If Malek—Azrael, fuck—wants the bullet to go straight through his brain, then who am I to deny him the wish?
I pick up a gun. The cold metal on my fingers feels too mechanical. I’m not killing just any target, I’m killing Azrael, and the weapon should fit the job.
But like every other time in the past twenty-four hours since I left my apartment, the idea of him, dead, freezes the blood in my veins. I simply don’t. I can resist anything, but am I really prepared for a world in which the only person who makes me feel alive is gone, deleted from existence by my own weapon? That single thought makes me vomit. I want to go back in time and shake his body until the neurons are working again. What the fuck is he thinking? Making me kill him?
No, I can’t. And even if I can, I don’t want to. But what can I do? The fucker signed his death sentence when hecontractedme to kill him.
You could say no.
The fuck I can. It will just prove I’m more attached to the Professor than I wanted him to know. I need to keep him alive in a way that would not make me desperate.
So I do the only thing that makes sense: take the gun and load it with blank bullets. If he wants danger, I will make sure he gets the best performance, but I’m not about to stain my hands with the blood of the one who is mine.
I’m about to leave when my overthinking brain stops me. He would never, but what if he wants the actual outcome of this situation, the blood and the last breath? The thought itself is too much, but I am always prepared. I need to face this, so I end up grabbing my blade—the special one, the one that has tasted blood only once—and I tuck it into my boot.
God, I want to believe this is just a sick game, but what if I’m wrong and I’m already losing?
The location is ten minutes out, in a remote area of the Asian part of the city. When I arrive in front of the building, there are no guards like I expected, no traps. The only unusual things are a candle in the window, and a single name taped to the door.
Victoria.
How poetic.
I pull out the gun and take a deep breath. I’m far from ready for this, but it’s too late.He should start counting his last minutes alive.Right, the same words I’ve thought of forty-five times already.
The door opens before I can knock, and there he is. Azrael, standing there in the middle of the room, unbothered by the gravity of the situation. Fucking psychopath,a psychopath that means more to me than the word itself.
The room is a hollow shell, rotting from the inside out. The logs that make up the walls are a jumble of twisted, cracked timber, their surfaces slick with a green-black film of mold. Dust motes are everywhere, and the only source of light illuminating the decay that coats every surface are candles lit in various places. The place itself screams death, and nothing could be more metaphorical than this.
“Hello, Professor.”
His voice is just as flat as his expression. “Hi, love. You don’t look surprised.”
I curl my lips into a bitter smile. “Can you blame me? I’m really good at my job.”
“So… you’re not going after?—”
He starts walking toward me but stops when he hears the answer.
“Malek. Yeah. At first, Alex was too sloppy giving me your profile, but after our very interesting first meeting, I dug deeper and found your papers. I know everything about you. You didn’t sign the earliest experiment with ‘AL’ but…” I point at him, “— ‘ML’. You.”
Someone would expect the revelation of information to scare him, but Azrael is not scared. In fact, he looks surprised, even amused. “So you’re saying you knew everything about me, and you still showed up every time, little ember?”
The nickname shakes something inside me. He’s not allowed to use it. That one is special, and I’ll not let him dirty it like this.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Call me that.” I answer furiously. He doesn’t get nickname privileges while he’s acting like a dumb bitch.
“Little ember? But Victoria, youaremy little ember, and you always will be.”
I should hate him. How dare he? But now is not the moment to fight over sentimentalities.
“I said don’t. Anyway, at first, I only knew your name, but not that you were the one hiring me. That information came too late.”
“And you still accepted it,” he says with a note of challenge in his voice.