She hadn’t cried then. She’d expensed the bullet.
Unforgivable.
Lena traced the scar on her ribs—a memento from Cairo, from a man she’d strangled with a fiber optic cable. For five years, that memory had tasted like victory: clean, sharp, deserved. Now, looking at it, she felt something warm and unwelcome coil in her stomach. The Killing Antidote
She took the stairs instead of the elevator, counting steps to quiet her mind. By floor twelve, her hands were trembling. Not from fear—from the absence of it. For the first time, she imagined Voss not as a silhouette on a dossier but as a person. A man who might have a daughter. Who might cry.
It was unbearable.
It saved the mirror.
Now you have to live with it.
But something held her back. Not mercy. Memory.