound. Just lounging on a chair turned backward, his arms draped over the top rail, smiling like we’re all friends.

“Dobriy vecher,” he says.

“I wouldn’t call the evening good , all things considered,” I say. “I was wondering when I’d run into you.”

“Before this gets started, I would just like to say”—he puts his hand to his chest—“I am a big fan. I know it would be silly to say ‘no hard feelings’ after what happened”—he leans back, waving his hand around his gut—“you know, with me stabbing you? But I hope in time we can get past it.”

My nostril still burns. “What did you dose us with?”

“Just now?” He nods toward a small, plastic nasal injector on the floor. “Naloxone. To counteract halothane with a small amount of fentanyl.”

“Didn’t they use that in 2002? The hostage situation at that theater in Moscow?”

He smiles and looks at Astrid. “See? This is why he is the best.”

Astrid lunges forward, but she’s tied too tightly to the chair. Kozlov looks at me with a sheepish little grin. “She is not a fan of me, it seems.”

“I’m going to wear your skin to FaceTime your mother,” Astrid says.

Kozlov smiles. “That is a good one. But my mother is dead. Anyway, the boss has no use for you.”

“And who’s the boss?” I ask.

Kozlov looks at something over my shoulder. “He is here, now.”

“Ave Maria” has been playing—the Bocelli version, I think—but almost as if on cue, footsteps approach, and a soft, awkward voice joins in:

Ora, ora pro nobis peccatoribus

Nunc et in hora mortis

The translation is not lost on me: “Pray, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

The footsteps stop directly behind me.

“You brought me some presents. Thank you, Viktor.”

That voice.

No…

A clammy wave passes over my skin as it erupts into goose bumps.

A pair of hands take mine and undo the cuffs. They clatter to the floor, and those same hands untie the ropes holding my legs.

I stand and turn, yanking the bow off my head, to find Stuart.

He’s barefoot, wearing an oversize maroon sweater and a pair of khakis. His entire demeanor is different. Gone is the scared-animal energy he had at the meetings. He seems to have grown a few inches since the last time I saw him, which I thought was: stomped to death on the floor of his apartment.

“Merry Christmas, Mark,” he says. Then he looks at Kozlov. “The bows are a little theatrical, but I’ll give you the points for effort. Why don’t you give us a moment? Don’t go far.”

Kozlov crosses to the other side of the room. Stuart turns the chair around, scoots it back a few feet, and sits, draping one leg over the other. He points to my empty chair and says, “Please, sit. We haven’t been introduced. Not properly, at least. You probably know me better as Hannibal Khan.”

“You son of a—” Astrid starts.

Stuart turns to her and says, “Speak again, I will carve your tongue from your mouth and feed it to you.”

Astrid complies, more frustrated than intimidated.

I sit on the chair to keep my knees from buckling, my body moving on autopilot.

Stuart snaps his fingers. “You have questions.” The confidence in his voice is deeply unsettling.

“Many,” I tell him.

Though I know the biggest mistake I made thus far was dismissing him. And the corpse. That was the only piece of this that didn’t fit. Why Stuart? And I forgot one of the most basic rules of this job: don’t ruin the target’s face, or else you could kill someone else and pass them as genuine.

He points a finger at me and smiles. “I see the wheels turning. I needed something to throw you off, just in case you came looking. Which was impressive that you found the apartment, you didn’t have much to go on. It was a homeless guy, panhandled around the corner. Same body type. I let him take a shower and borrow some clothes and once I was done driving my boot into his skull, it was an easy enough mistake to make.” He puts his hands out, in mock-worship. “Even for the great Pale Horse.”

“How’d you know?”

He shrugs. “I pieced it together.” Then he smiles and gestures toward the windows. “Isn’t this place the tits? Fourteen hundred feet above the park. Three floors. Seven bedrooms, four bathrooms. Seventeen thousand square feet total with the highest residential terrace in the world. Which surprised me, because you’d figure they’d have something like that in Dubai, right? But then again, who wants to be closer to the sun in the desert? I just moved in, but I got the tree set up. ’Tis the season. Now, if I told you how much this place cost, you wouldn’t believe me.”

