Page 12 of The Kill Clause
If I take off, Nora will enact the kill clause. If she hasn’t already. I haven’t wanted to be a drama queen about it, but the fact that my security code didn’t work was a worrisomered flag. Maybe she decided to give me one last chance. But I am about to let her down again. This is the end; this is the hard place Dr. Black was talking about. I finally understand my mother’s choice.
Sometimes you have to hurt yourself to help someone else.
I find myself thinking about Julian. The man I thought he was those first months together when it was all great sex and clean kills, wild parties and luxe hotel suites. It devolved into bitter arguments and ghosting for weeks, makeup sex that verged on violence. Our core irreconcilable difference? Julianlikedto kill people. He enjoyed it to a degree, the whole puzzle of it—when, how to do it cleanly, how to get away with it, how to evade security technologies, how to be a ghost who was undetectable even if seen. Nora should have seen at the Farm that I wasn’t right for this job, that I lacked an essential coldness. I cried myself to sleep after killing that doe, and I never forgot her sad, staring eye.
“Just make me one promise, and I’ll do the same,” he said the last time we saw each other, almost a year ago in some crappy hotel in New Mexico. “If you ever hear that Nora has enacted my kill clause, let me know.”
“She won’t.”
“Nora will do exactly what she has to do.”
Lying here with Apple, her breathing deep and steady, the stars from her night-light projected onto the ceiling above me, I experience yet another stark dawning.
Julian’s repeated calls. His last text: the knife and the Santa emoji.
Kill Claus.
Fuck.
7.
Islide out of Apple’s bed, into my shoes, and out the door of her room, pulling it closed with a soft click. Bryce has put on some music, a kind of jazzy Christmas mix. I’m going to make some excuse and go. Like any good hit woman, I have a go bag. It’s in the well of my trunk, where the spare should be. If I have any chance of getting away, it has to be now. I even have a safe house, a place I bought under a shell company name, remote in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and another car parked in a garage outside of town. Eventually, they’ll find the car I’ve abandoned, the house, me, but it will buy me some time to formulate a plan.
My heart thuds with fear, but I know this decision is the right one. It’s been a long time coming. This is my hard place. Time to go.
Bryce has turned the lights down low, lounges on the couch over by the tree.
“I have to leave,” I say, moving toward the door. “Something has come up.”
Usually, he’d use the opportunity to make a dirty joke. Instead, he stays silent. Did he fall asleep?
“You and Apple need to go too. I can’t explain, but I’m asking you to trust me.” He still doesn’t answer. “Bryce, are you listening?”
It’s then that I notice the way his head is tipped awkwardly back. How much has he had to drink?
I move in closer, put a hand on his shoulder.
“This is serious.”
That’s when I see a single bullet hole in the center of his forehead, the couch behind him washed in red.
I freeze; it takes a millisecond to process.
Standing there beside the big window, I realize I’m a clean target and hit the ground just as a bullet whips silently past me to shatter the stylish glass lamp on an end table. The pieces fly everywhere, one of them slicing the skin under my eye.
There’s no fear, just adrenaline pumping as I army crawl, keeping low.
Once I’m clear of the window, I get up and run down the hall, push silently into Apple’s room, and lift her from her bed. She clings to me like a little monkey, still sleeping, head resting heavy on my shoulder. I move, fast and quiet, to the master bedroom. I’m unarmed, but I happen to know that Bryce, like many idiots, keeps a loaded gun in his bedside table.
The front door to the house opens and closes.
Think.
I could slip out the back with Apple, run through the woods. But I won’t be able to scale the wall with her. No chance I’ll get us to my car without getting shot. Whoever it is, they’ll be watching for that. There’s no more chance of flight. So the only choice now is to stay and fight.
I slide open the drawer and let out a sigh of relief. There it is. A flat gray Glock. He loved to take it to the range and brag about his prowess after. I lift it from its place, check that it’s loaded with a bullet in the chamber, stow it in the waistband of my jeans. I look around.
There’s no back exit from this room, and slow footfalls are getting louder in the hall. I move us into the huge walk-in closet, then lay Apple on the carpeted floor, behind the center island, where Bryce keeps his obscene collection of watches, belts, underwear, and socks in a tidy tower of drawers. Apple stirs and rolls over into a ball.
