Am I hallucinating?
She’s in there with the barrister, discussing a very important case. I try to convince myself of that. I try to make my brain accept it. But my heart is starting to palpitate because I heard the moan again, and it sounds familiar. Exactly like the one I heard the night before. Even gagged, and this one is clearly not gagged, I know from deep inside my bones that this is the same woman.
My body goes rigid. My vision wobbles a little. I clasp my hands behind my back and squeeze hard.
What the fuck.
I hear it again. Longer this time. Followed by a grunt that is of a male. Deep. The grunt of a man who is chasing a high and is about to blow.
My heart does this thing—this terrible stutter—I’ve never felt before. Not in war. Not when I think about Jack Rutherford, because all of that is adrenaline and rage feeding me. This is different. This is a hook in my sternum, pulling, and I don’t know what is on the other end of it, but it is dragging me under.
I take a step toward the door. My hand is already reaching for the handle. I am going to open it. I am going to walk in there and—
And what? What am I going to do? She is my assignment. She is a woman in her own home doing whatever she wants with whoever she wants, and I have zero authority to—
Another moan. Louder.
My hand clasps over my own mouth before I can make a sound back. Sweat is trickling down my spine. I can feel it crawl past the waistband of the pants she paid for.
I reach for the handle again, and my fingers tremble. My pulse is everywhere. Throat, wrists, the backs of my eyes. I can hear my own blood rushing in my ears, and underneath it, the sounds from behind that door, and I want to break the door off its hinges. I want to put my fist through the wood and—
“Hey.”
One of the solicitors. He walked down the hallway with a coffee mug in his hand and a grin on his face. Then he winks at me.
“They’re fine in there,” he says. Low voice, conspiratorial, one man to another. “Old friends, those two.” He pats my shoulder, and my entire body is a grenade with the pin halfway out.
“You’ll get used to it,” he adds, then walks back toward the living room, and I am still standing here with my heart trying to punch its way out of my chest.
I take a step back. I press my spine against the wall.
What is this?
What is happening to me?
She is fucking the barrister. Right now. Behind this door. She is in there with a sixty-something-year-old man, and she is—
I hear her cry out. Sharp. That peak, I recognize. The sound she made when she came last night, when her body convulsed under mine, and she soaked the comforter.
She just came. Not with me.
My vision blinks from an emotion I don’t have a word for. There’s a hole in the center of my chest and it’s eating me alive.
I have been angry my entire life. Anger is home. I know anger the way I know my own hands. This isn’t anger. This is worse. This is standing outside a closed door, listening to a woman make sounds I want to belong to me, and feeling my heart crack down the middle over it. A pain with no wound. No bullet hole. Nothing I can press gauze against and fix.
She is cheating on Jack Rutherford.
That thought arrives, and I lean harder into the wall. She is Jack Rutherford’s woman, and she is sleeping with the barrister Rutherford works with. This isgood. This is exactly what I need to—
I can’t finish the thought.
Because the thought underneath it is this: she is doing with someone else what she did with me, and I want to kill this man. Not for Jack Rutherford. For me.
I press my palms flat against the wall, harder, and I breathe. In through my nose. Out through my mouth. The way you breathe when the world is falling apart, and you need to keep your hands steady enough to shoot.
Through the door, I hear her laugh. Light. The laugh of a woman who just had an orgasm and feels good about it.
I close my eyes.