Page 21 of Slay Bells Ring

If there are more out there, they won’t see the body, but they will know their predecessor failed.

I don’t go inside right away. After depositing the body, I straighten up and look to the nighttime sky. It’s dark. Clouds cover the stars. I can smell the smoke from the chimney, but that’s it. Everything else is quiet and natural, so much so that you’d think the world stopped.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. This cabin was meant to be the place where I lost myself for good. I wasn’t supposed to use my skills in any capacity. Drink and die; the only two steps of my plan.

But I’m not alone anymore. The kid I didn’t kill all those years ago is here, wanting vengeance. She’s not akid anymore, though, and if I have to guess I’d say someone wants her dead.

The same person who hired me through the Guild thirteen years ago, or someone else? Does it even matter?

No, it doesn’t. Not to me. Holly’s in there, bundled up in front of the fire, having nearly been killed. She’s an heiress to a large fortune, and probably by now the head of the company her parents vacated thirteen years ago. There must be a lot of people who’d like to see her dead.

And you know what? It shouldn’t be my fucking problem. None of this should be my problem. I shouldn’t have to deal with any of this—not with her, not with the other hitmen, not with one single thing.

All I wanted to do this Christmas season was die. Simple. It should be fucking simple.

I close my eyes for a few seconds, sigh, and then turn away from the snow-covered corpse. Trudging through the snow, I walk around the cabin to its only entrance, and I shake myself off as best I can before I step inside.

Holly didn’t lay down. She still sits up near the fire, her arms limp on her lap, the blankets on her sofa bed pulled around her. She doesn’t look at me when I enter, nor does she say a word. Still traumatized either by almost dying or from having to dig that bullet out of me.

I take off my boots and my coat. I go for the bottle I used for disinfectant, but I don’t sit near the girl. I take to the kitchen and pull out one of the wooden chairs, groaning slightly as I collapse.

This really is turning into some deep shit, isn’t it? I really just wanted to be left alone. The memory of that kill is still so vibrant in my mind, I don’t need Holly here to look at me with those green eyes and make me relive thejob when everything changed, the first night I started to wonder if I was really cut out for Guildwork.

I take a sip from the bottle, but I hardly taste it as the liquid falls down my throat.

Goddamn it. Killing myself shouldn’t be this difficult.

Minutes tick by, or maybe it’s longer. Hard to tell when neither of us move or say a single word. I don’t know where she’s at, mentally, but it’s far from here. I stare at the bottle in front of me for a long, long time, so long the details on it begin to blur.

The person who breaks the silence of the cabin is me.

“You want to hear something funny?” I don’t give her a chance to answer, instead plowing on, “I came here with a plan. There’s a reason I only brought the strong stuff. I’ve been planning it for a while. Leave everything behind, go to a cabin in the woods, drink myself into a stupor every single night, and then… and then just leave.”

Even though she’s not looking at me, I wave a hand through the air like I’m marching out as I speak. “I was gonna go out there and not look back. I’ve seen what guns do. I know what knives do. They make messes, and they can be quick. I didn’t want that. I wanted to feel it as it was happening. I wanted nature to do what it does best: wipe the slate clean and make me nothing but bones and meat.”

My chest heaves with a heavy sigh. “It’s not like I have anyone who’d miss me. No friends. No family left. It’s just me. It’s been just me for a while. I thought I could handle it.” A dark chuckle escapes me. “I thought I could handle a lot of things. Turns out, all it takes to break me is a pair of green eyes that are filled with such terror theymake me rethink every single choice I’ve ever made in my life.”

On the sofa bed, Holly finally pulls her gaze away from the fire, glancing over her shoulder at me, but she doesn’t say a word.

“It’s ironic. If you wouldn’t have shown up,” I tell her, pausing to take a swig from the bottle before me, “wanting revenge for your murdered parents, I would’ve done it for you. I would’ve marched right out that door and never came back. Told you it was funny.”

Funny, miserable, depressing; they’re all synonyms in this case.

“No,” Holly says, breaking her silence. “Mine is funnier. I came here with one goal: to kill you. And the entire time I was planning and searching for you, I knew if I ever found you, I might not survive. I knew there was a chance that you would… you’re a trained assassin and I’m just a girl who wants justice. What hope did I really have of succeeding?”

She looks at the fire again, her figure slumping. “I knew I might die, and I was okay with it. I don’t have anything left to lose. You took my family from me and I shut myself off from the world. I pushed away the friends I had. I’ve been alone the last thirteen years. Death has been on my mind constantly since the night I saw you over the barrel of that gun, so it shouldn’t scare me—but it does.”

Her voice trembles as she goes on, “It scares me so fucking much. I don’t want to die. Now that I’m finally here, now that some random other guy almost killed me, I realize I don’t want to die yet. I want to live… but the shitty thing is, even if by some miracle I make it out of this, I don’t think I know how to.” Now it’s her turn to let out a bitter chuckle. “Told you mine was funnier. Man, we’re just two severely fucked up individuals, aren’t we?”

I speak nothing but the truth when I say, “You’re fucked up ‘cause of me.”

Holly’s comeback is immediate: “And you’re fucked up because of me.”

While it is true, while she is the reason I began to doubt, the first crack in my mind, I don’t blame her. There’s the difference. I blame myself for all of it. I fucked her up by killing her parents. If I was never there, if I wouldn’t have heard something in the other room… at least I might’ve been unaware of her presence that night. I could’ve pretended.

But I saw her, and she saw me, and that night both our lives were irrevocably changed.

I’m about to tell her she should go to sleep when I hear her sniff, and it occurs to me that she might be crying. I… I don’t know what to do, what to say. I’m not a man who’s used to giving comfort—or receiving it, for that matter.

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