Page 10 of Grit & Glamour

“You want me to call you Killer One, Two, and Three?” I give him a quizzical look.

“No, I want you to call us One, Two, and Three,” he corrects me, as if that should have been obvious.

“You want me to call you numbers?”

“Why not? You said you didn’t care if they were real names or not.” He shrugs, and I can’t help but think this isn’t how is a kidnapping is supposed to go. Just who the hell did I hire to kill my mother?

“Fine, what number do you want to be?” I mock him, smirking before adding, “You can’t all be number one.”

“Screw number one. I want to be Three,” he announces.

“Three?”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” he teases sarcastically. I roll my eyes. I guess they’ve done what I asked. Albeit in the most ridiculous way possible.

“So what do you want to know?” I ask, turning my focus back to One.

“Who knew about the hit on your end? Who did you tell, Scarlett? I know you must have slipped up somewhere.” He begins his interrogation at once, firing off questions at me.

“Nobody knew. Maybe it was someone onyour end, One,” I retort, sitting back down on the edge of the bed.

“One?” he questions.

“Yeah. You’re the first ‘One’ I saw after all,” I mutter, feeling oddly self-conscious at him questioning my choice.

“I was the third as well,” Three cuts in, his voice sounding a little amused.

“Perfect.” I wonder if it’s possible for my eyes to roll right around in my head?

“Can we please focus? The mistake is not on our end. You are the inexperienced little girl here. Now, think about it for a second, and tell me who the hell fucked us over and why?” One insists rudely.

I grit my teeth over the little girl comment, taking a few deep breaths as I consider what he’s saying. Who knew what I was doing? Nobody. Nobody knows anything except from…

“Theo,” I whisper, his name escaping from my lips before I can stop it.

“Theo? Who’s he—a boyfriend? I didn’t see any guys around your house during our surveillance,” One presses.

“Theo is a friend, sort of. Well, he’s actually, sort of…” I trail off into unintelligible grumbles.

“I’m sorry, love. I didn’t quite catch that,” One prompts me to repeat myself.

“He’s...he’s my sixth-form’s preferred drug dealer,” I finally push out. Not that he does much of the actual dealing himself these days.

My friendship with Theo is a weird and somewhat distant one. We have moments of intense connection, and then we ignore each other for months, or even years at a time. I don’t think he’s capable of real friendships, and honestly neither am I, which is probably why ours works. In whatever distant form it takes. He’s older than me by a few years, but mentally he’s even older than that after what happened with his father.

“You have a drug dealer?”

“The idiots at my sixth-form have a drug dealer,” I correct. It’s not like he needs to know about the three times I’d bought stuff from him. An angel, I’m not, but I’d rather not listen to judgement on my actions from a freaking assassin.

“How do you know him then?” he asks.

“He’s around at parties, and we went to the same secondary school. He was three years above me, I think?” I muse aloud. “Maybe it was four.”

“I don’t care how old he is, what does he know?”

“Nothing much, he just… he had to help me with the laptop I used to pay you guys. I wouldn’t have known how to even get onto that side of the internet without him. Even then it was a mess trying to find you, filtering through ads promising to kill my fish. Kill my fish? Really?” I ramble incredulously. The internet is a mystical place. You can order pretty much any drug, and it shows up in something as ridiculous as a DVD case if you know what you’re doing. There’s pages and pages of all kinds of fucked up things even someone looking to hire an assassin doesn’t want to see.

“You considered hiring the kill your fish guys?” Three asks, and a hysterical little giggle escapes me as I remember some of the other quirky lines on their page. Apparently, your fish is as good as dead, and there was something about a good place to put your problems being a grave.

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