Best Served Cold

4

4

The apartment was caught between everything. It wasn’t lavish, but it also wasn’t poor. The counters were real stone, but they weren’t expensive. All the appliances worked, but nothing did more. The furniture wasn’t Spartan, but few adornments lay around the house. After all, Alex Godfrey didn’t have any medals from his childhood. He never got state academic achievements, he never won the soccer tournament when he was eight, and he certainly never got a commendation for bravery from the DEA from when he stopped a robbery at ten years old.

The normality of it was suffocating as I opened my door and walked through into the living room. I was about to turn on the light when I noticed that the kitchen light was lit, shining over the countertops. I hadn’t left it on. I fingered my gun underneath my sweater.

“Hey there.”

My mom stepped into the small kitchen light, her long hair sucking the luminosity right out of the air. My hand slid off my gun as I breathed a sigh of relief. I flipped on the lights for the living room, the apartment suddenly flooding with light from the ceiling fan. “Why are you here?”

“Technically, I’m here to see if the gang trusts you and hired you.” Her business clothes certainly made that part glaringly obvious. “But actually I’m here to see if you’re okay.”

“You already rehearsed that line, didn’t you?”

“Maybe,” she said. “So are you okay or not?”

“I’m fine. They took me in. There was this pretty face reader there that vetted me. Guess she’s not as good as she thinks.”

She nailed you on the hiding from yourself though, didn’t she?

I slumped onto the blue couch, another piece of average furniture in this place. I was already homesick.

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I killed my first man today,” I said. “We were rescuing a hostage from an Invis hideout. I told him not to move, but he reached for a gun. I guess he won’t be brave anymore.” Not knowing what else to do, I looked into my lap.

The kitchen light flickered for a moment.

“We have to take you off the mission.”

My head snapped up. “No.”

“You killed a man, Dale.”

Ice filled my veins as I started shaking my head. “No.” It was all I could think, too. No. No. No.

“I know this is important to you, but I have to take you out of this.”

Damn it. She made so much sense. I’m supposed to get taken out when someone dies.

But I can’t leave it now. I haven’t gotten revenge.

“What about Brianna?”

I could see pain in those blue eyes, but I also saw pity. “Brianna is already dead. Nothing you can do will change that.”

“One week,” I pleaded. “Give me one week.”

“One week,” she said.

A pause filled the air. There was one more thing I needed to know.

“Did you know that Dad worked for the Invis?”

Silence.

It was enough of an answer in itself.

Suddenly I was on my feet. “Why are you still covering for him?” I yelled. “After everything he’s done…”

My mom’s eyes closed, and she took a deep breath. Because, unlike me, she cared about controlling her emotions. “He may not have been the best person, but he doesn’t deserve to be in jail the rest of his life.”