Page 27 of Half the Summer's Night
I keep expecting Abi’s message to vanish, like it’s a mirage. A hallucination. But it stays put, the cursor in the reply box blinking steadily. I wonder if she can see that I’ve read her message, a thought that fills me with a sudden torrent of panic. I don’t want her to think I’m blowing her off.
Yes, of course.
I can’t believe I just did that. Can’t believe this is happening.
Oh, that’s great! Meet in 30 minutes?
My heart thunders as I reply back with another yes. I’d meet her there in five minutes if she asked me. I’d do anything she asked me.
I stare at the map on my computer screen, the familiar roads of Rosado crisscrossing over my monitor. An auspicious kill in so many ways, it seems. Not just that it’sK, or that it’s completing the next word. But that it’s the first kill after she came to me as Rowan, and after I went to her as myself. The first kill after she’s spoken to both sides of me, the disguise and the truth.
I don’t ask why it’s all happening now. Maybe I should. I know Uncle Nash would tell me to be suspicious, but that’s because he beat into me since I was a boy that the only person I could trust was him.
And that’s just because he wanted to use my violence for his own purposes.
I clear out the map, erase my browser history, take a deep breath. Remind myself that, despite what happened last night, she’s meeting Rowan Hanover. I have to keep my disguise in place, even if it tears at something in my chest, knowing she would never have asked the real me out to coffee at Seaside Brews.
It doesn’t matter. The real me will still be there, lurking inside this shell.
10
ROWAN
The coffee shop has the same nervous energy as the hotel. Everyone seems normal on the surface, but I can feel their fear drifting around, taut as a wire. That murder really has everyone worked up, and I wonder, for the first time, what my rival did that was so terror-inducing.
I specifically craft my kills so they don’t like kills, and I take pride in that—in protecting myself, in being clever. But I suppose, wading through the fear in the coffee shop to a small table near the back, that I can see why someone might want to generate all this terrified energy. Why they might want to bask in it.
It certainly helps distract from my own anxiety over being on a date with Abi.
I get there early because I don’t want to make Abi wait. I order a plain iced coffee and sip on it, watching the door while I count down until our meeting time. I also listen, because half the people in the coffee shop are talking about the murder.
“Can’t believe something like that would happen here,” says one woman to her friend, both of them older and clearly wealthy, the kind of people who live elsewhere but own a house on the beach for whenever they want to get away. “Can youimagine?”
“I heard it was a gang initiation,” her friend says. “With Rosado being so close to the border and all.”
I roll my eyes. I had more than my share of encounters with the gangs that run drugs through south Texas. Their kills are strategic, just like the assignments Uncle Nash gave me.
“Do they know who it was?” This question isn’t from the two wealthy ladies, but from a surfer-type hanging around the bar, bothering the barista in his board shorts and flip flops. “ID’d the vic?”
“Not that I know,” she says, sliding glasses down the bar. “I heard it was a tourist. An out-of-towner.”
“Oh, yeah? Who told you that?”
She says a name, but I don’t hear it, because everything in that coffee shop becomes overpowered by the sweet scent of lantana and orchids.
The bell over the door chimes, but I already know it’s Abi. She’s as pretty as she was last night, although she’s pulled her hair back, and she’s not wearing her thick-framed glasses. That just makes it easier to see her big blue eyes as she sweeps them around the space. When they land on me, my heart nearly erupts out of my chest.
I still manage to lift my hand in greeting.
And Abismiles, right at me, and it’s like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
“Hey,” she says when she comes over to my table. “You’re here.”
She says it like she thought I might not be.
“Well, yeah, of course.” I hope my voice isn’t too shaky. “Do you want me to get you something?”
Abi hesitates, just for a second. I think my question surprised her.
