Chainsmoking Your Love

Can't be good for my lungs-

**CW** there are a lot of threats in this chapter. Kylo does threaten the family of the client. This includes violent intent toward his wife and children. We here do not, repeat, DO NOT, condone violence in any kind of way outside the parameters of fiction- take care, stay safe luvvies.

The drag of the electric gates shudder to a creaking open. A sleek black Mercedes' begins its smooth crawl along the very neat grey brick drive.

Up the shallow slant of a hill sits this impressive house. Rich. Colonial. Lit up in the night with honey coloured up lighters splashing up the walls and up in the garden. Gold swims through the green of the trees. Shadows burst all over this house.

An impeccable all American dream home, that looks like it could belong on a postcard. Clean white. Bleached white exterior. Dark shutters lining every window. A precision clipped garden of low hedges and tamed shrubbery. All squared away. Blunted. Well kept. An immaculately shorn emerald lawn that's so big. It's too big.

Night rolled in slow as treacle in this quaint neighbourhood, and even the majesty of the stars are kept penned back behind clouds that roiled rain over the distant city.

Here it's out of touch. The city. The noise all that New York dirt and spewing heat and filth. It's crudeness and mess all been scrubbed away with every tidy mile of distance. It's clearer up here. The air feels cleaner.

The streets began to widen out. The houses grew fatter and richer. Bloated with wealth. The whole atmosphere tinged with Ivy League expectations and white collar snobbery. People who don't ever dare get their hands dirty for a living.

It's too quiet. Only the crickets thrumming. The yappy bark of the neighbours pedigree pekingese down the street. The wind stirs the trees. Flutters and picks at the blue-red blood of the American flag hanging above the porch.

The blacked out car stops in the great U shaped courtyard of the house. The back door opens the man inside exits, without so much as a cursory glance, or a word towards the driver.

The dull thud of the closing car door is soft. Brioni footsteps muffled on the grey penant block. The sedate trickle of the tiny fountain patters in the middle of the paved drive.

It doesn't register. The eerie quiet. The house is all dark and burdened with an awful slaughtered silence.

He doesn't notice that there aren't the usual suits patrolling the shadowy gardens. Earpieces in. Security cameras are still connected. But the feed was cut. Looking back over it will show nothing. It will cut to the fuzzy cracking swallow of black and white static.

This man ignores the dangerous serenity of his surroundings. Walks into his house, unlocks the door. Eyes lost in the white-blue glare of his phone screen in his palm.

Head dizzy off too many martinis at the Regis. That terrific snap as he drank down cold cocktail after cocktail. Glass after glass. Late evening talking business and smoking silky Cuban cigars. The taste is all cloyed smooth on his tongue. Vanilla, and spicy bitter cedar.

Inside is all dark. No lights left on anywhere. Not even upstairs. Shadows slant and slice around every nook and cranny of this big expensive echoing house. Noise of the front door slaps around the polished oak floors and bounced into the clean linear lines of the expensive kitchen.

He locks the door after himself. Making a path to his study for a scotch nightcap.

He doesn't notice as he walks past the ludicrously expensive couch - the one his wife had the interior designer import from Italy - that had he taken the few precious seconds to peer behind it. He would've comprehended the full gravity of his situation.