I killed him.

I was a killer, now. I put the bullet through his skull, splattered his brain across the wall.

I did that.

And the relief… oh my fucking god… the relief.

It was as if I lost my body for a second, I was the same consistency as the pink mist that had billowed out the back of Lazarus’s skull.

That, more than pulling trigger, made me a killer. My relief. The hard clench of joy on my soul, like the bite of a dog that would not let go.

Lazarus is dead.

I killed him.

I could have laughed. I could have fucking wept.

All these years doing everything in my power to not become this thing. And yet, here I was. It had been inevitable in a way. My fight against the tide for nothing.

You can’t control what won’t be controlled.

Marxist Economic Crisis Theory made real.

And I wished I could stay in this place—numb and mist-like. But I became aware of the ringing in my ears and that my hand was numb and slowly—horrifically—piece by piece I returned to my body. I returned to this room.

The smell of blood and gunpowder gagged me.

Bates’s face, calm and knowing like all had gone according to plan, enraged me. Filled me with a blood-red wrath.

I pointed the gun at him. Steady. Calm.

An animal. A machine. Nothing human left in me.

That bullet had killed so much.

“That is an option,” Bates said. Like killing him was a thing on a menu I could point to.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t?”

“Because someone has to clean up the mess Lazarus left behind,” Bates said, leaning back against the desk like I wasn’t holding a gun on him. Like his life wasn’t in the balance.

But this man was completely opaque. Unreadable.

“The women in the container,” I said, pushing the images from my mind.

“The cops will investigate.”

“We were a part of that,” I said. I didn’t give a shit about the cops. Like any other filthy sinner all I cared about was what was left of my soul.

“We didn’t know.”

“Does that make us less guilty?” I asked and to my shame I really asked him, like the cold man standing in front of me splattered with blood could lead me out of this horror.

Bates shrugged. Indifferent. Though something about it was not convincing.

“I’m not interested in conversations about guilt,” he said. “We’re all covered in the blood of the innocent. But you, Jack, despite the body at your feet, are not a killer.”

Not a killer?

I was a brother once. A son. A student, even, a million years ago. And despite the last two years and the sickening darkness overtaking me, I clung to the idea that I still was a brother. A son. A student.

A good man, worthy of those things, mundane and ordinary and beautiful.

The fucking empty gun I carried like it meant something, like it negated the beatings I gave. The fear I inflicted.

Like I could split hairs over the nature of my soul.

That was over.

I couldn’t undo this. I couldn’t pretend it never happened. And I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t do it for my own freedom, not just for the women we saw tonight, dead in that shipping container, starved of oxygen, their goodbye notes to their faraway children scribbled on the backs of far too few food wrappers.

I swallowed down the vomit screaming up my throat.

The air smelled of burnt blood. Of gunpowder and brain, and I threw the gun into the corner of the room.

“What’s next?” I asked, staring at Lazarus’s body.

“You’re free,” Bates said, circling the desk to sit in the chair behind it. He sat and grimaced as if the chair was all wrong and he stood up, pulled the chair away, and replaced it with another one. A hard one from the corner.

“My father’s debts—”

“Don’t interest me,” Bates said. “They barely interested Lazarus. He enjoyed the process of trying to squeeze the honor out of you.”

I had felt that, keenly. My honor so small I forgot where it was. Forgot I ever had it.

“Why?” I asked. “Why let me go?”

He seemed startled at the question. Or as startled as I ever saw him. A brief widening of his eyes. A slight flaring of his nostrils.

“Why does it matter?” he asked.

“Am I just supposed to believe you?” I asked. I was going crazy. That was the only explanation. I was losing my mind.

“Perhaps I wish someone had given me an out when I needed it.”

I never considered who Bates might have been before he became this. That there might have been another road for him.

“Don’t,” he said, lifting a hand. “I am king now. And kings don’t need pity.”

“Was this your plan all along?” I asked, connecting dots in my memory. Years of his silent and steady presence at Lazarus’s side, how he’d made himself indispensable.

“It would seem to me that a man bent on freedom wouldn’t ask these questions?” Bates said. “A man bent on freedom would leave. Fast.”

“You mean this?” I asked. “That I’m free. My father. My brother—”

“I don’t care about your brother.”

I stepped back, away from the blood I’d spilled and the brains I’d splattered on the wall.

With that one miniscule effort, the tiny amount of pressure applied to the trigger of that gun, I’d somehow opened my prison bars.

“Be smart,” Bates said. “And leave town for a while.”

I thought of that dude ranch Abby told me about. The work and purpose she found there.

Work and purpose.

Two things I never thought I’d have again.

I nodded, feeling like my neck was broken.

“And the girl,” Bates said.

“What girl?”

“Abby.”

“What about her?” I asked, feeling everything in my chest sharpen and push outward, like there was a bomb exploding in slow motion in my heart.

“Get her out of town too.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Tell her if she talks—”

“I didn’t tell her anything.”

“She saw plenty.”

“She didn’t see anything.”

Bates said nothing, but he looked at me with pity. Enough pity that I knew there was something he knew that I didn’t.

I charged the desk, pulling him up by the lapels of that suit he wore like a skin.

“What have you done?” I asked, feeling the cold hand of dread on the back of my neck. His silence enraged me.

