He chose the pills.
When he was done writing, he looked up from the notepad expectantly. His eyes were red, hollow, soulless. I tried not to think about what they’d seen when he was alone with my son. I tried not to think about a lot of things in that moment. My wife—my beautiful wife that I loved more than life itself, who gave meaning to my existence—liked Harry’s work, and I’d let him into my life. Into my house.
If she ever found out, she was going to kill him herself. Then fling herself off of a rooftop. I knew Emilia LeBlanc-Spencer better than she knew herself.
There was only one person she loved more than me.
Our son.
“Medicine cabinet?” I angled an eyebrow. I wasn’t prone to big speeches. I wanted to get it over with. I heard a truck parking outside the house, the sound of the vehicle automatically locking, and knew it was the glazier who’d come to fix the window. We had to slip away from the first floor quickly. Luckily, Fairhurst was too far gone inside his own head to notice potential help could be on the way.
“U-upstairs,” he stuttered. He smelled of piss and desperation.
Thank fuck. “Let’s rock n’ roll.”
The glazier walked in through the half-open door exactly a second after we went up the stairs. We slid into Harry’s en suite, and I locked the door behind us. Emptying the cabinet’s shelves, I grabbed everything at hand—paracetamols, aspirin, nefopam, ketamine (wasn’t sure what business that had being there, but I couldn’t complain. This shit could kill a horse with a bit of enthusiasm and the wrong quantities), and the usual variety of Xanax, Ativan, and other benzo drugs.
I emptied the pills across his gray marble counter and nodded toward them. “Any last words?”
“I…” he started.
“Kidding. I don’t give a fuck.”
“No, you don’t understand. I don’t have any water.” He side-eyed me with a pouty frown, the piss stain on his pants drying and stinking up the entire bathroom. I heard the guy downstairs whistling to himself, working quickly, and knew he had no idea we were upstairs. His invoice had no doubt already been paid by my PA. As far as he was concerned, he was all alone.
“You have a fucking sink in front of you,” I retorted.
“I do not drink tap water.”
“You’re about to die, you idiot.” I grabbed the back of his head and smashed it against the mirror above the sink, turning the tap on in the process. Blood trickled down his forehead when his head bobbed back up. The mirror in front of him was shattered.
“That’s seven years of bad luck. Your death couldn’t come at a timelier moment,” I chirped.
I began shoving pills into his mouth. I didn’t have time for this. I wanted to call my son and see that he was okay, talk to my wife and assure her everything was fine.
After his mouth was full of pills, I pushed his head under the water, forcing him to gulp down or choke up. I repeated the action three times, until I was sure he’d swallowed enough drugs to kill a Game of Thrones dragon. His bloodstream would soon be more contaminated than Chernobyl circa 1986.
When it was done and dealt with, Harry sat on the edge of his massive bathtub, clutching the edges to the point of white knuckles. I leaned against the sink, watching him die impatiently.
“So this is how it ends?” He looked around him, quietly stunned.
I crossed my arms. Expecting small talk from me after what he’d done was a fucking stretch.
“Ever wondered what it feels like?” He scrubbed his cheek absentmindedly. I don’t think he noticed his hand trembling. “Death, I mean?”
“No,” I answered. “I lived through it during my teenage years and most of my twenties. I know exactly what it feels like.”
“Do you believe in the afterlife?”
“No more than I believe in unicorns.” I stopped to think about it. “Actually, unicorns could potentially exist. Some dumb, millennial scientist is bound to fuck with a horse’s DNA and manage to get it to grow a horn and a pink, fluffy tail. Of course, you won’t be here to witness it. I’d send a picture, but sadly, USPS doesn’t deliver to hell.”
“I always thought…”
“Shh,” I pressed my index to my lips. “Your thoughts don’t interest me. You’re a pedophile. At least have the dignity to die silently.”
He was quiet for exactly two minutes, then spent the next ten minutes compulsively blabbing about his dark childhood—with his drunken father and MIA mother. I spent the next ten minutes flicking dirt from under my fingernails and checking the time on my BVLGARI. When the minute hand on my watch signaled it had been twenty minutes since the asshole gulped down a pharmacy, and I heard the truck downstairs disappearing in the distance, the glazier with it, I picked up Vaughn’s dagger.