I’m going to miss you.
—found unsent, Felicia Xia’s pager,
intended recipient unknown
Excepted from Tell Me A Tragedy
In the end, I didn’t have to wait long.
Minutes after the lights all shut off, the office walls crashed in.
In the chaos, I nearly missed it. Everything burst in a flurry of lights and shattered glass. My jacket sheltered me from most of it, but I dove behind the desk for more cover. In the mess, I nearly missed Hayden’s avenging form, stalking out of the darkness.
This wasn’t what any of us expected.
But there was no mistaking the crunch of his boots, the low challenge as soon as he saw Charles.
I sat up against the hard, wooden desk, groping blindly at my belt for my flashlight. Ear-splitting screeches—the sound of glass scraping on glass—filled the air. In my haste to get up, I slammed my head against the wood.
Too fast, I thought. I hadn’t been expecting the brutality of it all. I thought Hayden would slip in through a vent, find a crack in the room, but now everything was chaos, and as I scrabbled around, broken glass dug into the palms of my hands, leaving little nicks.
Get up, get up, I thought.
I flicked the flashlight on and swung it around, trying to catch where Hayden and Charles had gone.
Streaks of light painted the room, dancing about while I tried to still my shaking hands.
I only caught glimpses of the ugly, brutal fight. A flash of Hayden’s wild eyes, Charles’s grunt of pain. I saw their hands, grappling at each other, hard enough to break things. There was the heavy crash of a body, hitting the floor, and I jumped back, trying to aim my meagre beam of light to see what had happened.
A dark silhouette on the ground. In the hazy dark, I had no time to discern who it was before it heaved itself back upright, tackling the other again with a loud grunt.
My light steadied.
Hayden had caught Charles around the middle, but Charles had his hands fisted in Hayden’s hair.
They stumbled back, crashing hard into the shelf behind them.
Sheafs of paper rained down, and then they disappeared again into the flurry.
I don’t know how else to describe it: desperate, maybe. Wild. Animalistic. Rivulets of something dark painted Charles’s sleeves, Hayden’s hair. Copper bloomed in my own mouth—had I bit my tongue when the walls came down?
Eventually, they both stilled.
I swept the room again.
Harsh breathing echoed against my ears. The light caught Charles first, and he flinched back. A purple welt snaked across his nose, and his hair had spilled over his forehead. As he squinted against my light, I watched thought bleed back into his expression, his mouth slowly falling slack. He had the sense to look shamed.
He had taken a hand full of Hayden’s hair, pulled his head back. Hayden’s glasses lay broken on the ground before him.
I traced the line of Hayden’s exposed neck with my light, up to his gaze. His eyes were squeezed shut, a long line of blood running from a cut somewhere high on his forehead.
I took a step back and let my light wash over them both, standing frozen like a tableau.
There was a dark stain spreading from Charles’s knee. He leaned heavily against the wall as he sucked in great, heaving breaths, pulling tighter on Hayden all the while.
I dug inside my jacket.
“Is this what you wanted?” Charles hissed into Hayden’s ear, surprisingly soft. “Is this what your revenge looks like?”
Hayden’s nostrils flared.
“You’ve miscalculated,” Charles said. His hands shook, white-knuckled in the mess of Hayden’s hair.
“Have I?”
Charles laughed harshly. He wrapped an arm around Hayden’s neck. “Who wins, here?”
It could’ve looked like an embrace, if it weren’t for the way Hayden stiffened, his jaw trembling.
“What,” Charles started, cajoling, “are you going to accomplish by dying?”
At that, Hayden unfurled a fist, revealing the broken, jagged edge of a piece of glass. Sharp as a knife.
I pulled out my gun.
The stark glow from my flashlight painted the scene before me like a baroque painting. Hayden’s face, twisted in a grimace, lit from below. Charles, with his head bowed and profile in chiaroscuro, lips pressed in a flat line as if he couldn’t believe what he was doing either.
Slowly, Hayden brought his hand up, and rested the tip of his jagged glass weapon against the beating pulse at Charles’s neck.
“Hayden,” Charles said, his voice transforming, fake tender dulcet tones and bitterness both swallowed in a frantic squeak. “You can’t—”
“Maybe you should’ve considered, when you killed my father,” Hayden said, eyes wide, as if in a trance.
“Yes,” Charles blurted, “yes, okay, I—I made a rash decision, but that doesn’t mean you have to do the same.”
“Rash?”
“Think about what you’re doing!” Charles shouted. He tried to move away, but Hayden’s arm jerked as if involuntarily, and Charles cried out in pain. A drip of blood trickled down his neck, from the tip of the shard that Hayden held in his shaking hand.
Some part of me felt a detached awe. I had seen Charles vulnerable, sincere, sad, but never this frantic, never this afraid. I lifted the gun quietly, trying to see through the tangle of limbs, wondering if it was even possible to hit only one of them, they were so tangled up.
“This isn’t a rash decision,” Hayden said, and there was calm in his voice, I heard it.
Charles must have, too. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, voice breaking.
Tears streaked Hayden’s cheeks, tracks through the dried blood. He took in a deep breath. “You say that like it means anything anymore.”
“What else am I supposed to say?” Charles loosened the circle of his arm, lowered Hayden’s head. “What else can I offer now? I’ll give you anything you want, Hayden, please.”
“You know what I want,” Hayden returned, still mechanical, too smooth.
“But why? Because Graham said so? Let me go and I’ll let you both walk. Open the doors. Goddammit, Hayden.”
Hayden’s head was tilted to one side, like he couldn’t understand what was going on. I wondered if this was the first time he had seen his uncle hysterical, too.
“Don’t you love me enough to not murder me in cold blood?” Charles pressed on.
The corner of Hayden’s lip twitched. “Is that what my father asked?”
Charles whimpered.
Something sharpened in Hayden’s eyes. I recognized that look: darkly malevolent, but regretful. He tilted his head down like he had all the way in the beginning, right before he sliced his own arm open, like the first time he lied to me, the first time he kissed me. The look of a man about to upend his entire world.
He pressed in further with the glass, slow, as if deliberate, ignoring Charles’s desperate, feeble “No,” and I knew there was to be no convincing him.
So I shot him.