“Seriously?” Alace shook her head as she fished the piece of plastic out of the envelope. She had a phone propped on her shoulder, held in place by the tilt of her head. Regg laughed in her ear, his voice smooth and quiet. “This is the best Q name you can think of?”

Querida Pansy O’Dell. She sighed, loud enough to ensure Regg heard.

“When you already know it’s too late, why do you bother arguing, honey?” Reginald Davies spoke softly. “I have everything setup like I do every time. There’s a complex enough trail for your prospective employers to follow for seven years.” That was their gambit, always. Enough people were bitten by the seven-year itch that it was a safe gamble employers and rental agents wouldn’t check past that period of time. Regg had been her paper guy from the beginning, referred by a “friend” of her mother’s during a drunken conversation.

Alace had locked away the information and run with it after the trial, taking to her heels the very next day, and taking her mother’s sock of emergency money with her. Only a couple of thousand, it hadn’t lasted long, but it hadn’t needed to. Revenge was a lucrative business, and one she’d investigated long before she left the no-tell hotel that spawned her.

“You know what Querida means, right?” Upending the envelope, she captured the other items with her free hand. Social security card, credit card, bank card, contact list. “Everything’s here. We’re good.”

“I’m good, you mean. And of course, everything’s there. I mailed it myself.” Now Regg sounded huffy, and she grinned, knowing it was a fraud but still determined to soothe his imaginary ego. Regg was one of the most down-to-earth guys she’d never met, and once he’d learned the real reason for her documentation needs, he’d gotten behind her plan a hundred percent.

“You’re the best, Regg. Everyone knows that. Thank you, honey.” Still grinning, she listened to him laugh, the sound of his humor cut off by the call disconnect.

Querida. No good nickname from that one. I’ll be glad to hear the last of Paulie, though. She snorted a quiet laugh. No doubt some dickhead will come up with something asinine.

Alice had been her first alias, near enough to her own name so she didn’t get tripped up, but nearly too close in the end. Then Alice went away, and Betty Alana was born. Betty went by the wayside quickly, she’d only worn that disguise for two months before an opportunity presented itself and Alace had found herself going off-script in a way that was nearly terminal.

She lifted her hand, fingertips rubbing a slow arc along her collarbone, slowing when she crossed the scar where the bullet had exited. Got the job done, though. That mark, and this was before she knew what to call them, had friends in low places. Friends who’d seen her with him. Friends who weren’t friends, but people he had owed money to, so when he went missing, they’d come looking for her.

Thornton. She remembered his name suddenly, Cecil Thornton. He’d been a serial rapist in college, drugging his dates and fucking them however he liked. He’d held one girl down when the drug hadn’t worked like it always had. “A bad batch,” he’d been heard to complain. As if he had cause for complaint when he was the criminal. The girl had enough composure to go to the cops, but she hadn’t gone to the right cops, hitting the campus police up first. They’d bungled everything they possibly could, and Alace found out later both men were members of Thornton’s fraternity.

Coulda called it a sorority with how big those pussies were, she thought, and tried to shake off the unwelcome memories. Even as she escaped the thoughts that moment, when she settled into her motel room for the night, they circled back around for her before dawn. Every death held something in wait for her, like the best kind of getaway driver, relentless and persistent in their pursuit.

She leaned heavily on the bar, locking Cecil in place. The mechanism was intended to hold a gate against the flood of water in the canal, but she’d disassembled it to suit her needs. Rolling him from the top of the culvert had been easy, arranging him in place also easy. Getting the bar to lock was less so because he was bigger than she’d expected. Still, got ’er done. She listened for the sounds that would precede his death, not yet hearing the thunder. Even after the storm built, she knew it could take a few hours for the water to wend itself down from the distant hills, so she had taken the opportunity to get comfy.

Checking his pupils, she saw they were still dilated, but not as much as before, which meant the drugs she’d given him would be wearing off just enough, just in time. A roofie mix inspired by his chemist friend’s concoction. That friend had killed himself once he realized what his efforts had bought for so many. Another death to lay at your feet, Cecil.

Climbing into the canal, she worked the buckle of his belt free, unfastening and tugging down his dress pants.

Friendly little Cecil hadn’t gotten anything more than a slap on the wrist from the college. Even when six more girls came forward to say they thought they’d had nonconsensual sex with him, none of the charges saw the light of a courtroom.

