“Exactly fifteen minutes.”
“Okay.” She looks over at Scarface, then back at me, her eyes welling. I wait for her to beg me to spare him, to not hurt him. “Do…do I have to stay and watch?”
I can’t fight back a smile. “Only if you want to.”
She shakes her head so hard I imagine she’ll wind up with a sore neck. “N-no, please, no.”
“You fucking bitch,” Scarface growls, panting. He seems to have given up the effort to stand, at least for now. “I paid you in advance, and you’re just going to leave me? Call my security! Otherwise I’ll have you killed!”
She gulps.
I hold out a hand. “Don’t worry about him. Do what I’m telling you to do, and everything will be fine.”
Hesitantly, she slips her hand into mine, and I help her to her feet. Then I jab the button to call the elevator for her.
She steps inside. “Um. Thank you.”
“Fuck you!” Scarface yells through a sob.
The doors close. Now, it’s just us, and the man who murdered me.
I walk toward him where he still lies prone on the floor. A gun rests at Gaderel’s feet out of Scarface’s reach.
“Pulled it off him while you were speaking with his lady friend,” Gaderel says. “Otherwise, he’s clean.”
“Oh, no,” I say, shaking my head. I crouch before Scarface, resting my elbows on my knees, and look him in the eye. “No, my love, he isn’t clean at all. Are you, Barry?”
Scarface whimpers. “How do you know my name? Who the fuck are you? What the fuck did I do to you?”
I sigh. “These questions, they just get so repetitive. Who are you? What are you doing here? Why are you doing this? I mean, Jesus. I knew you guys were horrible, but to the point that you don’t remember the woman and her friends that you slaughtered two months ago? Do you kill that many people?”
He stares up at me, breathing hard. “I’m—I’m losing a lot of blood here, lady.”
“Yes, and you’re making quite the mess.”
“Look, if you wanna talk, let’s talk,” he says. “I’ll answer your questions, but I gotta have some medical attention.”
“Well, that would negate the purpose of why I came here,” I tell him, cocking my head with a patronizing smile. “What’s the point of helping you when I’m here to kill you?”
“No,” he half groans, half growls. “No! Let’s just talk, okay? I’ll give you whatever you want!”
“Your friends said the same thing too,” I say. “They’d give me whatever I wanted, that all I had to do was name a price. In fact, Shades even told me where I could find you. He said he and his brother never liked you, and I’d be doing them a favor by killing you.”
“Sh-shades?”
“Yeah, him and Bowtie,” I say. “You know, the pals you brought with you to Shakers two months ago, when you gunned down an entire club. Surely you remember that at the very least?”
He gulps. “What’d you do to them?”
“Well, let’s see. Shades lost a hand, and then I slit his throat.”
Scarface makes a soft uuugh sound.
“And then Bowtie, I threw him off his balcony.”
“You…you…”
“I,” I say pointedly, grabbing his face and yanking it up toward me, “am the woman you shot in the chest at Shakers that night. The very last victim to be killed. You murdered me.”