Devin

 

“Making a good clean hit is all about getting in and out,” Devin said as he and Cara sat across from one another at his kitchen table. It was the first time Cara had been upstairs since the night Devin brought her to his house, and it helped them to feel like equals, like partners. “That’s why a gun is nice. If you can sneak up on the target, then that is even better. One clean shot to the back of the head or the temple. BAM.”

 

Cara jumped as Devin mimed firing a gun, and he questioned, not for the last time, whether she had the stomach to handle killing someone who hadn’t been abusing her for years.

 

“So how will this partner thing work exactly?” she asked. “Will I distract him while you take him out or do you want me to pull the trigger?”

 

“Would you like to pull the trigger?” Devin asked, more as a test than anything else. His plan, though Cara didn’t know this, was to shoot her as well, so he had no intention of giving her a gun.

 

She hesitated, her face going pale. “Umm… I’m not sure.”

 

“That’s okay,” he said. “We have plenty of time to plan. You can be a distraction if you’d like.”

 

Just then Devin’s phone went off. For a split second, he hoped it would be Evan finally texting to give him his new number. However, he was disappointed to see Cristoff’s name flash on his screen. He opened the text and nearly dropped the phone.

 

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said.

 

“What?”

 

“No freaking way.” He reread the text again to ensure he’d fully understood its meaning.

 

“What?” Cara repeated, louder this time.

 

Devin took a deep breath and set his phone face down on the table. “They want me to do the first hit tonight.”

 

“Tonight?”

 

Devin nodded, still in shock.

 

“Is that okay?” Cara asked, her eyebrows raised as if trying to decipher what the problem was.

 

Devin stared at her. She’d asked about taking a shower before they sat down for deliberations, and Devin had agreed. Now that she was clean, he couldn’t help but notice the perfectly straight bridge of her nose, the supple curve of her upper lip, the soft blush at her cheeks.

 

Was it okay? Devin didn’t know. His hits always came with a timeframe, but he was responsible for staking out the target and choosing the optimum time to strike. The boss had never forced his hand before. That alone felt like cause for concern. Was he being punished? Did they not trust him to do his job?

 

Then, forgetting about the Morettis for a minute, the logistics alone were a concern. Cara wasn’t ready to take on a hit just yet. Devin had planned to ease her into it—to do a few stakeouts, thus making sure she wouldn’t completely blow the gig, and give him enough time to make her death look like a Bianchi did it.

 

Now, though, there wouldn’t be time for any of that. And if he wanted to do this properly, he couldn’t risk rushing anything.

 

“It’s okay,” he said, nodding, then looked away from Cara when he realized he’d been staring at her that entire time. “It just means you can’t come with me for the first hit.”

 

“But—”

 

“You’ll still get your cut,” Devin said, anticipating what she was about to say. “It will just be a bit of a rush job, and I can’t risk bringing a novice along with me.”

 

“I’m not a novice,” she said, her upper lip stiff with indignation.

 

Despite everything, Devin chuckled. “Downstairs you claimed you couldn’t be a hit man. You claimed you’d never be able to kill anyone. Now you’re offended because I called you an amateur.”

 

Cara rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything, and Devin found himself smiling at her attitude. At the way she refused to concede and admit he was right.

 

“I’ll bring you on the next one. That’s where you’ll earn your cut,” he said, still smiling.

 

But then the smile disappeared. He realized they were a lie. For a moment, he’d forgotten his ultimate plan was to kill Cara. For a moment, he’d believed they were true partners. But remembering the larger plan sobered him, helped him ignore the soft curls forming at the ends of Cara’s blonde hair as it dried.

 

Though they were now in business together, Devin still didn’t feel comfortable letting Cara have free reign of his home. He mentioned tying her up again, and she shook her head, adamant that she be left free.

 

“I just need more time before I can trust you,” he said.

 

“Trust goes both ways, buddy,” Cara said, trying to lower her naturally high voice to sound tougher.

 

“What if I leave you untied, but lock you in the basement room?” Devin offered.

 

Cara crossed her arms and shook her head, her lips pouting out in a way that made Devin want to reach out and touch them.

 

“Trust goes both ways, but Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Devin said. “It takes baby steps. This can be our first baby step.”

 

She sighed and stomped all the way to the spare room, but ultimately agreed. Before Devin left, he turned the key in the door and said goodbye to Cara through the wood. She didn’t respond, and he smiled, somehow finding her stubbornness endearing.

 

Devin was parked outside the first target’s house within ten minutes. The man, a friend of the oldest Bianchi kid by the name of Trevor, lived in an apartment complex near Devin’s house. Devin opened up the folder and studied the photograph again. Trevor couldn’t be more than a year or two older than Devin’s son, Evan. They both had shaggy dark hair.

