An espresso in the morning, a bourbon before bed. Every Monday after breakfast, he got a massage, and every Wednesday at lunch, he swam laps, and every Friday night, rain or shine, from dusk until dawn, he played poker. Four or five members of Tony Hutch’s crew all got together weekly at Sam McGuire’s place, since Sam was single—or at least, he wasn’t married. He had a rotation of sorts, a new girl every week, but none of them stuck.

Sam’s was a nice place—they were all nice places—but he had a bad habit of leaving the back door unlocked instead of giving any of his short-term girls a key. Marcella had warned him a dozen times— someone could walk right in. But Sam would just smile, and say that no man would walk in on one of Tony Hutch’s crew.

Perhaps, but Marcella Riggins was no man.

She let herself inside.

The back door gave onto the kitchen, where Marcella found a girl doubled over, ass in the air and head in the freezer, as she rummaged for ice. She wobbled in too-high heels, bangles clanging against the freezer, but the first thing Marcella noticed was the girl’s dress. Dark blue silk, with a short rippling skirt—the same one that had hung for more than a year in Marcella’s own closet at the Heights.

The girl straightened, and turned, her mouth forming a perfect pink

circle.

Bethany.

Bethany, who had twice as many tits as thoughts.

Bethany, who asked about Marcus every time they met.

Bethany, who looked like a cheap knockoff of Marcella in those diamond earrings, that stolen dress, which wasn’t stolen, of course, because the apartment in town had also been kept for her.

Bethany’s eyes went wide. “Marcella?”

“Did you always know,” she’d asked Marcus once, undoing the buttons on a blood-stained shirt, “that you had what it took to end a life?”

“Not until the gun was in my hand,” he’d said. “I thought it would be hard, but in that moment, nothing was easier.”

He was right.

But there was, it turned out, a crucial difference between destroying things and destroying people.

People screamed.

Or at least they tried. Bethany certainly would have, if Marcella hadn’t already grabbed her by the throat, hadn’t eroded through her vocal cords before anything more than a short, futile gasp could escape.

And even then, the men in the other room might have heard, if they hadn’t been laughing so loudly.

It didn’t take long.

One second Bethany’s mouth was open in a perfect O of surprise and the next her plump skin had shriveled, her face twisting into a rictus grin that quickly pulled away to reveal the skull beneath, and then even that turned to ash, as all that was left of Bethany crumbled to the kitchen floor.

It was over so fast—there was hardly any time for Marcella to savor what she’d done, and no time to think about all the things she should be feeling, given the circumstances, or even to wonder at their peculiar absence.