Pulling my hand away, I gripped my cup so tight the edges crinkled. “Sorry, but no. It's not a tale worth telling.” It's one I want to forget, and never can.
There was no hiding the anger that danced through her eyes. Amazingly, she took a slow breath and sighed. “I think that's unfair. You know mine. Tell me something, a tiny something. Your first contract, what about that?”
Tapping my foot, I turned my cup in a circle. It was hard to stop fidgeting. “You already know one of my kills—”
“Two,” she said, waggling her fingers. “Culver and Frank.”
“Right, sorry.” Damn, Marina did know a lot. This was what had Jacob so worried.
Was it worse to give her more information?
No, I told myself. She has enough info already to put me and Jacob behind bars. More won't hurt.
She's either alive at the end of this, or she takes our secrets to her grave.
Pushing the cup from one hand to the next, I studied her. When I'd told her about the contract that had gone wrong, it had been a cautionary tale. I'd wanted to scare her, for her to grasp how fucked up what we did was.
She had been acting like this was a game, or a movie. Marina didn't understand.
This girl had never killed anyone.
“Daisy,” I said, wincing at the name. “She was our first employer, a stripper at the club we bounced for. I mean, she was more hooker than dancer but—it doesn't matter.”
I got her killed.
The cold ache of guilt I felt was familiar. I often thought of myself as a monster, but thinking of the girl who had done nothing wrong—a girl no different than Marina—my heart still skipped.
Marina was exposing me to some deeply buried shame.
“Jacob was the one that started everything.” I said. Eyeing Marina, I tried to read her face. “He went to Daisy, told her he could have the pimp that was beating up her and the other girls killed. He played it off, pretended he knew a guy.”
“That guy was you,” she said confidently.
“Yeah. Me.” Chuckling cynically, I lifted my coffee. It was empty, so I just held it. My hands needed to do something. Anything. “Jacob followed the pimp to his home, and I made sure no one followed us.”
The face of that man entered my brain. His name had been Emilio; an ugly guy with uglier habits. He was a bastard, always busting up the girls who worked for him when they dared to disobey him.
I shook myself and said, “The shithead lived alone. Cornering him was a cinch.” There was a tsunami rising in me that I fought to bury. At the time, Emilio's death had felt satisfying, but I didn't want Marina to see me relishing the memory. “We stuck a plastic bag over his head, suffocated him. Jacob held him down and I squeezed his neck. It wasn't pretty.”
Her eyes were bulging. It was eerily similar to how Emilio's had looked.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “That was too much detail. You didn't need to know the method.”
“Yes, I did.” That time, she took my hand. It was electric, I sat straighter. “Kite, you murdered the man who was hurting those girls. I had no idea that your first kill was so... heroic.”
If I'd still had coffee in my cup, I would have watched it spill everywhere. It was a wonder I caught the container after it bounced off the tabletop. “Heroic?”
There were so many things wrong with what she'd said.
I wasn't a hero.
And Emilio hadn't been my first kill.
Shaking my head, I studied her, checking for pity. Nothing glowed in Marina's eyes but warmth and appreciation.
“You're wrong,” I sighed. “I did it because Jacob said we should do it. The money was too good, we needed to get out of the slums. Besides... it wasn't like I saved Daisy.”
“What do you mean?”
Pinching my nose, I filled my lungs. This memory always haunted me. “She'd told one of the other dancer's that she was going to teach Emilio a lesson. He found out what she said. Before we stepped in that night, he'd called her over.” My brained flashed with bloody images. “He beat her to death in his bathroom. We found her body after we killed him.”
Marina had gone very pale. “That's not your fault.”
To this day, I didn't agree. It was very much our fault.
She whispered, “His death is even more fitting, then. You saved the other girls. You are a hero, both of you are.”
Grimacing, I said, “That man was trash, but not everyone we killed was.”
Wrinkling her brows, she held my hand and didn't wrench away. I was thankful for that. “Unless you plan to list every contract for me right here, right now, so that I can judge, then all I can go by is what I know.” Turning my palm over, she traced the lines, tickled the invisible scar she couldn't see. “That man beat women, killed them, and Frank helped murder my family.”
I didn't know what to do. Was she really arguing that I was a good person?
“And Culver?” I asked. “You don't know what he did or didn't do.”
She held my gaze steadily. “You do, though. Was he a saint?”