Page 9 of Mistletoe & Mayhem
*Ready. He replies almost immediately: Be outside in 3 minutes. The emoji is his only concession to personality.
I count out exactly 210 seconds—three minutes plus thirty more for good measure—press the cold brass latch on the front door, and step onto the crumbling limestone stoop. My neighbors have gone silent, their argument snuffed out like a candle. I imagine them lined up along their grimy windows, faces pale as moons, blinking like rabbits caught in headlights. Their curtains twitch; a silhouette retreats. I wish I could hate them for it, for their voyeurism masked as concern, but I used to be the rabbit too—heart hammering against my ribs, pupils dilated with fear, watching the predators circle.
It’s cold outside, the sort of New York evening that tastes metallic. Gino’s blacked-out Navigator idles at the curb like apredator. He’s in the front seat, staring at his phone, tapping out a rhythm only his mother would recognize.
The back door unlocks with a click. I settle in behind him. Gino keeps the car at a slow roll as we take 12th east, over to Second Ave. The city is a monochrome smear out here, every streetlamp a wound that never heals.
“What’s the mood, boss?” he asks, not looking back.
I examine my hands, still raw from the wash. “Can’t complain,” I say.
He grunts, interprets. The GPS barks “Lenox Hill,” and I laugh. My father has no sense of irony. The uptown jobs always come late at night, always with the assumption that no one of substance will see you. As if people don’t exist after nine p.m.
Gino drives in silence for a while, clearing his throat every eight blocks like an ancient elevator. I’m grateful for the absence of small talk. My head is split with static tonight, a frequency only I can hear. At 86th, we cut west. The target is a narrow brownstone tucked between two prewar apartment buildings. No lights out front. My favorite kind.
He kills the engine. “You got this, right?” I expect a joke, but that’s it.
“I got it,” I say, but the words don’t fill the space.
Gino sits, mouth pinched, until I open the car door.
Inside the alley, I find the service entrance unlocked, just as promised. It feels staged, but that’s the way with these things. There’s less art to it than anyone wants to admit. Every lock can be opened, every house can be entered, every life can be scooped out like the rotten core of an apple.
I climb to the third floor, footsteps muffled by old carpeting. Every step is thick with the history of people who never knew they’d be ghosts in their own homes. I once thought about becoming a ghost—a real one, not just on paper —but I’m too vain, too hungry to leave a mark.
The window faces south, a perfect vantage point across the narrow courtyard where brick buildings huddle together like conspirators. In the target house, third floor, second window from the left, a yellow lamp casts honeyed light across cream-colored walls. A man sits in a leather wingback, one leg crossed over the other, reading a hardcover book with a crimson spine. His fingers absently stroke the edge of a page. He might as well be waiting for me.
I lay out the rifle on the threadbare carpet, each component clicking into place with satisfying precision. The window glass is thin, warped with age, and I unlock it with a single nudge of my steel pick. The October wind slices through the room, carrying the scent of distant rain and someone's dinner, drying my lips instantly. I click the scope into place, cool metal against my cheekbone, and peer through the crosshairs, expecting nothing but another anonymous silhouette.
But then I see him.
Pierce.
I don't mean 'him' as in the man I was sent to kill. I mean Pierce—the man who’s haunted me for five years. He's not much changed. His hair is shorter now, copper-flecked at the temples where it used to be uniformly dark. His beard is trimmed closer to the jaw, revealing the small scar beneath his bottom lip from when he fell off his bike in Prospect Park. Those same impossible hands—long-fingered, with prominent veins like rivers under pale terrain—cup the book as if it might bleed out if held too tight.
My first impulse is to look away, to reassemble the world into a shape that makes sense, but my father doesn't pay me to look away. He pays me to shoot, to make the red blossom appear between those shoulders that once carried me home through a thunderstorm.
The crosshairs settle over his heart, the fine red lines intersecting precisely where the left ventricle would be pumping blood through his body. A clean shot. A perfect shot. So easy I could do it blindfolded, left-handed, in a hurricane with sirens wailing and the world ending around me.
But I don't squeeze the trigger.
Instead, I set the rifle down on the threadbare carpet, my spine trembling like a plucked wire, and stare through the smudged glass as old memory claws its way to the surface, jagged and rusted and still somehow warm.
The day Pierce left, I broke every glass in my apartment. I scrubbed his hair from the drain, washed his cologne out of the sheets, and burned a pair of his socks on the fire escape. He never called, never texted, nothing. For weeks, I imagined him already dead, his beautiful hands mangled in some New York back street, his body a feast for rats. But then the PI brought me proof: an address, a photo, a bank statement. He had a brand new life in London. It took all the pain and made it worse, concentrated it down to a single black hole in my body.
From that day forward, I let that coldness become my armor. I let it run my life.
But now he’s here, in the crosshairs, and I’m supposed to kill him. There is a neatness to it I cannot bear.
He looks up, eyes passing over the window without stopping. I freeze, breath caught in my throat. My finger hovers over the trigger as he turns a page, oblivious to how close death sits. There's a flicker of something across his face—a private smile at something he's reading, a memory perhaps. I recognize that expression. I wore it the day I found his old sweater in a box I'd meant to throw away. Not the pain itself, but the proof that it had faded just enough to be bearable.
I watch him for a full minute, trying to summon the hate, but all I find is a warmth I thought I’d bled out years ago. It’s old, but it’s alive, this ache.
If I’m going to kill him, he’s going to look me in the eye first. I want him to know who’s ending his life.
Piece by piece, the rifle comes apart in my hands. I slide the components into the bag, then exhale a breath I've been holding so long it feels alien in my lungs. I don’t remember the walk. My body does it for me, every step a prelude to something I can’t define. I give Gino the signals and he takes the large case in my hands, trading it for a Glock.
“I’ll be back,” I spit out, unwilling to look him in the eye.