He looks at me with the energy of a child showing off a drawing of a puppy that looks like a melted puddle of mud with legs. When I don’t bite, he pouts his lips and frowns.

“Two hundred fifty million. Paid in cash. Not bad, right?”

I look for something to use as a weapon. Stuart doesn’t look to be carrying anything. Kozlov might have a weapon, I can’t really tell from here. I’ve got jack shit. An empty room and a woman who is more acquaintance than ally, tied to a chair.

“So, let’s start from the top,” Stuart says, “I started the Via Maris as a way to sell drugs. Lots of money in drugs. But it developed into a Craigslist for life and death. Which was great. More money for me. I mean, the processing fees alone.” He leans back in his chair, gesturing with his hands as he speaks. “But the bigger it got, the more I started to think, there’s a chance to make a real difference here. Looking at all the chatter on the boards, seeing who was getting taken out where, I realized I could predict which way the political winds were blowing. I began to recognize the ebb and flow of the world’s power structures. And I saw an opportunity.”

“What kind of opportunity?”

“You think governments kill bad people, Mark? They do not.” He shakes his head. “They kill troublesome people. The Agency isn’t trying to make the world a better place. They have an agenda. What if we could restructure the way that worked? What if instead of oil executives using the hammer of the gods—using people like you —to destabilize the Middle East to shift the market, what if we went after those same executives, who were using their power and influence to destroy the planet? Instead of killing a political leader because they dared to question the efficacy of capitalism, we could leave them in power and take out their enemies, so they could empower their own followers to fight the system. We could level the playing field. Make things right .”

“And what’s right, to you?” I ask.

“Anything we want.”

“You keep saying we .”

He sticks a finger in the air and says, “We’ll get to that.” Then he stands and strolls over to the window, clasping his hands behind his back and gazing out over the city, like it’s something to be conquered. “In order to do this, I need to break the Agency. Create a vacuum, which I would then fill.” He turns and offers me a rattlesnake smile. “I’ve been doing what I could, setting them against the Russians, letting both sides tire each other out. Make my job a little easier. But I needed a more targeted strike. I had to find an Agency employee to cause them some inner turmoil.” He claps his hands. “So I got in the Paper Cranes forum. Figured I could not-so-gently persuade them to get back in the game. The whole serial killer thing was a bit. I could never pass for an assassin. You’d sniff me out. But a serial killer? Serial killers have gotten in before. And all of you would think I was grotesque, so none of you would look at me directly. It would provide me with just enough cover to hide in plain sight. Granted, I had to kill a few people, to establish a pattern and plausibility, get past the vetting process with Kenji, but it was worth it. Because I got luckier than I could have imagined.” He raises an open palm toward me. “You.”

“Not gonna lie, bud, doesn’t feel that way to me.”

“I bet. Anyway.” He jerks his head to the imposing figure across the room. “I hired Kozlov to cause you some grief. I figured it’d smoke you out, and in turn, the Agency. I orchestrated that whole thing with throwing the suspicion on Kenji, too. You should have been watching over Gaius’s shoulder while he was working. He called me up on a chat immediately.” Insult creeps into his voice. “There’s no god mode. There’s no tracing anything back. I told him to tell you the thing with the username. I just needed to break you out of this bullshit recovery thing, get you back on the horse, as it were, and wait for you to dismantle the Agency. Because even if you didn’t suspect them, you’d realize they wouldn’t let you live, and then it was you or them.” He shakes his head. “I thought you’d raze that place to the ground. I really thought I would have broken you by now. That part of the plan didn’t work out. Still, I can work with this.”

I readjust myself in the chair a little, wonder if I could tackle him, but no, Kozlov is still waiting in the wings. Best to keep him talking. “To do what, exactly?”

He turns to me and sighs, thrilled to finally be explaining this. I bet he’s rehearsed this in front of a mirror. “We’re going to use all the data I’ve collected through the Via Maris to start our own Agency. All in one centralized, online, easy-to-access location. Now, every leader needs a team. You’ll be my chief of operations. Kozlov, our man in the field. That’s a pretty good starting point, right?”

Oh.