 

Devin stopped himself. He closed the folder and tried to forget about Evan. Getting sentimental on a mission went against rule number one. There were no emotions on a job. Only the job. Emotions simply got in the way.

 

According to the report, Trevor usually got back from the gym around eight, so Devin sat back in his seat, confident he had at least ten more minutes before he needed to be vigilant. Though, the moment his head touched the headrest, the world erupted into chaos.

 

A loud bang rang out, causing him to bolt upright, followed by a shower of glass shards. Something had just crashed through his window. Devin, frantic from the surprise, began looking for the object, but then realized there was a more time sensitive problem. Who had thrown the object through his window?

 

He opened his door and stepped out, his gun still holstered at his hip, and was immediately hit over the head. It felt like a fist, but the force of the blow knocked him off-balance, and he stumbled into his car. As he tried to blink away the stars in his vision, a knee came into view and immediately smashed into his face.

 

Devin shouted and swung his arms out feebly, trying to defend himself, but it felt as if the Earth had been tipped upside down and was trying to shake him off the face of it. He couldn’t find the ground or the sky. The only thing that felt real to him was the hood of his car, which he kept one hand on at all times.

 

Another blow landed on his spine, and Devin crumpled, falling to his knees with a sickening crack. He managed to look around and could make out three shadowy figures racing around him, each taking their turn swinging at him. He thought perhaps they were random thugs, but then he saw the glint of a blade.

 

Immediately, his survival instincts kicked into high gear. He knew that if he didn’t stand up, he would die. Shakily, he rose to his feet and tried to reach for his gun, but a burning sensation shot up his arm and into the back of his neck.

 

He looked over just in time to see the knife being pulled from his shoulder. He kicked out at the figure, making contact with his stomach and sending him back onto the pavement. Once again, Devin reached for his gun, but this time the burning pain came from the back of his leg. It felt as though someone was ripping a hole directly through his femur.

 

He screamed, and swung the fist of his injured arm in the direction of the man behind him. The man dodged it, but it gave Devin enough time to grab his gun. He pulled it from his holster and pointed it blindly at the men surrounding him. They seemed to back off, and Devin thought perhaps he had won, but then a crack rang out, and Devin realized a gun had been fired.

 

He felt a warmth spreading across his chest and down his rib cage.

 

He’d been shot.

 

He’d never been shot before.

 

Devin had shot other people, but he had never been on the receiving end of a bullet. He spun and fired at the figure who had shot him. One pull of the trigger and the man crumpled to the ground. At that, the other two men took off running into the darkness. Apparently, unlike their friend, they hadn’t thought to bring a gun and weren’t prepared to take an armed Devin on with their knives.

 

As he moved towards the heap on the ground, the severity of his wounds began to sink in. Pain ripped up his entire right side and down his left leg. His head was pounding with blood and adrenaline and a probable concussion.

 

Still, Devin wanted to see who had attacked him. He bent forward and pulled back the man’s hood, and saw none other than Trevor lying on the ground before him. Devin’s single shot had somehow managed to enter the right side of Trevor’s forehead. He’d died instantly.

 

Realizing how exposed he was out in the street, Devin limped back to his car and dropped into the seat with a thud. His driver’s side window was completely shattered, and he was sitting on shards of glass, but none of that mattered compared to the pain he was feeling. He knew that he needed to get home. Back to Cara.

 

Going to the hospital was out of the question. He’d show up with his extensive injuries and immediately be pinned with Trevor’s murder. No, he needed to get home. Though, even that had its risks.

 

Cara could decide to let him die. Devin liked to think they’d built some kind of rapport, but he also realized that could be because he found Cara to be insanely sexy. Sometimes basic attraction had a way of muddying the waters, making things less clear.

 

Devin didn’t know how he managed to drive himself home, but ten minutes later he was pulling into his driveway, his mind and body on autopilot. Probably as a way to avoid dealing with the pain he was feeling.

 

He stumbled into the house and headed immediately for the stairs. Each step felt like running a marathon. His left leg was nearly useless, just a lump of flesh attached awkwardly to his body, but still, he managed to make it to the bottom of the stairs and across the floor.

 

“About damn time,” Cara’s voice said from the other side of the door. “I have to pee.”

 

Devin fumbled for the key in his pocket and was relieved to find it was still in his front pocket and hadn’t fallen out during the scuffle. He shoved it into the lock and twisted, and that seemed to be all the energy he could expend.

 

He collapsed backward onto the floor, and everything went black.

 

# # #

 

Cara

 

Cara heard Devin arrive home and move through the house above her, but his footsteps weren’t as heavy or quick as normal. She had chocked it up to him simply neglecting her, taking his sweet time upstairs before he came down and unlocked the door. But when he did make it downstairs, and the key rattled in the lock, Cara was surprised that not only did he not answer her, but a loud bang sounded from outside the room.

