The Girl Who Would Be King(144)

“No, no I don’t suppose you are.”

“A boy can hope.”

“You really shouldn’t bother.”

“Y’know Lola, despite all my preparation, I kind of knew it was going to go this way. I knew the only chance I had of killing you before you killed me was if I just did it, right off the bat, before you even regained consciousness.”

“You’re probably right,” I say. “So Adrian, if you don’t mind my asking. Why didn’t you just do it?” I pause and then echo his words of a moment ago. “I don’t suppose a girl can hope that, after all this time, it was love.”

“Would that stop you from killing me?” he asks.

As much as I want to hear it from him, I can’t bear to stoop and lie to him. “Not this time.”

“I didn’t think so. It wasn’t love, though I did love you once,” he says.

“Gee, thanks,” I pause, “So, what was it?”

“Just the revenge, I think,” he says shrugging his shoulders, seemingly resigned to his fate, like he actually accepted it long ago. “I’ve been looking for you for so long, always with only one thing on my mind. And you know, I think I’ve been planning to die this whole time. Knowing that I wanted to hurt you, but also somehow knowing it would be the end of me.”

He can’t possibly know how hard that last sentence hits me. It shocks even me how much I relate to it.

“I understand what you mean.”

“You do?”

“I really do.”

“That’s kind of nice, then.”

“Yeah, yeah it is.” The gun has been sitting between my legs as we talk. Now I just casually pick it up and shoot him in the head with no warning. I don’t do it to be cruel, I do it so he won’t be afraid like Felice had been. I do it to be merciful.

Part of me does still love him.

He falls slowly to the floor, slumping at first and then his head hitting the concrete with a wet thud. There’s surprisingly little blood. My aim was good. He’s lying there, staring at me with his eyes open and I lie down too, so I’m looking right at him for a while. Except for the distance between us, I can almost imagine it’s like those long days we spent in bed together, just staring at one another. Eventually, I curl up in a fetal position and close my eyes to focus on purging my body of the rest of his animal tranquilizers and whatever alcohol might remain, also a general clean up of miscellaneous wounds, which are many. I cry for a long time too, not just for Adrian, but for myself. I realize now, lying there with him, that killing Adrian has also killed the last soft parts in me. It’s all hard now without him. I’d thought killing Liz was the last of the soft parts, but I guess I’d buried some softness for Adrian deep inside, and now that’s gone too. Adrian was my last chance. The last person I hadn’t killed, the last person I cared for, the last shred of whatever humanity I had left.

All gone now.

And it makes me sad. Sad for me, and sad for the world. Sad for everything that must be coming now.



I wake up a few hours later and it takes a moment to realize where I am, but it comes flooding back like a painful dream and I try not to look at Adrian’s body. I stretch my arms and stand up. I test my legs and crack my neck. I have no idea where I even am. I open the door to the room and am alone in another room, a large abandoned basement in a building somewhere. I look at the door to the room I’d been in. It’s an old fallout shelter. There’s an exit at the far end of the basement, when I go through it, a bright warm sun assaults me. A Los Angeles sun if I’ve ever seen one. Looking around I recognize street names. “Sonofabitch,” I smile. We’re still in my L.A. territory, barely two blocks from my penthouse.

I take flight immediately to survey my lands and what has been going on – and likely wrong – in my absence. I can’t have been gone more than 48 hours but I can tell from the air, that edges are fraying. It looks like my henchman have managed to lose ground on both the northeast and southwest sides of my border – pushing us back almost two whole streets on each side, and the wall only partially built on the north and west sides. “Sonofabitch,” I breathe again, setting down on the roof. “Jeeves!!! Moe!!!” I scream down the hallway from the roof deck to the floor below. The door flies open a moment later and Jeeves appears, out of breath and shocked.

“Boss! Where’ve you been?!” he asks.

“I’ve gotta better question for you, Jeeves – what the hell happened to my borders?!” I scream, gesturing to the horizon around me.

“We uh, had some, um, setbacks,” he starts, looking down at his feet sheepishly.