“You think I’m going to come work for you,” I tell him.

“With me, Mark. With me. You’re the best.” He bows a little, the gesture meant to be respectful, but given the circumstances I can’t interpret it as anything more than obscene. “I want you to teach me how to do what you do. I want you to steer the ship through choppy waters. You don’t even have to kill anyone for now.” He waves a dismissive hand. “You can stick with…whatever this phase is.”

“It’s not a phase.”

“Mark,” he says, his face twisting like he’s in pain. “Mark, please.” He takes a deep breath and screams, “If you really wanted to make amends you would turn yourself in.” He settles himself, and his voice drops back to normal. “Been dying to say that, ever since the first meeting I attended. Seriously, this whole recovery thing, it’s weird. You know that, right?”

“Standing in front of a judge isn’t going to fix the problem. The problem is me.”

He rolls his eyes. “I’m tired of unpacking feelings. Look, I ordered Chinese, figured we could all sit and eat and talk logistics, but it seems like you’re still coming around to the idea. Fine. In the meantime, we need to straighten up a bit.” He raises his voice. “Viktor? She’s all yours.”

Kozlov smiles, cracks his knuckles, and advances on us.

I stand in front of Astrid.

“Gonna have to go through me,” I tell them.

“I don’t need you to save me,” Astrid whispers.

“At this very second, I think you do,” I tell her.

“She would have gutted you if she had to, Mark,” Stuart says, drawing closer to me.

“She didn’t,” I tell him. “Your man did.”

Stuart nods. “Fine fine fine.”

And he snaps his foot out so fast I don’t even see it coming. It lands on the side of my head and sends me spinning to the floor. He circles me and pulls the sweater over his head as I struggle to get my bearings. He’s shirtless underneath, and while he’s not big, he’s carved out of granite. He turns his arms out a little, posing a bit, then rubs his triceps.

“Not bad, right?” he asks. “I have more money than you can imagine. And time. With all that money and time I’ve trained my mind and body. More fighting styles than I can list. Targeted weight training. Hell, I constructed a mock Hell Week to complete, which I did, in record time. You were a SEAL, you remember what that was like.”

I get to my feet and he throws another kick at my head, so fast I can’t get out of the way.

“The thing is, I’m not like you,” Stuart says. “I’m not lying to myself.”

Kozlov wraps his hands around Astrid’s throat, and I forget about Stuart for a second and launch myself, slamming into the both of them, knocking them to the ground. I’m about to help Astrid out of the chair, when Stuart grabs me from behind and sends me sailing. I hit the window and bounce off. Mercifully, it doesn’t break, but it’s hard enough that stars bloom in my vision.

I clamber into something like a fighting stance as the knife wound on my side screams at me. I can feel warmth spreading across my skin. Must have ripped the stitches again.

Stuart spreads his hands out, palms up. “C’mon, Mark. You were born for this life. All I had to do was apply a little bit of pressure and what happened? Okay, you didn’t kill anyone. Congratulations. You did everything but . You fell right back onto the power of your name. You used fear as a weapon. You want to have it both ways. Be the Pale Horse and Mark. You’re one or the other, my man, and I think you know which one it is.”

Of all the blows I’ve taken in the last few days—and some of them have been pretty serious—that’s the one that lands hardest. That’s the one that makes me forget my box breathing and the serenity prayer and just about every other thing I’ve achieved.

Because he’s right.

I didn’t just fall back into my old patterns.

I did a shit job of convincing myself I wasn’t enjoying it.

But I was.

I loved every second of tapping into that god-energy again.

My existential funk dissipates when I realize Kozlov is advancing on Astrid, but she’s managed to wriggle free of the chair. She throws a hard kick into Kozlov’s shin, which causes him to throw his head back and howl. She stumbles out of the room, heading deeper into the extravagant apartment. Kozlov goes after her. I turn my full attention to Stuart and wait for him to come at me, but he doesn’t. He stands and waits.

Smart.

Making me come to him.

I don’t indulge. I circle a little, trying to get the pathways of my brain firing again, get my muscles warm.

Pet the bunny closest to the bench.

“Why’d you take the notebook?” I ask.

