When I made it to the side entry door and no alarm rang when I picked the lock, well, you could say I was feeling pretty confident about the mission.
Security systems only worked if the owners remembered to engage them.
And much like the guards out front, sometimes a monotonous activity could get looked over. At least for short bursts of time. I imagined Brandon Adams would eventually remember to engage the system when he was ready to go to bed.
But it gave me the perfect window to sneak in.
That’s not to say that the cameras or motion detectors still didn’t record feed. Sometimes they did, even if you didn’t have the door lock alarms on.
That was a problem for later, though.
Depending on the situation, I could get into Adams’s system myself from inside to erase the footage and deactivate the system before I headed out. If I didn’t have that kind of time, I could get Nia to hack in and do it before the cops would even get a chance to look. She was better than she even realized at times. She could do it if she had to.
It was fine.
I’d done several jobs for Quin over the years, and more for myself. Many of them were high-value targets with a lot of money and access to the best systems out there. But even the best systems could be overridden, despite what the companies who sold them claimed. Hell, if government encryption all over the world could be hacked, some random person’s private security was no big deal.
Once inside, I stopped to double-check my pockets.
I had my gun if I needed it. But a gun was a last resort on a job like this. You didn’t want to draw attention to your presence when there were highly-trained guards just minutes away.
I had my knife, but unless I could get a clean cut to the carotid, knives took too long and were messier than necessary.
I had a garrote. Which, in my humble opinion, was an underutilized method.
But for this job, I was pretty confident going with either a simple neck break if I could get behind him without being seen or heard, or the ever-classic staple of a plastic bag over the head.
Did it take longer?
Yes.
But it also made it impossible for the person you were killing to make any sort of noise. It also didn’t leave fingerprints or bruises like just choking someone out would.
As I made my way down the hallway of what was the house staff area, though there was no one there full-time, I could feel the parts of myself that I’d carefully cultivated over the years slowly starting to slip away, leaving me with the man I’d been shaped into to do the jobs the military wanted me to do. That monster in men’s clothing never fully came out, not anymore. I’d worked too hard to rein him in, chain him down. But when on jobs for Quin, or on my own little personal missions, parts of that person I used to be reemerged.
It was healthy, I’d convinced myself, to allow that every now and again.
If you didn’t have an outlet, that was how the trauma started to eat away at you.
Like Finn with the obsessive cleaning.
Like Ranger hiding in the woods away from society.
Like Holden who’d done something similar because his PTSD nightmares were so uncontrollable that he could very well end up killing an innocent when he got too deep into his own head while unconscious. Word was that the girl he’d trained for years in the woods to become the best fighter and killer possible used to have to lock herself in at night to stay safe from him when he was in a bad spell.
I didn’t want that life.
I’d had the darkness consume me for enough time. Letting little bits of it leech out kept it out of my system for weeks or months at a time, allowing me to chase after the lighter things instead.
So, in a way, I was thankful for the job, even if I’d made Quin practically beg me to become part of the team.
It was good for me.
And it was good for the world.
Because men like Brandon Adams didn’t belong in it.
That was where my mind was as I carefully made my way through the kitchen, then in toward the empty family room. A movement in the front study had me pausing, ready to slip backward to hide if Adams was coming my way.
But no.
No.
It wasn’t Adams.
It was a woman.
Moving behind Adams.
Raising her arm.
With a gun in her hand.
I felt like I was watching some sort of movie, like this situation couldn’t actually be happening. In real life, you didn’t just happen upon a murder as you were going into someone’s house to murder them. That was ridiculous.