Page 284 of Let Me In

He just closes his eyes.

And nods once.

Like a man admitting gravity.

I draw the knife.

Not for vengeance.

Not even for justice.

But for closure. A clean end. A surgical strike meant to sever his influence at the root—because anything messier might echo. And echoes reach too far.

I don’t take pleasure in it.

I don’t need to.

He exhales once—almost peaceful—as if he knew this was the only ending I’d ever give him.

I give it to him quickly.

Quietly.

No spectacle.

Just one breath—his last—and I release it with him. Not revenge. Not fury. Just the quiet end of something long overdue.

When it’s done, I move without pause.

Down the back stairwell. Along the corridor slick with quiet. Past the bodies I’ve already laid down.

To the engine room.

I open the compartment and pull the charges from my belt. Small. Contained. The metal is cold in my fingers, the edges familiar from a hundred quiet missions before this. But this time, it feels heavier. Personal. Exact.

I place them where the steel ribs meet fuel—calculated, timed. There won’t be screams. No evidence. Just absence.

I move through each room with precision, setting the rest. Fuse lines, remote detonation fallback, redundancies. Like always. Because this isn’t about destruction. It’s about removal. About unmaking the roots of everything he built.

This is how it ends: no records, no ledgers, no lieutenants whispering his name in some other port. No leverage. No legacy.

I leave the bodies where they fall, and close the doors behind me.

The bridge is empty. Just as I expected. One of his lieutenants had been up here earlier, logged into the nav systems. I’d watched from the dock. Counted minutes. Timed the loops.

I step to the console and bring up the coordinates—out past the mouth of the bay, thirty nautical miles. International waters. No traffic lanes. No eyes. Nothing but dark.

I engage the auto-nav, set it to slow. Deliberate. No alarms. No changes in course that could be flagged. Just a long, quiet drift into nowhere.

At the end of that drift, I arm the charges—all of them. The engine room. The fuel bay. The central stairwell. The upper suite.

No failsafes. No escape routes. The control room hums faintly around me, stale with heat and the trace of fuel in the vents.

Just enough time to get off the ship. Time enough to vanish without a trace.

I seal the detonator into its case, tuck it against my chest, and leave. I climb down the exterior ladder, rappel once to the aft deck, and dive.

No splash. Just water, breath, and freedom.

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