Page 4 of The Kill Clause
Drake is another of Nora’s prodigies, like I was once. A rescue. The story goes that she found him as he was about to enlist in the army after aging out of the foster care system. She found me at community college, also just aged out of foster care, working at a boxing gym called KO Punch and sleeping in the pool house of its owner, Maxine Marsh. Maxine taught me how to fight, how to take out my rage on the heavy bag. She taught me how to defend myself. I came to her a fourteen-year-old scared of my own shadow, brought in by a local cop who caught me shoplifting. Instead of arresting me, he took me to Maxine, and she took me under her wing. When I agedout of foster care, Maxine took me in and gave me a job. By the time Nora discovered me, I was a locally competitive junior female featherweight, strong, fast, willing to take on any opponent.
You’re special, kid. You have a spark. Don’t let them snuff it out.That’s what Maxine would say when I’d take refuge at the gym after whatever drama had unfolded at school or at the group home where I finally wound up. She saved me from what I was about to become—on the pole, or addicted, or dead, like so many lost girls.
“You’re a million miles away,” says Drake now. I sit at the table. He pours me a glass of cabernet. “Tell me.”
I tell him about how the job went bad, about Apple. He listens, watching me over his glass.
“You did the right thing,” he says when I’m done.
“Nora won’t see it that way.”
Faintly, I hear my phone ringing, still buried in the bottom of my bag.Whatdoes he want?
“Make her understand.”
Drake is naive, still thinks we have something to say about how things go. Nora chose Drake because he was a deadeye. His foster father apparently thought a good bonding activity was taking him to the gun range. When his talent was discovered by the range owner, Nora got the call. Her network, eyes in unusual places, looking for unusual talent possessed by a certain type of young person. Lost girls and boys with nowhere to go and no one who looks when they disappear—or even cares.
It goes without saying that I shouldn’t be sleeping with Drake. I’m his mentor, and he’s far too young. Unfortunately, we have a sexual chemistry that can’t be denied.
We don’t even bother with the dishes, tearing at each other’s clothes as we move down the hallway to my bedroom.He’s as attentive and eager as a labradoodle. His youth, his beauty, is a salve. I love to watch his toned, muscular body writhe with pleasure beneath me, feel his lips on my skin. There’s so little comfort in this life; I’m a proponent of taking it where you can get it.
Afterward, he drifts off, and I get up to clean the kitchen. This is an activity I find soothing. I take my time, making sure everything is spotless.
When I’m done, a glance at my phone reveals two more calls from The Asshole. He has a name. Julian. But it’s better for me if I cast him as the villain in everything that transpired between us. Otherwise, I have to contend with my own regrets and wonder if things could have been different. There’s no time for that. What’s done is done. I ignore the calls, turn off the lights, secure the perimeter.
As I’m checking the front door lock, I spy a pair of headlights going dark across the street. A black SUV sits. No one gets out. The windows are tinted black, so from where I stand, I can’t see anyone inside. But I know there’s someone there. Watching.
I move swiftly to the floor safe in the pantry, retrieve my Glock, and make sure it’s loaded—though I know it is. Back at the keypad by the front door, I set the alarm, activate the motion-sensor cameras. This house is a fortress—bulletproof-glass windows, dead bolted security doors, every entry point monitored. No one will get in without my knowing about it.
When I get back to the front door and peer out the side window, the SUV is gone.
Heart thumping, I sweep the house, just to make sure there isn’t anyone already inside, waiting for us to sleep—every room, the basement, the attic. But it’s clean.
I sit on the stairs, looking out the window at the street. It’s quiet, my neighbors’ homes decorated tastefully forChristmas, twinkling lights in pines, red-ribboned wreaths on doors, animatronic reindeer grazing in yards. The pretty, easy lives of the innocent.
In my pocket, my phone pings again.
He’s given up calling. This time it’s a text.
It’s just two emojis, a knife and a Santa.
I puzzle over it for a time. Has he lost his mind?
3.
Julian and I met in Vegas. City of vice, the debauched glitz of it all, that glittering false promise of a life-changing win. When I think back on it, maybe it was that place, that moment in time that glamoured me. Because I remember feeling different there, different than I had before, different than I would after. I was new on the job, my first time in the field. I’d just completed a year of training with Nora and her team—weapons, martial arts, coding, social engineering, breaking and entering. It was grueling, twenty-four seven instruction. But also, more attention, support, a certain kind of love than I had experienced before. The kind of love where people believe you can do things you never knew you could do.
“You’re ready,” Nora told me after my last exam. “More than ready. You’re the best I’ve ever seen.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“I don’t.” A rare smile, a firm hand on the shoulder. “Just be careful. The field isdifferent—more variables, less margin for error, a chaos factor. Follow your instincts.”
There are so many rumors about Nora; no one knows what’s true. Former CIA. Her parents were KGB agents living in Washington, DC; she didn’t even know she was Russian until she was eighteen. Disgraced Special Forces. Lesbian.Trans. FBI sharpshooter. It didn’t matter to me who she was, where she came from, or what she’d done. She saved me. Or so it seemed at the time.
Maybe if that first assignment had been anywhere else—Tampa or Detroit, Bangkok or Paris—it wouldn’t have happened. I’d spent the last year at Nora’s isolated property (she called it the Farm), and my world had grown small. Learning, eating, sleeping. Everything regimented, not a single second to myself. The private jet, the limo ride from the small, secluded airport through Vegas, a city of lights, glowing, seeming to offer everything on a platter. By the time I arrived at the Wynn, I was already starry eyed.
He was waiting for me in the honeymoon suite—that was our narrative, newlyweds in Vegas. He was a high roller, a big shot venture capitalist always looking for the next big win. I was a fitness influencer with a hundred thousand followers (thanks to Nora’s tech department). Our target was the head of some data-gathering firm. I had a digital file on my phone—headshot, bio, likes and dislikes, not much else. He and his wife were swingers. Their debauched weekends in Vegas were well known.
