Jett

35

*Unedited* If I'm being entirely honest I might change this a bit when I finish my exams. We'll see. 

Kayden stared at Jett for what felt like centuries after the words had left her lips. His ears had registered them but his brain wasn't entirely able to make sense of the statementm.

Under his gaze her face had gone deceptively blank. She refused to look right at him, instead eyes focused just over his shoulder.

He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her and tell her to 'look at me, dammit.' He wanted to see something on her face that told him that she felt something towards what she had said. He needed a real fucking explanation not some line in German while she pretended that she was incapable of feeling shit when they both knew full well that she could.

He took in a deep breath. "When you say killed," Kayden broke the silence, forcing himself to sound as calm as possible. "Do you mean for... a job?" He couldn't imagine why someone would want to target a child. The worst thing he could remember Marlow doing was breaking a vase at his house and framing him for it. Besides, the police had ruled it a robbery gone wrong. No one had even entertained the possibility of a murder.

Which, when he actually thought about it objectively, was fucking ridiculous. You have a dead girl and no missing items and it's suddenly a robbery gone wrong?

'Either whoever Jett works for has the police in their pockets or the standard for law enforcement has dropped dramatically.'

He felt like he knew which of the two options was correct.

He wasn't sure whether to be mad at Jett, himself or the police. The appropriate response was probably all three. Though, all he could feel was this overwhelming urge to empty his stomach of the popcorn he had just ingested. He knew Jett was a killer, she never entertained the fantasy that she was anything less; he just forgot that she was capable of killing anyone. In his mind it was only old white men in drug trades. It never occurred to him that it could be children, even when she was a child herself.

"It was during a job," Jett replied evasively, he'd never noticed the slight Spanish lilt in her voice. Though there, when she wasn't trying to be just an average American school girl, wasn't trying to hide under layers of covers, he could hear it. He didn't know why but that itself felt like a small victory.

Kayden frowned before asking "do you normally kill children?"

She flinched at that and some twisted part of him was glad. Glad that she was able to feel guilty for what she had done. She had been so largely apathetic during their time together that, had he not seen her crying the other night, he would of thought of her as incapable of remorse. "I'm not a child killer."

"Then why is Marlow dead?" Heis deadpanned as he continued to look right at her. Waiting for her to properly meet his gaze. He wanted to feel angry, outraged on Marlow's behalf but all he could feel was hollow.

Jett bit the inside of her cheek before sighing and making her way over to her car instead of answering his question. He watched as her gaze swept over pieces of paper covering almost every inch of the front of the car. They stopped just past the driver and passenger side doors— apparently the culprits decided that only half arsing the job would be enough to get the desired impact.

He took a second to properly survey the damage, his attention finding the picture of him, Mark and Marlow as baby faced five year olds about the same time Jett's did. He watched as she reached out and pulled the paper off. She held it in her steady hands and stared at it for a few seconds before crumbling it and tossing it away. She reached out to tug more pieces of paper methodically off of the windshield.