“Oh, that,” he says. “I mean, if I’m going to dismantle the Agency, I need more data on them. But I also needed a little more data on you. Pressure points, you know? I didn’t really think you would accept my job offer right off the bat.”

“I mean, not ever, probably, you psycho.”

He winces a little, the word leaving a mark on his skin. “Like I said, pressure points.” He takes a phone out of his pocket and waves it at me. “I’ve got two men stationed outside that house in Jericho. They’re watching Sara and Bennett right now. All I have to do is say the word and there won’t be anything left of them but wet smears.”

“And if I take your job you’ll let them live?”

He pauses, not expecting my laid-back reaction.

But the bluster comes charging right back.

“I know this isn’t the best incentive, but hey”—he shrugs—“if it works, it works.”

“I guess there’s only one thing for me to do,” I tell him.

Stuart smiles. “And what’s that?”

“Tell you to take your job offer, turn it sideways, and shove it up your ass.”

He frowns. “You think I’m kidding.” There’s a crashing sound from deeper in the apartment, which draws his attention for a moment. Then he turns back to me and says, “Well, okay.” He dials a number and sets it to speakerphone. When the call picks up, he says, “You can move on the woman and the boy. Keep the phone on so we can listen to what happens.”

A voice comes back: “Stuart? Is that you?”

Booker.

Stuart’s face drops.

There we go. My turn to give him a little bow. “I did kind of figure whoever took the notebook was looking for something I did,” I tell him. “But I knew it could expose Sara, so just to be safe, I sent some friends to keep an eye on them.”

“Hey, Stuart,” Booker says. “Always knew you were an asshole.”

Stuart growls in the base of his throat and tosses the phone across the room.

“That must suck, huh?” I ask. “I’ll admit, I missed a few pieces, but everything else I pretty much figured out on my own. The only mistake I made was thinking I was up against a real player. Russia. China maybe. Not some kid with delusions of grandeur.”

Stuart tries to respond, but the words come out in a choke as his face twists in anger.

There’s the nerve I wanted to hit. I keep digging.

“You know what I think, Stu?” I ask. “I think you’re full of shit. You make me this nonsense pitch about changing the world. In your expensive apartment, which you can’t wait to show off. Then when I said no, you showed me the muscles you bought. You’re not trying to change anything. You’re just like every other one of these assholes. You want to be rich. You want to feel powerful. You got a little money and bought your way into the game. But you’re a tourist. I think you just want to be me. You want the kind of power I had. And you never will, so the next best thing is to buy me, like you buy everything else.”

Stuart’s face morphs from anger to rage to pure fury, and he charges at me.

Which is exactly what I wanted.

Get him to see red.

Red means stupid.

He comes at me with a roundhouse. It lands hard, but I’ve got my block up and take it on my forearm. I throw a cross and he slips, and then I go to sweep his leg and he hops around it. He actually is pretty good at this, but again, he bought this training on a mat, in a gym. He didn’t earn it on the asphalt, where the person on the other side of the fight is trying to kill you.

It makes a difference.

He comes at me with a teep and I sidestep, grab him under the ankle, and lift, which acts as a lever, sending him to the ground. I could kill him six different ways from this position. But I don’t. I let him get to his feet and come at me again, slipping and blocking, letting him tire himself out. Then I dance back a little, creating some distance, and when he charges, I duck out of the way and use his weight to smash him headfirst into one of those pretty, expensive windows. He falls into a heap and scrambles to his feet. Then he’s flailing at me, screaming like an animal. I do my best to block him, waiting for my opening and, when I find it, send my fist so deep into his stomach I leave knuckle prints on his liver.

He doubles over and before he even hits the ground, I’m sprinting through the doorway, looking for Astrid and Kozlov.

Never let an opponent get behind you. But I can’t abandon Astrid. I follow the sound of their struggle, through a series of hallways and an empty library, and find them in the dim lighting of a massive white marble kitchen. Astrid is lying on the island in the center of the room, and Kozlov is straddling her, his hands around her throat.

“Still pissed at you, by the way,” I tell him, and use my momentum to take a running jump with my knee out and slam into him. As I land on Astrid he goes flying across the room and slams into a cabinet. It stuns him for a moment, and Astrid leans forward, hacking the air back into her lungs.

