Win a man with money, and he will stab you in the back the moment another offers him more.
Loyalty is in the blood, not in the wallet.
A man who fights for money fights for himself alone.
Stanislav had a dozen more sayings like that. He had drilled each of them into me over the years from the time I was old enough to listen.
The lessons had stuck.
Apparently, Budimir wasn’t paying attention.
All the better. You have a few lessons still to learn before you die, motherfucker.
I can only hope that he’s made just enough mistakes to undo him. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Truth is, I’m living on a sliver of hope and the dirty fuel of revenge.
But that’ll be enough.
It has to be.
* * *
I don’t know when I fell asleep. I dreamed all night of strangling Budimir until he spluttered and choked and turned blue under my fingers.
But the sun wakes me up.
A little rudely, to be honest.
Yesterday’s clouds are gone and the dawn this morning is bright as fuck. I open my eyes and wince against it.
And then I realize there’s someone else on the roof with me.
Adrenaline surges through me at once. I leap to my feet, halfway to drawing a knife from my boot to gut the motherfucker…
When I see who it actually is.
I sigh and sheathe the knife again.
“Good morning, Sinead.”
She sinks gracefully to a seat on the ground across from me. Removes her dark sunglasses and stows them in her purse.
She’s wearing black checkered pants and a snow-white coat. Elegant and poised, just as she was yesterday.
She looks around at the rooftop and sighs.
“I don’t think I’ve been here in over a decade,” she admits. “Certainly not up here.”
“Has it changed?” I ask.
“Not even a little bit.”
“It’s… not quite what I expected,” I say with a harsh laugh. “Cillian made it seem like heaven on earth.”
She smiles sadly. “I never did understand why the boy loved this place so much.”
“I think it was more about the experience than the place.”
“Perhaps,” she says with a shrug.