Page 57 of Assassin Anonymous

I snap my foot into his stomach, but he grabs it and wrenches it to the side. I go tumbling and hit my head on the sink. Get up and press my head and feel blood. Exactly what I didn’t want. I get to my knees and throw a hard fist into his stomach, which doubles him over, and I grab him around the neck and yank, hard. His spinal column cracks and his body slumps to the floor. I flip him over and snap a picture with my phone, then send it along with my crypto account to the number from before.

I realize I have to pee but I feel like I’ve been in here too long, and sooner or later someone is going to disregard that traffic cone. My head is swimming and I check it in the mirror; there’s a nice gash on my forehead, oozing blood. I grab a bunch of paper towels and press them to the wound, then crack the door open to make sure the coast is clear.

When I get back to the table, Sara is still on her phone. She looks up at me, confused for a second, and then her eyes go wide. “Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Slipped on some ice.”

She motions me to sit and puts her hand on mine, taking the wad of paper towels, and winces at the sight of it. “We should get this looked at.”

“Nah, it’s not deep. It’ll stop bleeding in a few.”

“It’s deep enough.”

“What about the ice-skating?”

“We can ice-skate another day.”

“Yeah,” I tell her. “But you promised to tell me the trick.”

She smiles that knowing smile again and sits back. “Let’s just go up to my office, okay? It’s right here. There’s a kitchen and a first-aid kit.”

“Sure.”

We stand and she locks arms with mine. We’re walking back the way we came, when a scream slices through the tranquility of the evening. It’s the woman who was sitting with Amato.

“Someone, please, help! My dad!”

Oh.

Sara looks over—the woman is running back from the bathroom. “Maybe we should help,” she says.

But there’s already a handful of people rushing over. “I…I’m feeling dizzy,” I tell her.

“Okay,” Sara says, and we head back to the office, but the energy of the evening has shifted. What felt playful is suddenly fragile, like glass gone brittle in the cold.

Usually I walk away from a job a little high. That god-energy shot through me. I did the thing I was good at. I lived, the other person didn’t. I would be rewarded. But I thought the woman was a girlfriend or a mistress. I don’t know why that made it okay, but it did. Something about it being his daughter, and then Sara witnessing his daughter’s grief, and now we’re just walking someplace for her to clean me up and she doesn’t know that I’m the one who caused that pain, makes me feel ashamed of what I did.

I’ve never once felt like that.

“Hey,” she says, “are you okay?”

We’re in the elevator, gliding up to her office. I don’t remember walking through the lobby. What is happening?

“Yeah,” I tell her.

We make it to her office and she leads me to a small kitchen and sits me down in a hard plastic chair, then disappears, returning with a white plastic first-aid kit. She opens it and lays out wipes and antibacterial ointment and butterfly strips, then goes to the sink and washes her hands.

Something about her doing this makes me feel worse.

Like I don’t deserve it.

She comes back and opens a wipe, dabbing it around the wound on my head, cleaning away the blood, and I ask her, “What’s the trick?”

“Hmm?” she asks.

“The trick to ice-skating?”

“Oh,” she says. “Don’t slip.”