This Love Hurts (This Love Hurts 1)

I sent the old man away when we got to the scene and he gagged; we didn’t need two of us back in the alley while we waited for backup and transport for the body. Sirens were a constant, and one bellowed behind us as he headed toward the street. The sun was setting. I watched it fall for a moment and did my best to avoid making eye contact with an older woman who peeked out of her curtains three stories up in the worn brick apartments across the street. She wouldn’t talk, I knew that much. I also knew everyone fed information to the mob. If a person breathed in that town, they did the dirty work of Romano. Whether out of fear or a need to survive, I didn’t know and I still don’t.

I had an evidence bag in my hand, ready to pick up a necklace that looked like it’d been ripped from the woman. A thin red gash colored her neck and the silver chain was dull with dried blood as the streetlights flickered on.

“Shame, isn’t it?” I heard Marcus before I saw him. He’s good at sneaking around and hiding in shadows. Monsters like him all do the same.

With a hand on my holster, I heard the familiar sound of a bullet being chambered in a Glock. He tsked me as I stood there, painfully still, with my blood rushing in my ears.

“Don’t do anything stupid.”

I could try to pull out my weapon, and probably get shot. I could call out for my partner and probably get us both killed. Instead, I stared down at the woman’s face and held my breath waiting for his next move. I didn’t know where he was. Somewhere above me and to the left judging by how his voice carried. The alley sat between buildings with shops on street level and apartments five stories up. Back then I assumed he was watching from a window in one of those apartments. He had the upper hand and the cold sweat on the back of my neck made me all too aware that I knew he was the one in control.

He told me not to turn around, right before I heard the thud of a man jump and land behind me. The sun may have been setting but there was enough daylight to see him if I dared to disobey.

“Who are you?” I questioned, although I had an inkling. We’d been keeping tabs on the local mafia for a while; we knew the real names of their members, had files on their whereabouts and aliases. There was one name that was only whispered. A rumor, a ghost. A single name and no other information save a list of bodies the people around here credited to him. We thought he was an assassin but as the truth unfolded over the years, I learned he was more than that. He was an angel of death. A murderer who killed based on his own morals and judgment. The chills flowing down my arms and the way he spoke made the name resonate in my mind before he spoke. When I first started, I thought the man didn’t exist, but years in that town made one thing very clear. Monsters are real and the one named Marcus was the worst of them.

Marcus, he answered me and I knew the man behind me was a wanted serial killer who caused fear to run down the spines of even the hardest men from the mob that we’d interviewed. They called him the grim reaper, the monster under your bed. They called him a lot of things, but they only ever whispered his name in a single hiss.

He didn’t stop to ask my name; he didn’t ask me anything at all, merely made a comment about the dead woman followed by a sucking sound of discontent. And how it wasn’t supposed to be her.

“What do you mean it wasn’t supposed to be her?” I downplayed my interest as best I could, all while trying to conceal the nerves that rattled me and the fear that forced me to stare down the alley the way my partner had gone. I was alone with a man I couldn’t see who held a gun at my back.

It was quiet for a long moment. Too many seconds passed for my liking. “I don’t know that I can trust you yet.”

“Are you going to kill me?” I didn’t give myself conscious permission to ask, yet I did. I didn’t want to die. Sure as hell not in some dirty alley with a gunshot to the back of the head.

“Why would I kill you? You want what I want.”

I didn’t answer and I didn’t need to. All Marcus did was direct my next steps.