Page 97 of Fixation
What a fucking relief. What a breath of fresh air.
For the first time in forever, I don’t see myself as a hitman. As a surgeon.
My fingertips don’t itch to make incisions, suture, and heal.
I’m perfectly content massaging shampoo into Harper’s hair.
But good things never last. Especially for me.
And in that split second where I don’t watch myself, a memory assaults me.
The smell, the sounds, the house I’ve been transported to—I know where I am before the flashback even starts.
Anton. He was my first hit job. A burly man in his sixties who lived in one of those rich people’s buildings overlooking Central Park.
He’d made the deadly mistake of outranking Sergey in the Bratva.
And I was there.
Without guns or knives.
With serums that I’d curated from my father’s formulas.
Throughout my entire life, I was led to believe that he’s a good man. A man who was passionate about science and his wife.
Only when he died did I find his notebooks. His secrets, written in his messy handwriting.
He hadn’t been fired from his teaching job because the Dean had favored his brother-in-law. Dad had been fired for fucking a student.
I would’ve been willing to look past that. I loved my mom. I hated that he’d done that to her. But cheating wasn’t as bad as murder.
That—seeing his excited notes for poisonous serums—was unforgivable. It sickened me.
Actually having to do that myself raised one wave of hatred after the other.
When I let myself into Anton’s luxurious home, I expected questions from him. Confusion.
Why me? Who the fuck are you?
As soon as I walked through the foyer, as soon as my beat-up sneakers thumped on the black and gold marble floors of his living room, I was greeted with a gun in my face. A gold revolver and aclick.
My heart raced a million miles a minute. Sweat soaked through the back of my T-shirt.
“You fucked up, coming in here,” he said in an accent thicker than Sergey’s. He moved in closer, his breath rancid. “I don’t know who sent you, but?—”
On the inside, I was shaking. On the outside, I was as cool and murderous as I had to be. My mom was still on my mind back then. I was goddamn eighteen.
My hand was around his wrist. The syringe was aimed between his fingers.
The needle sank neatly into his flesh, where no one would think of searching. The serum I found in Dad’s study had an immediate effect on my victim. Faster than I thought possible.
Bang.
Anton was done.
Nothing but a pile of meat on the floor.
He was an evil man. Sold drugs and girls and whatever else the fuck was wrong with this world.
