Page 29 of Rent an Enforcer

The thought of the clock makes me look to the digital clock on the nightstand. I’ve been up for two hours.

The pain in my jaw has settled into a dull ache. I feel it when I clench my teeth, which I try not to do but can’t help. My knuckles have fresh bruises and swelling. There’s a scratch across my forearm from the dumpster—I didn’t notice it until I showered last night and the water hit it.

None of that is what’s keeping me up.

She shot a man for me. This girl who won’t step outside unless she knows exactly how hard the wind is blowing. She picked a gun up off the ground and put a bullet in a man’s thigh because someone had his hands on me. She then climbed into my lap behind a pharmacy and kissed me like she wanted something. She did a lot more than that.

I can’t stop replaying it. Not the fight. I’ve been in enough fights that they blur together: fists and elbows and the sound of a body hitting a surface. What keeps running through my mind is the look on her face when she pulled the trigger. Shock. Fear.

Then, underneath it, something bright and fierce I had never seen before. It was something that looked a lot like the part of her that’s been locked behind all those phobias finally kicking the door down.

I did that to her. I put her in a situation where she had to pick up a gun.

Yet instead of destroying her, it woke something up. That should feel good.

It doesn’t. It feels more like I cracked open something that was supposed to stay closed. Now there’s no putting things back together.

It’s hard to remember a time when I didn’t understand her fear. When she told me about the straws and the wind and all of it, part of me—the part that’s been hit and shot at and worse—couldn’t make sense of it. How can someone be afraid of everything and still function? How do you get through a day when the world is made of triggers?

I understand it now, because I’m lying next to her with my jaw aching and knuckles raw, and I am afraid.

Not of Castellano. Not of what comes next in that mess, which I’m sure will be considerable. I’m afraid of her. Of what she’s become to me. Of the fact that she is now a name that men will say to other men in rooms I’ll never be in, and those men will calculate her value not as a person but as a pressure point. A way to get to me, and through me to Dorian.

I’m afraid of being the reason something happens to her.

The thought sits in my chest, heavy and cold. I’ve spent my entire career making sure the people Dorian loves stay safe, and I’ve done it well. But those people live behind gates and guards. An entire system I built and maintain from day to day. Stella isn’t a part of that system. She’s a girl who walks around with paint on her at all times. She talks to her rabbit. She doesn’t know that the world I brought her into has teeth.

She showed up and the noise in her head went quiet. That’s what she told me. What happens when the noise in my head won’t stop?

I know what I have to do. I’ve known since four a.m. I’ve been lying here for two hours waiting for the courage to do it, which is ironic, because courage is never something I lack. Yet here I am, afraid to wake up this small woman with paint dried under her fingernails.

But I have to. The sooner, the better. I want to soak in these last moments before setting her free. I want to commit her to memory. Never, if I live to be a hundred, will I ever know anyone like her. The sort of person who is terrified but pushes through anyway. That’s the sort of courage I didn’t know existed until now, and I have no choice but to push it away.

“Stella.” At first, she doesn’t move. I have to nudge her shoulder. “Stella.”

This time she stirs and makes a small sound before pulling the blanket over her head. “No, thank you,” she mumbles.

“I have to talk to you.”

“Is the house on fire?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then we can talk at a human hour.” Her voice is muffled by sleep and the blanket when she asks, “What time is it?”

“Six-fifteen.”

“Come back at nine.”

“It can’t wait.”

Something in my voice gets through the blanket, then through her skull. She pulls the blanket down, squinting at me in the thin light. There’s a crease on her cheek from the pillowcase, and her hair conceals the other half of her face when she turns her head to look at me. Whatever she sees changes her sleepy squint into something sharper. Something alert.

“What’s wrong?” She sits up, pushing her hair back from her face with one hand while holding the blanket to her chest with the other. “Is it the Castellano thing? Did something⁠—”

“Nothing happened.” I sit up too. My hands are on my knees, and I’m gripping them because if I don’t grip something, I’m going to reach for her. I can’t reach for her while I’m saying this. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. You need to find your own place.”

All right. I could’ve been gentler, but I’m doing all of this on the fly. Still, I hear the way it sounds, and I wince and wish it had come out better.