 

Hesitantly, Cara twisted the knob and found it unlocked. She pushed it open, not sure what she might find on the other side. Had Devin been attacked from behind? A mafia member hitting him over the head with a bat or whatever melee weapon mafia members use? Or was it some kind of trap?

 

She had tried to allow herself to trust Devin, but they didn’t know much about one another personally, so Cara was still finding that difficult. When the door opened, however, she found all the answers she needed.

 

Devin was hurt.

 

Bad.

 

He was on the floor, his arms and legs twisted at strange angles, and his gray T-shirt and jeans were soaked through with blood. Cara couldn’t tell how much of it was his own and how much of it belonged to someone else, but she could tell there was a lot of it.

 

Immediately, she looked around the room for signs of an intruder or attacker but didn’t see anything. That felt like a far-fetched theory, especially since she had only heard one set of footsteps upstairs. No, the more likely scenario was that Devin had gotten hurt during the hit and had come back to the house seeking her help.

 

Like her, he had permanently placed himself on the opposing side of most emergency personnel, so she was his only chance at survival. The reality of that hit Cara like a physical blow. She had the choice to attempt to save Devin or to let him die.

 

He was a hit man. There had to be a good amount of cash lying around his house, as she didn’t think the mafia handled many checks, and he didn’t seem to have any other family so she would have a few days headstart if she made a run for it. She’d always wanted to start over somewhere tropical. Somewhere warm, with a beach where she could take walks along the shoreline and have a collection of seashells on her mantle.

 

Before the thought had even fully formed in her head, Cara was halfway up the stairs, prepared to search through Devin’s things while he bled out on the floor of his basement. Did he have to die, though? She thought about it, her foot freezing mid-step. She could at least try to stop his bleeding, bring him a glass of water for when he woke up. She could give him a fighting chance, and then take his money and run away.

 

That felt much more moral. Or, at least, as moral as she could be while still stealing someone else’s money. So, Cara continued upstairs and dug through his surprisingly organized linen closet until she had an armful of towels and washcloths. She also filled a plastic bowl with warm water.

 

As she lifted his shirt, the extent of his injuries became clear. He had a deep gash on his arm that might need stitches, but might not—she had almost no medical training, so it was hard to be sure—and a bullet wound in his shoulder. She lifted him up slightly to check for an exit wound and found one on his back.

 

She’d seen in a movie, about a ragtag group of people surviving the apocalypse, that an exit wound meant the bullet didn’t need to be extracted from his shoulder. This was a huge relief because Cara had no idea how she would have gone about extracting a bullet from Devin’s body.

 

She wetted a few of the washcloths and began wiping the dried blood away. Then she wrapped the towels around his arm and his shoulder in a makeshift tourniquet cast fashion to try and stop the flow of the fresh blood. Next, she moved to his leg.

 

She considered just leaving his pants on and wrapping a towel around his wound, but an infection was a real concern, so she finally buckled and used a pair of scissors to cut his jeans from his ankle to his hip. She was able to lift his leg slightly to see a deep wound on the back of his thigh that was still bleeding. She cleaned it off as best she could and then applied a large wad of washcloths to the cut before tying it all together with a towel.

 

She knew it was a shoddy job, but it was the best she could manage. Once the work was done, she sat back and realized how incredibly fit Devin was. She’d noticed his thick frame before, but even chubby men can look fit in cloths; however, now that Devin was practically naked on the floor in front of her, one thing was certain: he was not fat.

 

Muscles carved up the skin of his legs and arms as if he’d been sculpted by Michelangelo. The plane of his stomach was smooth and taut, flesh pulled tightly over muscle, all of which culminated in a deep V right above his pelvic bone.

 

His pelvic bone.

 

Cara blushed. With his pants cut open and thrown wide, she was afforded a very clear look at his pelvic area, and… it wasn’t small. In fact, it bulged out so much she was tempted to poke it and ensure it was real. Though, clearly, it was.

 

She stood up, shaking her head, trying to dislodge the dirty thoughts that were currently taking up residence in her mind. She needed to focus. She’d done her best for Devin. Now it was up to him whether he lived or died.

 

She looked down at him again as he lay on the floor, his body exposed, his limbs wrapped in bloody towels, his typically serious face blank and serene. Like a child sleeping.

 

Cara went to the spare room and grabbed the navy-blue comforter off the bed. She brought it back to the main room and laid it over him, tucking it gently under his chin.

 

She told herself she was still going to leave. That she was still going to steal whatever cash he had and make a run for it. She told herself this as she sat on the floor next to him, her hand pushing a strand of hair away from his forehead.