Page 28 of My Violent Valentine

I don’t remember, but that sounds like me. I don’t bother telling her that I’m not actually wearing Kevlar right now. She’d fucking kill me. And I try not to let my mind spiral… to think about how careless I was with my own life when I thought she was gone. What if I, unprotected and stupid, had died and left her here to mourn me?

But I just hold her in my arms as we sway back and forth. “I love you,” I sigh into her hair.

“Hey…” she finally says.

“Yeah?”

“You know what we need to do right now?”

“What’s that?”

“I mean… if you really love me…”

“Mina…” I growl, already not liking where this is headed.

She pulls out of my arms and crosses the diner. She bends over right next to the jukebox, giving me a delightful view of her leather-clad ass, and then she picks up the quarter from the floor and slides it into the coin slot.

Against all odds, the machine actually lights up. She flips through the selections until she’s finally found what she’s looking for. And I know exactly what she’s looking for.

A moment later Frank Sinatra’s voice begins to croon out My Funny Valentine. Mina crooks a finger at me. “You have to…”

I let out a long, slow sigh. This diner is completely destroyed, littered with shattered glass, weapons, blood, and dead bodies. She’s right. We have to. I cross to her and take her in my arms and we slow dance.

“I love you,” I say again.

“I love you, too,” she says.

And then we kiss under the giant pink and red paper hearts riddled with bullet holes.

EPILOGUE

MINA

Six days later.

I just killed Brian Sloan. He lies sprawled in a pool of blood, holding his still beating heart. Okay, it’s not actually still beating, and it came out of a guy we just killed lying a few feet away.

“That camera angle will never work. And you’re standing in your own light,” Brian says.

He’s awfully talkative for a corpse. The authorities condemned Benjamin Barker’s Costuming Company after the fire on Christmas Eve. They locked up the building and just left everything there. The firetrucks must have arrived quickly that night because most of the front room had only water damage. So we ransacked it for some stage blood and makeup to make his chest look like a gaping wound.

“They aren’t going to believe this,” I say, snapping photos even as I complain. I mean it looks good and all—like Hollywood movie level good—we watched several video tutorials. But still.

“Dante is dead. He had an ego the size of a Mack truck, so he surrounded himself with idiots. They’ll buy anything. We just need the contract as dead as he is so we can get on with our lives.”

I sigh and take a few more photos.

“They’re just going to think you faked your own death.”

“You overestimate the thinking power of the goons that worked for Dante—even at administrative level jobs like this. Everybody hated Valentino, and I’d bet they just want out of this whole thing. Nobody wants to still be working for this asshole even after he’s dead. His entire syndicate has scattered and are busy building their own criminal empires. They’re all going to be too busy jockeying for power and who gets to sit on the iron throne to think about me.”

It turned out that Dante didn’t just hire a team to take Brian out, he hired the whole underworld—the entire network of sundry killers and opportunists. I mean, not like in the whole world, or anything, just “our underworld”. This network does extend outside our own city, but it’s not as though every contract killer in the world is in the same club and knows all the same people.

But it was an open contract, and with the money in escrow, the only thing that had to happen was the terms had to be fulfilled… by anyone. So we’re fulfilling them.

Once Brian approves the photos, I send them over the dark web to whoever was put in charge of handling this whole sordid affair. The reply is surprisingly quick. And just like that, a new ten million dollars is being wired to one of Brian’s offshore accounts.

No wonder people were willing to risk it all to come after him. That’s the highest contract I’ve even heard of.

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