“What have you done!” I bellowed, yelling so loud my voice burned. I shook him, and his expression did not change. He smiled at me like I was pitiful, and I grabbed from the desk the gun he’d left there.

“She was looking for you,” he said. “I just told her where she could find you.”

She was looking for me because of that message I left her. That fucking message. I told her I loved her because I thought I was dying.

“What did she see?” I asked, even though I knew. Because the world turned like a screw, I knew what she saw.

“She saw you put that bullet in his head, and then she left.”

“You planned that?”

“Of course not—not even I am that good. I took an opportunity. But it doesn’t change the fact that she saw and now, I’m afraid, she’s a loose end.”

“If you hurt her, I will kill you.” I put the barrel of the gun under Bates's chin.

“I don’t need to hurt her. You did that yourself.” He arched an eyebrow at me. For a second I was sure I was going to blow his brains out. I felt it so sharp I could see it, the splatter of his blood across my face. Across the wall. The jerk of the gun in my hand. “You forgot we don’t fuck the innocent, because it’s not transferable. You will only diminish it. Ruin it. Men like us—”

“I am nothing like you,” I spat in his face, jamming the barrel deep into the soft palate of his mouth.

“You can no longer say that, can you?” he asked, lifting his chin so he could speak, his eyes flickering to the dead body behind me. “As of ten minutes ago, you are just like me. At least to her you are.”

The words struck me like bullets, hitting and destroying the places I’d protected in the last two years.

He was right.

I was no different than the men I’d disdained.

And it wasn’t him I wanted to kill. It wasn’t him I wanted to hurt.

My heart burned in my chest, every pound a scream.

I put the gun under my own chin, the cold barrel pressing up into my throat.

Something registered in his eyes. A fleeting panic, a shock that vanished as soon as it was there.

“You don’t want to do that,” Bates said.

“I do,” I said. “I should have done it two years ago.”

“If you die, who will tell your brother he can stop risking his life in those junkyard fights of his? If you do this thing, I will have to bury your body in the same grave as Lazarus. And no one will ever know.”

I didn’t care. I didn’t give a shit about any of that. My brother would survive, and going down in a grave with Lazarus is everything I deserved.

“If you kill yourself I will send Sammy after the girl,” he said. “And Sammy will put a bullet in her brain and leave her body for crows. Or you can walk out of here and take care of her yourself.”

“I won’t kill her.”

“As long as she’s silent and not in the city, I don’t give a shit what happens to her. But without you, she’s just another shots girl. Get her and get gone, or you’re both dead.”

I sagged. Broken by his words. Beaten by exhaustion. I put the gun down and let go of Bates.

I didn’t see or expect the left hook he landed across my face, and I staggered back. He charged around the desk toward me while my ears still rung.

The calm, expressionless Bates was gone. Vanished under something cold and vengeful. Something that had been simmering beneath his still and silent exterior.

As bad as Lazarus was, and he was evil, this man was worse.

“Get the fuck out of here before I change my mind and kill you both right fucking now,” he said. I blinked. “GO!” he roared.

I needed no other warning. I was out the door and down the steps. I didn’t think about my future. My life. My freedom after all these years.

My world shrunk to a tiny pinpoint of light. Everything now was about Abby. About making sure she was okay. About making sure she got out of the city and stayed safe.

At the bar was a woman I’d never seen before, she stood up from her stool as I came down.

“Are you done up there?” she asked, pulling the tie on her raincoat. I nodded, speechless and numb.

“Excellent,” she said and climbed the steps to the second floor. I almost warned her but something told me she knew what she was going to find in that office.

On the bar was the manila envelope I’d left for Abby. The money I wanted to give her so she could realize her dreams; that café where everyone gets what they need.

Where Abby, so sweet, so warm and so bright, gets what she needs.

She’d left without it. I gathered the envelope and slipped it into the pocket inside my sweat-soaked and blood-splattered jacket.

That night, before the diner, before going back to my place, she told me her address, and I drove there without thinking.

Her apartment was an old post-war building, with a security door at the front that I couldn’t get through. I stood in the drizzle of a late night and looked up at the windows. One apartment was lit up.

I had no idea if it was hers. I fished out my phone and looking up at that window I called her, believing—hoping—the woman who’d rushed to the club after getting that message from me would not, even having seen what she saw, refuse my call.

She would answer just to know if I was all right.

She would answer just to tell me she was never going to see me again.

I prayed because it was second nature to me. Because I spent most of life praying.

Please answer. Please, my sweet girl, please let me tell you you are safe. Let me tell you you don’t have to be scared. But you have to leave town.

But the phone went immediately to voice mail.

“This is Abby. Sorry I can’t get to the phone. Leave a message, or, better yet, text me.”

I closed my eyes at the sound of her voice. The laughter buried in the sharp edge of her tone, like she was asking me to laugh with her because she was so bad at returning calls.

I missed her. I missed her so much.

And she’d texted me. Days ago. And the only reason she’d reach out was if she was pregnant.

But Abby being pregnant wasn’t something I could think about right now.

I couldn’t let it in. Not even a little. That would break me into pieces.

“Listen,” I said. “I know… I know what you saw, but I can explain. And I know how fucking dubious that sounds, but this is real. Everything has changed and I…I want to tell you you’re okay. You’re safe. You need to call me. Please. I will not hurt you. Call me please.”

I hung up, staring up at that window, rain in my eyes.

But she never did.