The equipment is ready, so now I wait. I’m positioned three floors up in the building next door, tucked back in the shadows. The kill point is set, my exit is timed, and I’ve checked the wind. I have a perfect view, a flawless trigger path, and a body count long enough to know that I will not miss.
I never do.
Minutes later, the target is in sight, walking toward the point I chose to be his final destination on earth. Everything is ready, the operation is about to begin, just a few more seconds, and my gun and I are ready. I finally have a visual on him, walking the same path he has hundreds of times, looking through the windows of the shops at street level. Watching people inside, while he’s walking, and he’s alone. He’s alone. Alone. Lonely.
Now you have nobody. Not me. Not Alex. Not even your little Cat…
A few more seconds and he reaches the point where nobody can save him from my bullets…
…You’re alone in this, and nobody will save you.
And then he’s there, right where I want him, but somehow my fingers forget to react, and I don’t pull the trigger.
At first, I think it’s a glitch. A delayed reflex, maybe? It has to be, like when your body goes still before a sneeze. Butfive seconds pass. Then ten. My finger is still resting,fucking resting, on the trigger. My breath stalls and my pulse has the wrong rhythm.
I blink confused.It cannot be.
You’re just a pathetic, useless girl in a costume…
I can still see him. He’s walking away from the spot where his body should already lie dead. A real person. A dumb, soft man. Not as a target, not an objective for my bullet. He isn’t even scared. Why would he be? He doesn’t know he is on borrowed time. His wife is waiting for him, his dog is waiting for him, and there is no reason for him to think he won’t get home to them tonight. He’s going back home. Someone is waiting for him. He’s not alone, and the contrast between us makes the situation worse.
…playing at control, hoping no one notices the tremble under the mask
“Victoria, what the fuck happened” Alex’s voice sounds somewhere in the corner of my brain, but it gets muffled by all the other voices: my own, Azrael’s, his. Voices all around me.
The smell of the wine. The cuts, deep in my ribs, the nail stabbed in my back. Alone in a room full of people, thrown aside like an object that is no longer needed.
Breathe in, breathe out.
I close my eyes, trying to reestablish contact with reality back in the present.
“Thirteen seconds to regroup. Plan B,” I say, and it comes out even and cold. It scares me more than if I had screamed.
Fucking Plan B.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Failure.
Not a technical problem. Not ‘the client changed the plan’.
Failure, and it is all mine.
I discard the gun, dumping it behind the ventilation shaft while I grab another one with the silencer attached.
I slip out of the building and turn into the dark alley, no longer hiding behind glass. My incompetence brought me out here on the street, following a target that should already be dead.
I have five minutes, five minutes to intercept and somehow correct that fucking mistake.
The mark is heading home at the same time he always does, following the same path. Always the same fucking path. Five yards from his front door, the alley between two houses, a 2.5 second window. That’s all I have.
I got here fast enough to have time to think, to wait. Deep down—although I will never admit it— I hope he will do something unexpected, reckless, and change his pattern.
Ten yards.
The waiting is killing me more than my bullet will kill him.
Five yards.