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Hey.

It’s "Me".

AndI know who you are, Milena.

I exhale again, fixing my tie before I walk over to the painting hanging on the opposite side of my room, above the couch. It swings out on hidden hinges, and I thumb open the biometric lock to the safe behind it. I slide aside my passport, a few rolls of hundreds and a .45 magazine, then pull out the little black velvet jewelry box.

No, it’s not a fucking ring. Jesus.

Notyet, anyway.

But I know she’s going to love it.

I grin as I pop the box open, the light glinting off the diamond inside.

Perfect.

I shut the box and slip it into my jacket pocket. Then I smile as I reach back into the safe and pull out my most prized possession.

Someday, maybe, the New York Public Library is going to fine me thousands of dollars for having this out for so long, especially given that it’s a rare book.

But they’ll have to catch me first.

I sit on the couch, the velvet box safely in my pocket as I trace a finger over the worn leather cover.

I’ve always enjoyedThe Sorrows of Young Werther.

At first, it was just another stupid book assigned by a teacher with a hard-on for esoteric 18thcentury European literature. But for some reason, this book hooked me. I loved the prose, even though I realized I was reading it in English, and who knowswhat gets lost in translation, especially from fucking German. But I also know I’m probably neverlearningGerman, so, it is what it is.

I liked the way the whole book was written via letters.

But what I loved the most is that one day, it brought me to her.

For a long time, she was just that: “her”.

My correspondent. My pen pal. My fellow Goethe fan with a fiery temper, sharp wit, clever mind, and something captivating about her thoughts.

We wrote back and forth, tucking the notes between the pages of the very book I’m holding in my hands. We talked about nothing and everything. And slowly, we began to dig deeper.

Hauled out demons from our respective closets.

Nightmares and dreams. Fears and aspirations.

Cravings and desires.

And then one day, we decided to move from the page to real life. We discussed what we wanted and made a plan: we’d wear masks, and we’d explore the dark side she’d always wanted to dip her toes into.

We met. And on one mad, reckless evening, I found an equal to my darkness I never thought I would.

Then, bullets shattered everything.

When the violence started, I sent her running to keep her safe. I took a bullet in the arm, but I managed to eliminate the four motherfuckers somebody had sent to kill me. I have no idea how they managed to find me: I later ended up paying an ultra-high-end Chinese hacker to reverse engineer my phone to see if it’d been tracked. But even he couldn’t solve the mystery.

That was just the start of it.

An hour later, after I’d fought my way out of the warehouse space and linked up with a wounded Dom, I learned about my parents.

They’d been ambushed in a restaurant my father owned: a place he’d purposefully emptied for the night so he could have a romantic evening with my mother.