Page 87 of Love Her

51

RHAIM

Imade sure to act normal at Corvo all day—which, for me, meant sixty percent useful and forty percent pissed off. I went to meetings, I took calls, I sent emails—I did nothing that spoke of a man about to murder someone, and frame someone else for it.

And I didn’t feel a shred of guilt about things.

Mostly because I knew they were both dirtbags, but also because by the time you came to my attention, usually you’d done something to earn it. It wasn’t like Nero had had me out there murdering women and babies. Most of the time the people we’d been shooting at had shot first—and then it became my job to make sure ours was also the last.

Was I upset that discovering my occasional past time upset Isabelle that one night? Yeah.

But Lia could hardly blame me after the fact for doing what needed to be done.

Plus…that kind of moral compunction just wasn’t present in her soul.

At least not in regards to me.

She understood how the world worked, no matter how much her father had wanted to shield her from it, and I knew no matter what I did, I would never catch her chewing her lip, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if she’d made the right choice, marrying me.

Someday.

When the heat from all this bullshit died down, and Nero’s rook was off the board.

I left Corvo late,went home to change clothes and grab my bag, then went to pick my rental up—Chevy’s boys had tinted the x5 way the hell up, so much so that I was glad it was night out, otherwise between that and the rental plates, I’d have gotten pulled over for sure.

Once I was inside of it though, I called Sable.

“Everything a go?”

“Solidly,” she said.

After she’d spoofed Zane and Bix’s phones, she’d been texting them as some of their favorite people for the past week—in Zane’s case, his dealer, in Bix’s case, his heroin source—which was why I needed the BMW, to match the man’s ride.

So I drove to the garage on Bleeker and Mercer, and took the x5 down to the bottom level of the garage, which Sable’s ploy had cleared out for me, and was waiting there, parked askew like I’d drifted into the spot—conveniently hiding my plates—with music blasting, a lit joint, and my passenger window cracked.

After that, I put on the rest of my gear—body armor and a balaclava—before pulling out my tire iron, to walk away and wait in a dark corner.

“Target one is closing,” Sable whispered in my ear.

“I thought I told you we didn’t need code names?”

“Why won’t you let me have any fun?” she countered, grumbling. “He’ll be there in three.”

I nodded to myself. “Alone?”

“Not sure. But it seems to me like scumbags usually travel in twos.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. I didn’t want to kill more people than I had to—my schedule was too tight.

“Candy red Dodge Charger coming up!” she warned, and I braced, putting on my glasses—not because I needed them, but because you only need to be sprayed with blood in the eyes once to know they’re a good idea.

Bix’s Charger did just as shitty a parking job as I did—the bass from my BMW was thumping, and I could smell the weed from here.

“Yo!” he shouted, getting out of his car. He did have a passenger—a girl—but when he slammed the door behind himself she didn’t move. “Neeko!” He waited—and honked his horn—but it was hard to hear above the sound of Slab Pressure, a song that’d just come on over the BMW’s stereo, that had enough bass to mask a gunshot. “Fuck,” I saw him mutter, more than heard, and watched him walk over into the trap I’d laid for him.

I kept a wary eye on the girl in the Charger…but the bass let me creep up right behind Bix, at the same time as he went to knock on the BMW’s barely cracked window.

“Hey,” I said, grabbing his shoulder to spin him around. He startled, and went to draw but it didn’t matter, I already had my tire iron underneath his chin. “You move, you die,” I said, before disarming him of some cheap 9 mil with a flashy aftermarket grip.

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