Page 69 of Eyes in the Shadows

There’s nothing remotely sexual in his tone, nothing but a factual assessment. Still, I feel my face heat at the frankness of his speech. It didn’t even occur to me I was being critical; people usually respond well to self-deprecation and witty observations. I was really just trying to win him over with humor, since he hasn’t seemed like my biggest fan. It’s my knee-jerk reaction.

“I’m glad you like them.”

“I will take the other,” he says, holding out his hand expectantly and looking at the second box sitting on the counter.

A thrill of pride spikes through me, and I rush to hand it to him. “There’s a bunch in the freezer, too. If you want more, just let me know and I’ll prepare them!”

He nods as he puts the containers into his bag. He adds a few bottles of water and, after a sidelong look my way, takes one of the other prepared meals. “Thank you,” he says curtly, and leaves.

I’m going to ride the high of that win for the rest of the night.

It’s a couple of hours until Mac walks back through the front door. I’ve been learning his routine over the past few days. Dimitri leaves at 6, Mac gets back at 8 and he always comes to greet me first. Then he changes into sweats, works out, showers, we eat dinner, then we go have completely mind-blowing sex for, like, two hours. My response to that front door is basically Pavlovian, now. The door clicks closed at 8 PM and I get wet.

But realistically, this is the last night of that. It’s Saturday. I know whatever is going to happen is supposed to go down tomorrow night. After it’s over, I’ll be able to go home.

My heart sinks.

Wes takes his stew into his office, like usual, so it’s just me and Mac at the table. I’m quiet and Mac notices, but I don’t really work up the courage to say anything about it until he’s going back for seconds and I’m picking at the last couple of carrots and potatoes in my bowl. “Can I… Is it okay for me to ask you stuff about your work?” I say uncertainly.

“’Course you can ask. I’ll tell you whatever I can.”

“You’re going somewhere further away, and you were doing surveillance alone before and now Dimitri’s helping… I assume something changed. Is it just that whatever’s going to happen is so soon?”

He sits back, looking thoughtful. “You know, for someone who really doesn’t have any details, you’ve picked up a lot just by observing.”

“It’s not hard to notice comings and goings—I’m here all the time,” I say. I try not to smile because, though it feels like praise, it’s fundamentally about that thing we’ve been ignoring. The looming, abrupt conclusion to this honeymoon phase. “You don’t have to tell me anything, if you don’t want to or you can’t—”

“No, it’s not that. You just haven’t asked. But, if you want to know, I’ll tell you. Simple as that. I’m just trying to figure out how far back to go to give you the context you need.”

I smile a little at the implicit trust. For my part, I was pretty intentionally staying out of it. Asking feels like opening a door that can’t be closed—I’ll know about the lives about to end, the danger Mac is about to face, the consequences of it going wrong. It’s a lot of pressure for me, and I’m not even really involved.

“I want to know,” I decide.

He nods. “The three of us have been working together for a few years now. There’s someone we report to, we call him the General. He’s sort of our behind-the-scenes guy, he sends us the info on the job and takes a cut when we get the payout. We don’t take every job—I mentioned before that we like to do our own research and make sure these guys are as bad as they seem.”

“Do you ever get jobs that are kids or women?”

He cuts me a look. “Sometimes.”

“Do you take them?”

“The ‘kid’ was 17, but he was into some real heavy shit—wanted by the Italians for stealing from the Don and fucking his wife. We tried scaring him straight, told him to disappear. He didn’t, and someone else took the hit. No kids since.”

“And women?”

He sits back and laces his fingers over his lower abdomen. “Yes, I’ve killed women. One who helped her husband sell other women in human trafficking rings. A group of women stealing infants from poorer countries and selling them in the US. The head of the board of a pharmaceutical company who was responsible for covering up dumping practices that poisoned the drinking water in an entire city—it killed 43 people.”

I cover my mouth in horror. There are so many fucking terrible people in the world.

“Women are capable of atrocities. It’s not as… frequent or obvious as it sometimes is with men, but I don’t have some strict moral code that says no women at all, if that’s what you were hoping to hear.”

I chew on my lip. It isn’t what I wanted to hear, but it’s also self-consistent enough with the moral code he’d mentioned before that it makes sense at least. “If I can live with the other killing, I suppose I can live with that,” I say. “So, this General gets you the jobs, you decide if you’re going to do it. Then what?”

“Then we take them out. In this case, Rossi has men under him that would just assume control of the operation if he disappears, so we need to make sure we take care of them, too. And since there’s a shipment of weapons already here in the country, we want to try to avoid those falling into the wrong hands.”

I nod, looking down at my stew. I roll a carrot from one side to the other. “What would have happened if I hadn’t interrupted you that night?”

“I never would have… um…” the uncharacteristic way he flounders for words makes me cock my head in surprise, but he recovers a second later, “I wouldn’t have fumbled the shot. Rossi was on his way to the warehouse, but he was warned—the guy I missed had time to call or text him that they were under attack. If it had all gone to plan, we would have gotten Rossi, his inner circle and the weapons shipment at once.”

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