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CHAPTER THREE

Mya

Waiting to kill someone was boring.

My head hurt. Figuring I was dehydrated, I reached for the bottle of water next to my thigh and glanced over at the gun that sat on the seat next to me. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, to just leave it sitting there, but I wanted to be ready.

I was parked just outside the prison. Waiting. Just waiting. Not much crossed my mind. No doubt. No worries about consequences. I felt surprisingly calm now. Nico would pay.

I took a long drink of water and tried to ignore the voice of my mom in my head. That single voice of sanity in my insane world.

As a social worker, I told so many people that they needed to let go of their rage and anger. That it served only the purpose of hurting them, but I hadn’t even let go. Anger and rage were now part of my soul. But I still heard her voice.

Excuses are for the useless.

“Dammit, Mom,” my voice cracked. “I’m trying my best.”

I chugged the water, tossed the bottle in the back seat, and sighed. I needed to drive away. The rage would subside. I needed to go home.

“What am I doing here?”

I had to let go. I had to let Jason go. Unfortunately, I didn’t know who I was without him.

Feeling resigned, I told myself, I guess I will have to find out . I pulled away from the curb to go home, but that’s when I saw Nico exiting the prison, flanked by a couple of guards.

The guards stepped out of the way and let him out through the giant gate covered with barbed wire. Nico was smiling widely, looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

He seemed to be joking with the prison guard, who laughed at something he said.

The bile rose in my throat again. How dare he smile? How dare he act as if he hadn’t taken the life of an innocent man?

Three times he shot my husband and then left him there to die. I had gone to the trial and walked out when he made eye contact with me. A hint of a smile had been on his lips.

Pure evil, that’s what he was. He deserved to die.

I wanted to rip the smile off his face. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t deserve to breathe, let alone smile.

Jason would never smile again. Jason would never laugh again. He was dead. Nico deserved to be dead too. I would see to it.

I picked up the gun as I drove. Could I take the shot from here?

I only had one chance, but I was a pretty good shot. The woman who ran the group home had a boyfriend for a few months who would make us line up empty beer cans in the backyard for him to shoot.

Sometimes he would be so drunk that he wouldn’t wait until we cleared the target before he started firing. I would never forget the cackle of his laugh when we dove for cover.

He was a sicko, but he had taught me and the others how to shoot before he ended up in jail. Again.

I knew I had to get closer to my target. I wasn’t some kind of trained sniper.

Not to mention, I wasn’t a coward. I wanted him to see my face before I took his life.

I took the gun in my hand, well aware that it was probably the last thing I would feel before one of the prison guards shot me. Cold metal. It was okay, though.

I knew this was a one-way trip. With the gun in my hand, I pulled up slowly.

Suddenly, a car swooped in front of me, out of nowhere, cutting me off. I slammed on my brakes, the gun falling out of my hand.

“Fuck!”

I was lucky that it hadn’t gone off. I reached for the gun and looked up. Nico was gone. There was only one place he could have gone. The car in front of me.

I had no other choice. I followed it.

The day was getting late, and I needed gas. I had already followed the car for an hour outside of the city to a part of New York that I wasn’t familiar with. There were giant houses and carefully manicured lawns as far as the eye could see. It was clearly a wealthy community.

It was the polar opposite of the neighborhood I had visited earlier that day to get the gun from Ricky. I didn’t get distracted by the giant stately homes around me. The whole area reeked of old money.

At any other time, I would have felt out of place. I’d always been insecure about growing up poor. However, today I didn’t care. My only focus was catching Nico as soon as he stepped out of the car.

Patience. That’s what I kept telling myself. I just needed to be patient.

The car never stopped for gas or even seemed to slow down. A few times I thought I was going to lose it. I even wondered if the driver had noticed me. Nervously, I twisted a lock of my hair.

Had they spotted me? It wasn’t as if I went around stalking random dudes on a daily basis. I was new at this.

For the hundredth time, I asked myself what I was doing. I didn’t know. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. It was probably just classic disassociation, I told myself.

I felt that Nico had to die, but there was something awfully depressing about my life coming to this end. Why was life so determined to punish me? First my mother and then my husband?

There had to be a little justice in the world. Others lived happy lives, right? Why couldn’t I?

Why couldn’t Jason have lived? I felt crushing loneliness as I followed behind the car.

My life’s circumstances had broken me. I wanted to scream in rage at the world. I spent the years after Jason died hiding from everyone because being a part of it without Jason just hurt so much.

What tenuous friendships I had all pretty much disappeared. I’d taken up running because I needed to get out of the house to feel something again.

I would never forget the first run I went on, how my chest burned just walking briskly down the block. But soon enough, I welcomed the pain of running a mile, then two, then ten, and then I adjusted and got used to it.

I used working out as a means to literally run away from my rage. Clearly, it hadn’t worked, or I wouldn’t be where I was now—following a stranger, determined to kill him.

Besides running, albeit slowly, I didn’t pursue any other interests. The majority of my time at home was spent thinking about how unfair the world was, thinking about how I was robbed of everything meaningful in my life.

The life I wanted, the happiness I had known, had been stolen from me by one man. Nico .

We stopped at a light, and I pulled out the gun, liking the heaviness of the cold metal in my hand. Soon enough, the car would pull over. Nico had to get out sometime and when he did, I would be ready for him.

I ignored the check engine light on my dashboard and prayed that I wouldn’t have to drive much longer. I didn’t dare glance at the gas gauge.

I didn’t need it to tell me what I already knew. I needed gas soon, or I would be pushing the car trying to get to Nico.

I had been driving around since morning. It was an old car, prone to minor acts of rebellion. It’d seen better days.

Jason had joked that the car would outlive him. We had laughed at the thought. There was nothing funny about that joke now.

Following Nico’s car deeper in the hills, I let out a soft whistle as I took in my surroundings. “Fancy,” I said aloud to the silent interior of my car.

The properties in this area were even more spread out, and mansions locked behind ornate gates came into view. Majestic trees lined each side of the road, shading my car and the one in front of me. It was a beautiful sight.

Of course, someone like Nico lived out here, I thought to myself bitterly. Life wasn’t fair.

The car that carried Nico finally slowed down. My heart began to race. It was time.

The car in front of me took the first right, and I was about to do the same when I heard tires squeal behind me.

The next thing I knew, someone rear-ended me hard. I held my breath and closed my eyes as my car careened off the road.