The Window

1 Hour Before...

I stared at the corpse on the ground as I took a large sip of the whisky. Her eyes were bloodshot and filled with terror. There was a long trail of blood coming out of her mouth and the fork which I'd stabbed her with was still protruding out from the ventral side of her body. Bile-like yellow liquid was seeping out of the wound in the same manner that milk oozed out of the breasts of a new-born baby's mother. The large bleeding depression in her chest caused due to the bullet was also too prominent to ignore. Prior to this, I had never imagined that the human body comprised this much blood.

The liquor burnt my oesophagus as it made its way down to my stomach. I felt a slight gag-reflex at the utterly harrowing sight before me. I sat down on one of the chairs and looked away, in an attempt to stop myself from regurgitating.

I watched Manik skip over the girl's body and pull out the chair right next to mine in the most nonchalant fashion possible.

"The whisky is...good." I remarked lamely, not being able to bear the silence any longer.

"Glenfiddich. Eighteen years. Of course, it's good." He said, as he picked up a tissue from the table and pressed it on the wound in his arm.

I took another sip and scrunched up my nose at the overpowering taste of the beverage.

"You shouldn't have come. I had the situation under control." He muttered under his breath.

The irritation I'd felt earlier began to return. Looking at the amount of whisky that was left in the bottle, I could tell clearly that my initial guess had been correct. He had been drinking.

"She was going to pull the trigger. You were sleeping like a log!" I shrieked in a rather shrill voice.

Maybe I was losing my mind...slowly...but losing it all the same...

A few seconds of silence passed before he answered. "She missed."

"What?" I asked, confused at his abrupt declaration.

"The bullet hit the pillow. I woke up a split second before and dodged it on time." He said, in a neutral voice, as if he were discussing something as mundane as politics rather than an incident which could have resulted in his death.

The itching sensation in my cheek had grown progressively stronger during our exchange and unknowingly, I'd begun to scratch the area.

"You should get cleaned up. Go wash yourself. I'll get you something else to wear." He said, standing up, giving me a decent view of his chiseled abdomen, despite the fact that most of the lights were turned off.

As soon as he turned around, the nasty scar that ran across the length of his spinal column was clearly visible. It was even more frightening up close!

What could have caused such a mark?! A stick? A whip? I shuddered to think of it.

As he took a step towards his room, one of the questions which had been plaguing me slipped out of my mouth.

"Did you murder...Eric Wang?" I stammered.

He stilled for a few seconds, and I gulped as I waited for his answer.

He took another step in the room's direction, making me think that he'd chosen to ignore my question.

However, he swerved around eventually and replied. "That man had it coming."

That wasn't a 'yes' or a 'no'. Why did he have to be so annoyingly equivocal?!

"What do you mean? He was just a businessman, right?" I asked.

"Sure! You could call him that. His pharmaceutical company was nothing but a front for Triad operations. Drugs, human trafficking and so much more. He was involved in all of it." Manik scoffed in response, as he walked away.