By the time accusations had gained the attention of a real cop, far too much had already been swept under the rug. Evidence gone, testimonies distorted, alibis lined up like kids at the swimming pool slide on a hot day, seven girls made to feel their memory was faulty, or they were teases of the worst sort—cock. Don’t insult the penis, ladies. That’s just not done.

By the time Alace had heard about the story, four of the women had committed suicide. That left three survivors who would sleep better knowing their attacker had left the world, never to bother them again. The brother of one of the dead was her contact. He’d never meet her, of course. Never know the first thing about her. Alace was good at keeping herself secret. He only knew he was purchasing the surveillance and investigative services of someone who wanted justice.

He wasn't buying a death, but he'd get one, and ten would get you twenty he wouldn't spend time crying about it. She wondered idly if Cecil had heard the one about fifteen would get you twenty, snorting as she lifted her head, seeing lightning playing along the edges of the hills.

Alace hated the word vigilante. It sounded so wannabe. She tried to even the scales for people like her. Helping them out if they couldn't take justice into their own hands, like she had. For a moment, the scenery around her wavered as the dream tried to slide sideways and feed her Trev’s voice screaming loudly, but Cecil’s death yanked them back on course. Thank God.

Cock tease. Worst thing you could do to a man was send him home with aching balls. “No, the worst thing is to kill him and not send him home at all.” Alace’s voice always surprised her in this dream, because she sounded entirely crazy. “I’m not crazy.” Thoughts given voice in her dreams. “Just kill him already.”

Cock tease. Cecil’s weapon of choice didn’t look too threatening now, pale and limp, coiled in the dark hair of his crotch. “Blue balls.” A rubber band appeared in her fingers, thick and strong, the kind used to hold bundles of envelopes together at the post office where the man’s sister worked before she hung herself. Applying the band was the work of moments, and she took a twist around the end of his penis for good measure. “All tied up and nowhere to fuck.”

Out of nowhere, the water came in a rush, surrounding her and pushing her backwards against the gate she’d somehow reassembled, even with Cecil’s unresponsive body underneath the bottom rung. Higher the water surged, all the way to her knees while she twisted to try and pull herself out of the torrent. Then to her hips where the flood was frigid against her core, the cold relentless as it penetrated to bare skin. It rose to her breasts, the force of the water causing them to bob and lift, fighting against the support of her bra. To her shoulders and she suddenly realized she hadn’t done everything she needed to do. “Not yet,” she cried out, water flowing into her open mouth. “Not yet.” Weak words garbled against the torrent of liquid threatening to submerge her.

Pressure against her feet lifted her, pushing upwards, and she felt a cold hand wrap around each ankle. Throwing her arms over the top of the gate, she finally wrenched herself free from the wave of water. Balancing there by an act of will, holding tightly to the bones the gate had somehow been constructed from, she stared down into the water. Clear as if it were the Caribbean, she saw Cecil below, a smile on his face as he drowned, saving her.

She lurched up from where she’d gone to sleep lying crossways on the mattress, feet dangling off one side and her head wedged against a pillow on the other. So soft the words barely disturbed the air, she whispered, “At least it was Cecil.” Some nights were harder than others because while Cecil didn’t have any family left behind, that wasn’t true of all of them.

Squinting at the clock on the nightstand, she saw it was nearing six o’clock, which meant she could give herself permission to rise.

Alace’s world was governed by a multitude of rules, all self-imposed. Don’t eat red meat—that one mostly driven by a short-term job at a slaughterhouse. It wasn’t like she was a vegetarian sworn off all meat, just beef.

Don’t buy a car less than ten years old. States had different rules for newer cars when it came to licensing them. The few times she’d needed a car in her name, she’d followed her rule, and everything worked out as it should. It wasn’t in the owning them where the problem lay, but in the disposing of them afterwards. An older junker could be left unlocked with the signed title in the seat, and finders-keepers, first to man up—why do we call it man up? Why not woman up?—and pop the door was the winner of the day.

Don’t rent where you have to get utilities set up. Okay, that was less of a rule and more of a no-brainer. One payment, one background check, one thing to cancel.

Don’t get close to the mark. Use the gig as you need to, and get tight with their coworkers, their friends, their family even—that one was touchy, though, since family meant you gave a shit about someone in the end, and she just wanted to do her job and move on—but don’t ever, never, get close to the mark. She’d only broken that one once, and that was less of a breaking and more of a cause for the rulemaking.