Given our last meeting, I’m not giving Kozlov the chance to breathe. I hop off the island and go at him fast, driving my knee into his head so hard it cracks the cabinet behind it. His eyes roll around in his head for a second and I’m about to throw another, when he strikes me on the side of the knee and my body crumples to the ground.

I’m going to feel that tomorrow, but for now, the adrenaline is working.

He gets on top of me, but as he does I manage to place my foot on his sternum. I buck my hips and push up hard, throwing him into the air behind me. He hits the refrigerator, denting the stainless steel. By the time I get to my feet he’s already waiting on his.

There’s a trickle of blood dripping down from his hairline, which he wipes with the back of his hand, smearing it across his forehead.

“Don’t hold back,” he says. “Please.”

From there, it’s a dance. The two of us throwing blocks and blows in a mad, buzzing flurry. It reinforces the thing I learned the first time we met: we’re pretty evenly matched, and now it’s about who finds the first opening.

Which is me.

He drops his guard just enough that I’m able to open-palm smack him on the ear, hard.

Hard enough to pop his eardrum.

He screams and staggers, falling to his knees, but before I can take advantage of the opening, something slams into me, pushing me onto and over the kitchen island.

“He’s mine,” Astrid says.

I attempt to clamber to my feet but my knee buckles. “Are you kidding me?”

She brings her foot up high, ready to bring it down on his face, but he throws a hard fist into her crotch and she bends over in pain. There’s a crashing sound from somewhere deeper in the apartment. I turn to look for Stuart but don’t see him.

Then there’s a sharp crack, and Astrid staggers back.

Kozlov has a small handgun cradled to his chest.

I hope she’s wearing a vest, but she presses her hand to her side and comes back with a fistful of blood. Kozlov is training the pistol for a better shot when I yell, “No!”

So he turns to me, sending a bullet into the meat of my left shoulder.

At first, it feels like a punch. Adrenaline still working its magic. But whatever he hit, it mattered, because suddenly I can’t move the arm. The pain is howling at the door, and I go down to one knee. Kozlov gets up and comes toward me.

Astrid is writhing on the ground, but he’s lost interest in her. He’s stalking toward me now. Whatever went down between them was personal, but not personal enough to distract from the opportunity to put down the Pale Horse.

“Ultimately,” he says, “I didn’t think it would work out. It was always going to be you or me. But I appreciate the opportunity.”

He aims the gun at my face.

This is it, I guess.

When you enter this life, you don’t expect to leave it clean. When I got into the program, I thought maybe there was a chance. And there’s still a part of my brain saying: You can do this. You can fight back. You can survive.

Just give over to that thing you’ve been denying about yourself.

Be who you’re supposed to be.

Except I don’t want to be that.

And I don’t have to be.

“It is a privilege to take your life,” Kozlov says.

He tenses, ready to fire.

And the point of a long blade erupts from his chest.

He drops the gun and his eyes roll back. He’s dead before he slumps to the floor.

Kenji is standing in Kozlov’s place, his face bloodied. Every ounce of his concentration is directed at keeping his body vertical, and I know without him having to say anything that Kozlov isn’t the first person he’s killed today to get here.

My heart shatters on the tile floor, the fragile glass shards of it cascading around us.

When he sees me, he just gives me that bemused smile, like someone told a moderately funny joke. He opens his mouth to say something, but there’s another explosion. He puts his hands to his chest and falls to his knees, then collapses into my arms.

Blood blooms hot and sticky on my legs.

Too much blood.

Kenji coughs and sputters, his eyes rolling around in his head before they lock on mine. He reaches out, and I take his hand. He squeezes it, hard, and says, “It’s…okay…”

His grip loosens.

And then he’s gone.

Another hand appears on my shoulder. “You see? In the end, Kenji understood.”

Stuart.

His voice is soft and warm, like he’s comforting a scared child.

“This is all there is,” Stuart says. “That thin line between life and death. Only people like us can navigate it. So, c’mon. I get this wasn’t the smoothest way to go about things. But let’s put all that aside. Let’s work.”

