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“Umm, well”—he scratches his head—“what exactly is the job? I mean, uh, I guess I’d want to know what was expected of me…well, I mean, if it’s OK I know before I agree?”
Yes, that’s definitely urine I smell.
I pull out a cashier’s check with his name on it and put it on the counter, sliding it into his view.
He glances down nervously, having a difficult time looking only at it with me standing close enough to grab him when his guard is down.
“Holy fuck…,” his voice trails off and finally keeping his attention on me is put on the backburner as the five figures next to his name dance in his line of sight.
He takes the check into his hand as if to make sure that it’s real, then finally he looks back up at me through those blue eyes wide on display underneath his curly black hair.
“You can make that much every month,” I say. “As long as you perform at the job to my complete satisfaction and approval and as long as you stay clean and don’t fuck up.”
His eyes are finally smiling again, just like they had begun to do when I first walked into the store and he hadn’t noticed who I was yet. Now his whole face is smiling. Greedily. Like a pirate standing over a chest of gold. The job could be sucking me off once a week and he’d likely agree to it for that much money.
“I’m your guy,” he says.
I smile faintly and pull out my wallet from the other pocket, opening it and fingering a twenty into my hand. I toss it on the counter.
“I’m going to pull my car around to the pump,” I say. “Give me twenty bucks.”
He nods and takes the money.
“Wait, uhh,” he calls out as I start to walk away—I stop and turn to face him. “How do I—?”
“I’ll be in touch,” I say and push open the glass door.
Dante Furlong became my private assistant. He knows a lot of drug dealers and addicts who can never be reformed, and whores, or ‘lot lizards’ who have killed men—truck drivers and husbands looking for some ‘strange’. Dante knows just about everyone in the crime ring not only in Maryland, but most of the surrounding states. He knows the lingo. He knows the ins and outs, and where to find all of the people who will one day end up in my chair.
Sometimes when thinking of Seraphina—because I do think of her as well as Cassia—I wonder why I didn’t just find someone like Dante a long time ago. With him there are no attachments, no risk falling in love, no risk losing love. I can look Dante in the eye and kill him if I have to without thinking twice about it, or regretting it, or hurting over it. And when I want to fuck, I can find the Kate’s and the Kira’s and the Kali’s and the Gwen’s. No attachments. No looking back. Just moving forward. Onto the next willing woman who I can break beneath me.
And every single day of my life, I fight against the pain that tortures my black heart, the pain that I know will never go away. The pain of being alone and without her. Without anyone. My interrogations for Victor’s new Order become more brutal with every job. My tolerance for my victims, lessened. My ability to offer mercy, practically non-existent. And during my personal tortures of those who Dante brings my way, I become more sadistic and let fewer and fewer live.
A part of me—but just a small part—worries that I will someday come to the point when I kill each and every one of them. Because the more I kill, the more I immerse myself in the pain of others, the easier it is to shut out the screams in my head and the images of the two faces of the woman that I loved.
My beautiful swan. My savior and my undoing.