Donovan Knowles. She’d been twenty-five and six years into the game, which meant her name had been Felicia. Alace snorted, rolling her eyes over the number of times she’d heard the phrase, “Bye, Felicia.” Bad choice, Regg, she’d scolded him. A lot of his name choices were bad, but he did his job so she could do hers. Felicia Eugenie Danforth. All her names went that way, the flip-flopped alphabet alignment Regg’s idea, too. The time before Knowles had been Estrella Dawn Clevinger.

That mark had been Cynthia Birch, a woman who took in troubled girls and boys, and then made them fuck each other with common household items, videoing them to not only feed her own perversion but to make a fortune selling the films online. Cynthia’s reasoning, when Alace had questioned her, was because her daughter’s tuition was so high, and she posited those educational costs had been set by the bureaucracy driven by men. In Cynthia’s warped mind, she was getting a dig in against patriarchal society with every upload.

Even three social worker reports hadn’t been enough to convict her, a jury of her peers hadn’t spent more than thirty minutes debating the fate of the bitch. They’d probably spent most of that time discussing how long they had to wait to make sure everyone knew they’d given it the old college try.

Alace turned her head to one side, collapsing onto her back, trying not to feel the burn of tears at the back of her eyes. Cynthia always did that to her, not that she felt sorry for the bitch, but for the sake of the woman’s kid. The girl had cried so hard at the graveside she’d collapsed and her father had to gather her up and cart the kid away like baggage.

Unlike many of her marks, there hadn’t been any poetic justice tied up in Cynthia’s death. Alace had found no palatable ways to kill her while making a statement about her crimes.

The cops had gotten closer than Alace liked with that one. She hadn’t considered it had been only two years since she’d left a note on a body, but those detectives had compared case logs with the Tampa cops who had flagged her kill down there and confirmed the notes were written by the same person. Damn computers made connections where humans wouldn’t. That was all they could prove, she thought. That time.

Back to Knowles.

She’d tried all the planned ways to enter his circle without getting close to him. Her dossier on him was exhaustive, and Regg’s expectation was she could have dug her way in, but none of the planned contacts in his close-ranked friends worked for her. One guy had just gotten engaged, to an unknown girl he’d met the week before on an island trip. Alace snarled at the memory. Surprise! The sister got a job transfer at the last minute, winding up across the country in Boston. Alace had toyed with the idea of replacing his assistant at work, but Knowles had developed a reputation for being a straight arrow guy after his legal troubles.

That was how the news accounts put it, their written summaries slanted to minimize damage to his reputation if nothing could be proven. Innocent until proven guilty, except in the court of Alace. So, the whole affair had been generalized as legal troubles for the local whiz kid. Knowles had started his own company at twenty, skipping a masters’ program in favor of bringing his ideas to life. They were good ideas, interesting twists on software used every day, and Alace had no doubt that his name would still be a household word within a few years, even without his hands at the helm.

His legal troubles started in high school but didn’t catch up to him for nearly ten years. Long past the expiration of any statutes, and an eternity from when he’d expected the axe to fall. Kneeling and looking up at her as he’d bled out, he’d told her it was a relief. According to Knowles, since he was a junior in high school, he’d been living his life in purgatory, waiting.

She wasn’t proud of what happened next, considering she wasn’t supposed to lose her cool. All of this effort, this work, it was anonymous. She was virtually nameless, and none of these cases were personal to her. She’d dealt with Trev and his henchmen years ago. Doggedly waiting until she was strong enough, she’d managed to wait nearly too long, an unexpected liver disease almost taking Trev before she could. But even if it wasn’t personal, Knowles wasn’t supposed to feel relief his fate had been decided, oh no. Alace had exploded, rage taking over and the planned slow death by exsanguination had been escalated with an addition of a significant amount of blunt force trauma. Jesus, the body held a lot of blood.

Every blow had ripped a little more of her grief free, since while she’d been Donovan’s girl, back when she’d been working him as a mark, he had seemed normal. Kind and sweet, so openly patient and good to the point she’d broken one of her rules and called Regg to make sure she had the right Donovan Knowles. Hoping they'd gotten it wrong. They hadn’t.

That had to have been why she’d snapped the way she did. His confession meant the info wasn’t wrong, which mean he’d fooled even Alace into believing and trusting a monster. Each swing of the bat had driven that knowledge home, etching the rule in stone, sealing it with blood set in a mortar of bone.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Alace took a chest-expanding breath, then another one, using every exhale to envision a bloody hand pushing those memories aside. Donovan and Cynthia and even Cecil were history, not even a blip in her rearview mirror. Alace glanced at her phone, checking the time again. Time to rise and shine. Time to become Querida. She snorted. As if.