Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

cargo shorts. He took a seat by the hearth and smiled in such a way that she knew she was expected to take the seat across from him.
    She did.
    Directly behind him was an eight-foot-tall mirror in a marble frame that matched the marble of the hearth. She was reflected in it, along with the back of his head and the back of his chair. Her lower eyelids needed work. They were growing darker lately, deeper.
    “What do you do for a living, Nicole?”
    “I’m a homemaker.”
    “So you make things?”
    “No.” She chuckled.
    “Why’s that funny?”
    Her smile died in the mirror. “It’s not.”
    “Then why’re you chuckling?”
    “I didn’t realize I was.”
    “You say you’re a homemaker; it’s a fair question to ask what you make.”
    “I make this house,” she said softly, “a home.”
    “Ah, I get it,” he said. He looked around the room for a moment and his face darkened. “No, I don’t. That’s one of those things that sounds good — I make the house a home — but is really bullshit. I mean, this doesn’t feel like a home, it feels like a fucking monument to, I don’t know, hoarding a bunch of useless shit. I saw your bedroom — well, one of them, one with the bed the size of Air Force One; that yours?”
    She nodded. “That’s the master, yeah.”
    “That’s the master’s? Okay.”
    “No, I said —”
    “Anyway, I’m up there thinking you could hold NFL combines in that room. It’s fucking huge. It ain’t intimate, that’s for sure. And homes, to me, always feel intimate. Houses, on the other hand — they can feel like anything.”
    He pulled a handful of coins out of his pocket for some reason, shook them in his palm.
    She glanced at the clock. “Lana’s expecting me.”
    He nodded. “So you don’t have a job.”
    “No.”
    “And you don’t produce anything.”
    “No.”
    “You consume.”
    “Huh?”
    “You consume,” he repeated. “Air, food, energy” — he looked up at the ceiling and over at the walls —“space.”
    She followed his gaze and when she looked back at him, the gun was out on his lap. It was black and smaller than she would have imagined and it had a very long suppressor attached to the muzzle, the kind hit men always used in movies like
Grosse Pointe Blank
or
The Professional,
the kind that went
pffft
when fired.
    “I’m meeting Lana,” she said again.
    “I know.” He shook the change in his hand once more and she looked closer, realized they weren’t coins at all. Some kind of small metal things that reminded her of snowflakes.
    “Lana knows who you are.”
    “She thinks she does, but she actually knew of another guy, the real Kineavy. See, they never met. Her father met him, but her father died — what — three years ago, after the stroke.”
    Her therapist had taught her breathing exercises for tense situations. She tried one now. She took long slow breaths and tried to visualize their colors, but the only color that came up was red.
    He plucked one of the metal snowflakes from his palm and held it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “So, Kineavy, I knew him well. He died too. About two years ago. Natural causes. And faux Kineavy — that’s me — sees no point in meeting most clients a second time, which suits them fine. What do you do, Mrs. Walford? What do you do?”
    She could feel her lower lip start to bubble and she sucked it into her mouth for a moment. “I do nothing.”
    “You do nothing,” he agreed. “So why should I let you live?” “Because —”
    He flicked his wrist and the metal snowflake entered her throat. She could see it in the mirror. About a third of it — three metal points out of eight — stuck out of her flesh. The other five points were on the other side, in her throat. A floss-thin line of blood trickled out of the new seam in her body, but otherwise, she didn’t look like someone who was dying. She looked okay.
    He stood over her. “You knew what your husband was doing, right?”
    “Yes.” The word sounded funny, like a whistle, like a baby noise.
    “But you didn’t stop him.”
    I tried. That’s why I hired you.
    “You didn’t stop him.”
    “No.”
    “You spent the money.”
    “Yes.”
    “You feel bad about it?”
    And she had, she’d felt so terribly bad about it. Tears spilled from her eyes and dripped from the edges of her jaw. “Yes.”
    “You felt bad? You felt sad?”
    “Yes.”
    He nodded. “Who gives a shit?”
    And she watched in the mirror