I’ll keep digging. Also, did you know the so-called spiritual leader of Hallow Hall was excommunicated from the Church a few months ago? Give me the names of the rest of the guys who work up there, and I’ll look into them for you.
Talk soon, shithead.
G
I hadn’t known about Vargas. It wasn’t in the brief, and I had a rule of not researching my targets beyond where they lived and how I could get to them. I had other rules, too. No women. No children. Any more information, and I risked feeling something about ending their lives. I wasn’t there to pass judgment on who should live or die, or evaluate a person’s worthiness.
I was just a deadly bullet, shot from a gun my clients fired.
But Hallow Hall was changing my habits and breaking all my rules. No, not Hallow Hall, really. It was her. Katarina. My littlestray. If I hadn’t met her, I’d have killed Vargas and already been in Rome on my next job.
She was an unpredictable variable in my orderly life, throwing off my balance.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about that yet.
I could ignore it. I could just leave town right now and never go back. When Katarina got out of solitary, I’d be long gone and we’d never see each other again.
But I wouldn’t do that. I knew it as well as I knew I’d kill both Pavol and Benedict so I could take everything she had agreed to give me.
All her firsts.
The dark possession that filled my veins when I watched her was a new thing. I’d never felt anything like it, and I was sure I never would again.
It was something specific to her. I wasn’t the type to question my instincts; they had always served me well. Now my instincts were telling me to stay and see my deal with mymicettathrough.
I wouldn’t let someone else have her.
I used my phone to pull up the address Giada had sent me for Katarina’s mother and headed in that direction.
The day was brightening up. The houses of the neighborhood were pretty dusted with snow, overlooked by a backdrop of dramatic white mountains. The area was at the edge of the city, closer to the mountains than anywhere else. Such beauty, and yet just up the road a little was a place where people who needed help were locked away from the world and experimented on.
If I hadn’t lost faith in the world long ago, the existence of a place like Hallow Hall would have gotten the job done. Humanity was over, finished. We were circling the drain. Good people were few and far between. They had been wrong... the meekwouldn’t inherit the earth. The powerful and corrupt—the soulless—had already destroyed the world. And wasn’t I just another of them? I certainly wasn’t one of the good ones.
I turned the corner and noticed a small market being set up. One of the stalls had fresh flowers wrapped in newspaper. An oldnonnasat behind the table wrapped up to the nose in a woolen scarf. Only a few bunches of flowers rested on her little table. It was slim pickings in winter.
“Bucaneve?”she murmured when I paused in front of her.Bucaneve. Snowdrops.
I picked up a newspaper cone and looked inside. These snowdrops were beautiful, not small and trampled like the ones I’d slipped Katarina before she went into solitary.
She asked a meager amount for the flowers, and I pressed a hundred-euro note into her gloved palm before walking away.
The address should have been just up ahead. I strode down the frozen street and came upon tall gates at the end.
What the fuck?Giada had a seriously dark sense of humor.
The graveyard was silent at this time in the morning. I walked through the gates and glanced around the small space. A chapel sat a little way off, the windows already glowing. I walked the rows of graves slowly.
I found her at the end. She had a simple headstone. The kind the church would stump up for if a devout parishioner was without family.
Elena Dmitrova. A Mother.
She had passed a couple of years ago. That was why she never visited her daughter... and Katarina was being blackmailed into staying at Hallow Hall to save the life of a dead woman. I wondered where my mother’s gravestone sat. I still didn’t know. Did she have one? If she did, would anyone stop by and leave her flowers?
I crouched next to the headstone and brushed the frost off its surface.
“Hello, Mrs. Dmitrova,” I said quietly, just for the ears of the ghosts. “I’ve come to see you.”
I placed the bouquet of snowdrops against the headstone.