Page 14 of The Hitman's Prince

He had soft blond waves and I had red curls.

He was pale like porcelain and my skin was always pinked like I’d been out in the sun too long.

He was athletic, while I was a little too short and small for my own good.

At least that’s what my older brother’s friends always told me.

Too desperate, too clingy, too needy.

I was a thorn in everybody’s side. I made everything worse, ruined lives, messed up plans…

I still went to him on the sidewalk, the pool of blood quickly spreading out beneath him and I thought about stealing a kiss. If he survived, he probably wouldn’t remember and if he died, no one would ever know. Sinking down to my knees beside him, I found him breathing but unconscious. His phone screen was cracked, a call disconnecting in real time before I had a chance to read it.

Reaching behind me, I yanked my shirt off and balled it up, pressing down hard on the wound in his chest to stop the flow of blood. The contact had his eyes flickering open, but if he saw me, I wasn’t sure. He coughed, rolling onto his side and inadvertently pressing his face into my thighs. In any other situation, that would have been awkward, but he was dying so I tried to not overthink it.

“Help!” I cried out, looking around frantically and not finding another living soul. “Help!”

I shouted myself hoarse, realizing what I’d worried about all along was true. I wasn’t cut out for this and it wouldn’t be enough. Vince’s eyes fluttered open again as he lay sprawled and bleeding out half on my lap and half on the sidewalk, and I was going to be sick.

He muttered the name of a constellation, and I followed his gaze up to the stars. The tall and heavy church doors creaked open and I looked that way, Vince’s blank stare still squinting up at the sky.

“Orion.” Over and over again until his body shuddered and his eyes fell closed again.

“Hello!” I yelled toward the darkness of the open church, desperation taking hold in my veins. “Please help. He’s been shot.”

A figure ran down the stairs, coming into view as a man who looked far too handsome and young to be a priest, but who else would be locked up in a church in the middle of the night if not a man of God?

“What happened?” he asked, covering my bloody hands with his own and pressing down harder on Vince’s chest.

“He’s been shot,” I said again.

It wasn’t quite a lie, but I didn’t know what else to say.

The priest wore a signet ring on his pinky, gold with a five-petaled rose in the center of it. Beyond that, his clothes were nondescript, black slacks and a black button-up, a loose white collar hanging undone at his throat. It was late to be so dressed, but I imagined it was also late to be getting shot.

“What’s his name?” the priest asked.

“Vince,” I whispered, my t-shirt so wet with blood it wrung through my fingers like a sponge. “Vince Angelini.”

The priest looked at me, more aware than he’d been at first. “Angelini?”

I nodded.

“Have you called 911?”

Before he could answer, sirens echoed in the distance, and I worried what their arrival would mean. Someone wanted Vince dead and if he survived, he was far from safe. Another hitman would come in place of me, and one after him and another after that until finally someone would be successful. Vince Angelini would be dead, his soul nothing more than energy floating up with the constellation he’d been so desperate to find before losing consciousness in my lap.

“Did you see what happened?” the priest asked.

I blinked at him, dumbfounded, unable to speak.

An ambulance squealed to a stop, a fire truck right behind. A herd of men dressed in starched blue uniforms pushed us out of the way, and the priest was so much more well-spoken than I was. He told the paramedics Vince’s name, he held my bloody t-shirt in his hands, and as they loaded Vince onto a gurney and wheeled him away, nobody even acknowledged me.

The night was cold and dark, the colored reflections of the church’s stained glass windows lost to the glaring red and blue of the ambulance lights. I was half naked on the street, my hands and legs covered in Vince’s blood, and I found myself suddenly desperate to be anywhere else. I thought this was what I wanted, but I’d never been more wrong about anything in my life.

Wrapping my arms around myself in the saddest excuse for a hug I’d ever known, I took one step backward toward the shadows, and then another, and another. From the rear of the ambulance, the priest looked up, his eyes searching the darkness for me as I took one last step into the shadows. If he saw me, he didn’t say, but his fingers curled around Vince’s lifeless hand as they loaded the gurney into the ambulance were the last thing I saw before turning and running off into the darkness.

Chapter 11