He wasn’t even surprised, the night Caprese’s men came to visit. He was already high. Claire was out with friends and Jonathan didn’t have their money and he knew it and they knew it and there was the hammer and his hands—but then there she was walking in, there was Claire, screaming, there was Claire, pulling out a gun—where had she gotten that gun?—and then there was noise and pain and darkness.

Jonathan should have left Merit, after that.

Should have bailed the moment he came to in that hospital room with two broken hands and three bullet holes in his stomach and chest.

But Claire’s blood was still mingled with his on their kitchen floor, and he just couldn’t bring himself to go. It just didn’t make sense, that she was dead, that he was not—Claire didn’t deserve it, didn’t deserve this, to become a past tense, a footnote in someone else’s story—and Jonathan had the strange but unshakable idea that he hadn’t made it either. That he was a ghost, anchored to the place where it all happened, bound there until some grim business was done. So he stayed, and wore that one good suit he had to her funeral, dripped ash on it chain-smoking cigarettes in a cheap hotel room afterward, waiting for Caprese’s men to find him and finish the job.

Funny thing, but until that night when Caprese’s men showed up, Jonathan had never killed anyone before.

He thought it would be harder.

It should have been harder, should have been impossible, considering the number of men, the number of shots fired, but so much about that day was impossible. The blue-white shine, like a shield, knocking their bullets away. The cacophony of sound and violence, and when it was over, Jonathan, standing alone among the corpses.

Unscathed.

Untouched.

In his rare metaphysical moments, Jonathan thought it was Claire, looking out for him. But in his masochistic moments, of which there were far more, he knew it was punishment, the universe mocking him for what he’d failed to do.

The clock chimed seven, and Jonathan knotted his worn-out tie. He slid on the jacket, picked up his saxophone case, and headed to work.

His breath fogged before him as he walked, this part of Merit already dark, like it couldn’t be bothered with streetlights. It was a half mile to the Marina, a patch of Merit they’d labeled Green Walk on the map, another bit of irony considering there was nothing but stone and asphalt in every direction.

The Ghost of Green Walk.

That was him. The man who couldn’t die.

He was already—

“Hey,” snarled a voice. “Give me your money.”