Page 164 of Let Me In

The car hasn’t moved.

Still tucked behind the rundown motel where he’s been holed up for two days.

Long enough to confirm, long enough to plan. Long enough to know this isn’t just surveillance.

It’s a message.

I tap the screen once. Map confirmed, route clean. No cameras and no traffic.

No witnesses.

Just me and the night.

I pull out slow. Gravel muted under the tires.

Hit the road with the windows down just enough to feel the air shift around me.

And as the trees blur past—

I let go.

Of warmth.

Of softness.

Of every breath I took while she slept in my arms.

Because there’s no room for both.

Not for the man who tucks a blanket over her at night and whispers soft promises against her hair—and the one who’s about to make someone vanish. That part of me, the one she quiets just by being near, has to go silent now. Folded down and locked tight, so the other can rise.

Right now, there’s only the mission.

There’s only the threat.

And the man who made the mistake of stepping into my world.

Into hers.

He doesn’t know what’s coming.

He doesn’t know that mercy lives in that cabin, sleeping on my couch—and I left it behind.

All that’s in this truck is me.

And I’ve been very, very good at making monsters disappear.

The old part of me, the one that doesn’t flinch, doesn’t hesitate, uncoils slow and steady, like it never left. I don’t dread it. I don’t welcome it either. I just let it rise. Because it knows exactly what to do.

Tonight?

I’m absolute.

I kill the headlights three blocks from the motel.

No cameras. Just a gravel lot and the kind of office that locks up at midnight and stops caring by sundown.

I coast the rest of the way.

---