That black, noxious thing in me bubbles to the surface.

And I am tired again.

A different kind of tired.

I am so tired of fighting that thing inside me to a standstill every night just for it to rear its head every morning. I’m tired of the effort it takes to be different, when being the same is just…

Math.

“You’re free now,” Stuart says.

I grip the hand on my shoulder and throw my whole body forward, flipping Stuart onto his back, and scramble on top of him.

“You wanted me, here I am,” the Pale Horse says.

And I hit him in the face so hard I break a finger.

Then I do it again.

And again.

There’s a voice in the back of my head trying to tell me something.

I ignore it.

Adrenaline coursing through my veins like liquid gold. That thing I denied myself. Pretending I didn’t need it. Slowing time and allowing me to savor every swing of my good arm, hammering him until my fist is wet and shattered. Until all that rage bubbles out and spills onto the floor and the most savage part of me fills every square foot of this stupid giant apartment.

Until I breathe smoke and taste metal and the building shakes because I am a god.

The voice persists, and I can just barely make it out, but it’s not strong enough. This feels good. So good. It’s not going to bring Kenji back, but it sure is going to make me feel better.

It dawns on me that it’s probably past midnight.

The one-year anniversary of killing Lucas.

This is a hell of a way to celebrate.

And just as I’m about to deliver another shot to his jaw, with the express goal of splitting it clean in half, he wriggles and I slam what’s left of my fist into the soft part of his throat.

It crumbles.

Because the trachea has the tensile strength as a soda can. You have to be careful how you hit it. Just right, the person can’t breathe. Can’t breathe, can’t fight. Do it too hard, they’re unable to take in air and they choke to death.

He’s choking to death.

He reaches for the crushed remains of his face, gasping, gargling blood, spitting it up, going flush. The sight of it snaps me out of my rage just long enough for the voice to slip through.

Sara.

Don’t slip.

The trick to not falling.

So simple that it’s almost ridiculous, and I didn’t hear it when I needed to, but I hear it now. Loud and clear.

Don’t slip.

Simple as that.

I climb off Stuart to find Astrid crawling toward me, a trail of blood streaked on the floor behind her, a kitchen knife grasped in her hand.

“We have to help him,” I tell her.

“Let him die,” she says.

I don’t see a phone handy. No way we can get an ambulance here in time to save him. I need to save him. I need to keep my fist from closing around the paper crane I’ve been cradling in my heart. I came too far. Maybe Stuart deserves to die. No, he does, he really really does. But it’s not for me to decide.

I’m not death.

We can do a tracheotomy. I pull the felt marker out of my pocket, yank the ends out with my teeth. “Astrid, please.” I offer it to her. “I don’t know how to do this.”

She falls onto her back, staring at the ceiling, breathing hard. “No.”

“If he dies…”

She spits. “If he dies, what?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I tell her, searching for the words. The right thing to say. Some perfect thing that will convey this impossible feeling inside me. It’s just there, at the edge of my fingertips, and I need her to see it. I need her to see me…

“The world will be a better place without him,” she says.

“And if he dies, I’ll be worse. Look at what this life gave us. This isn’t living, Astrid.”

She laughs, long and deep, her eyes closed. “You think we can change? It’s kind of adorable.”

“We can ,” I tell her. “We can, okay?” And I find it. That perfect thing to say: “Yesterday matters. Today matters more.”

She turns over and stares at me. I think that did it. I think she sees it, that pulsing light at the center of me, dimmed for my entire life and finally free. That feeling that the world used to be so small, and now it’s bigger.

She rolls her eyes and pushes her body into a crawl. She gets over Stuart and holds out her hand. I give her the marker. She looks at it for a moment, studying it, like she’s never seen one before.

Then she tosses it aside and plunges the knife through Stuart’s eye.

He stops choking.

His body goes slack.

Astrid falls back onto the floor. “You’re right. Today matters more.”

I slump on the floor next to her, close my eyes. Adrenaline abandons me and the pain comes roaring through the door, rattling the foundations. I allow it to sink its teeth into me. It covers up all the other things I’m feeling in this terrible, crushing moment.