Page 9 of Lady and the Hitman

I didn’t answer.

Because wasn’t that the question? Could you despise a man—everything he stood for—and still believe he deserved to live?

Yes. My answer was still yes. Because killing was never the answer. That was my line, and I’d held it tight for as long as I could remember.

Even now, as the news anchor rehashed the details—single gunshot, no sign of forced entry, no known suspects—I felt the same familiar heat rising behind my ribs. Not grief. Not sympathy. Rage.

Not at the killer.

At the story.

At how it would be shaped. Sold. Sanitized.

Redmond would be turned into a martyr before lunch. Articles were probably already being drafted about his “service to moral education,” his “bravery in the face of cultural decay.” They’d skip over the harassment lawsuits, the quiet hush-money settlements, the years of institutional abuse and whitewashed bigotry.

And worst of all? Some group would use this to push more surveillance. More fear. More state power disguised as protection.

I clenched my jaw. “This’ll be weaponized before the body’s cold.”

“You gonna write about it?” Mina asked.

“I have to.”

But something about it didn’t sit right.

Something sharp and wrong hovered at the edges of the report. The language. The timing. The total absence of detail.

It didn’t feel like a break-in.

It felt like an execution.

What if there had been no forced entry because the man who’d come for Charles Redmond hadn’t needed to break in?

He’d walked through the front door.

Calm. Silent.

Precise.

And he had pulled the trigger like it was a ritual.

Like it was nothing.

It was all too upsetting to dwell on.

I turned back to my screen. The cursor blinked like it was daring me again.

Write. React. Rage.

That was my brand, wasn’t it?

I was supposed to channel this disgust into something sharp and cutting—wrap it in rhetoric, lace it with research, slap a headline on it that would earn two thousand retweets and a furious email from someone’s uncle in Texas.

But my fingers hovered uselessly over the keys.

Because I couldn’t stop thinking about how clean it all sounded. One shot. No signs of struggle. No evidence left behind.

Whoever had done it hadn’t been sloppy. Hadn’t been scared.