Page 6 of The Hitman

“Just because you didn’t get married doesn’t mean you can’t go on your honeymoon.”

* * *

Giulio

Salvatore told me to skip town as soon as I completed this job. I follow all of his orders without hesitation, but I want this holiday so badly that I’ve been using it as motivation. Between hunting my targets, I’ve booked my hotel, bought my plane ticket, and stocked up on condoms. I’m ready, and by morning, I’ll be gone.

First, I just have to check this final thing off the list Salvo gave me, but it’s taking forever, and I hate waiting. There are worse ways to spend an evening, but there are definitely better ways as well.

Sure, I’m not shuffling to the communal shower in a dank gray prison with a homemade weapon hidden under my folded clothes, the disgusting slapping sound of sandals over wet concrete heralding the time of day, but I’m also not in a luxury hotel suite, on my back with one woman riding my dick and another sitting on my face either. Hell, I’m not even sitting at my nona’s dining room table, letting her feed me too much roast chicken and freshly baked bread. So yeah…my night could be worse, but it also could be so much better than sitting in a cold car outside a rundown house on the wrong side of town, waiting.

I like to think of myself as a man of action. Not in the impulsive knobhead kind of way, but in a “point me and my gun at the problem and let me kill it” kind of way. I’m not interested in waiting for backup. I like to get in, get it done, and get out, but here I am, with my gun, ready to get the job done, and my target is MIA.

I hate it.

I huff out another sigh and check my watch. Five hours. I’ve been sitting in front of this house in a cold car, waiting, with a Berretta in my lap for five hours. I have a flight I need to catch in six hours. If I miss it, I’m going to take my frustrations out on this asshole I’ve been waiting all night for. He’s the last name on the list. His time has run out, and if he makes me miss my flight, he’ll spend his last few hours as a living man regretting it.

And then I’ll book another flight, make it to this hotel that’s costing me a fortune per night, and finally let some woman I hope to never see again use my face like a chair for as long as she likes.

What I’m saying is that I have plans, and nothing is getting in the way of that.

4Zahra

I can’t speak Italian.

I bought a phrase book. It’s probably somewhere in the bags I packed nearly a week ago, but I don’t look for it before I land in Milan, because I don’t care. I’m dehydrated from all the crying and champagne I drank on the flight over, and the last thing I want to do is speak to anyone in any language, so who cares?

Ryan doesn’t speak Italian either, but we’d talked about how romantic it would be to spend an entire week on our honeymoon, struggling to communicate in a new language together. I’d imagined our honeymoon as a kind of team-building exercise, a time to focus on each other and our relationship, while eating all the pasta and gelato we could stand. I’d imagined the joy of not worrying about work or paparazzi or Ryan’s social media content. It was supposed to be perfect; we’d paid damn good money for perfect. The reality is far from perfect. I’m not married. Ryan’s not here.

I’m going to drink all the Italian wine instead of eating all the pasta. This is me, learning how to pivot in my new life without lists.

“Reason for visiting Italia?” the bored border agent drones at me without looking up from my passport.

I take a deep breath and bite the inside of my cheek, trying to stop the tears from forming in my eyes. I fail.

“Madam? Reason for visiting Italia?” he asks again, his voice much less bored the second time around. He sits up in his chair and finally looks at me. I’m guessing that he sees a tired, slightly hungover American with wet eyes and a trembling lower lip, and that gets all his attention. Unfortunately.

I can feel the weight of his heightened scrutiny. I know I’m playing this all wrong. I already look…well, unhinged might be optimistic. I’ve had a headache for a full day. My curly hair is still pinned in an elaborate twisted crown around my head, and there’s a bobby pin literally digging into the back of my head. But nearly thirty-six hours since my hairdresser shellacked this style into place with half a bottle of hairspray, after ripping my veil from my head and sleeping fitfully on the planewithoutmy silk scarf, I know without even checking that the elegant style looks less like the regal crown I was going for and more like a bird’s nest.

And I can’t even imagine what my face looks like. Every time I stumbled to the first-class bathroom on the plane, I conveniently avoided looking at my reflection. I couldn’t bear it. So I don’t know if there’s even any makeup on my face. My throat is dry, my skin is drier, my eyes are so puffy they hurt, and I smell. Like, I can smell myself, and I hate it. So yeah, I can only imagine what the border agent is thinking as he looks at me. And even worse, I can imagine what I’ll look like on the front page of every gossip magazine with the bold headline: “Ryan Fuller’s jilted fiancée has been detained in Italy trying to go on their honeymoon alone.” I can literally visualize it in my head. I can’t let that happen.

Especially because hair and puffy face aside, I’m also dressed in an all-white Adidas tracksuit with the word “Mrs.” written across my ass — without the accompanying man in the matching “Mr.” outfit. I’m not particularly confident in my own abilities to save myself, but I need to try. I need to pull myself together at least long enough to get into this damn country.

I unclench my teeth but clench my fists. I dig my jagged nails into my palm and take a deep breath. I blink away the tears in my eyes, just enough to see the border control agent clearly; well…mostly clearly.

I’ve never been a great liar, and I don’t have enough energy to try, so I decide to tell this random man the truth.

“I’m here,” I start hesitantly, “because this is supposed to be my honeymoon. But yesterday — my wedding day — I turned on the news to find out that my fiancé had spent the night before fu—” I cringe, lick my lips, swallow and course correct. “The night before our wedding, myex-fiancé had sex with my former best friend and a really famous stripper. So instead of being here on my honeymoon and doing a bunch of romantic and touristy stuff, I’m here to get drunk and eat a lot of carbs and probably cry myself into a coma. I don’t know how you note that on the forms, but that’s my reason for visiting Italia.”

Some people say that when you unburden yourself, you feel free. Not me. Now that I’ve told someone about the soap opera I’m trying to escape, I feel more fully like the disheveled, stinking mess that I am. I hate Ryan and Trisha anew. I press my lips together and wait for some kind of response, and I get it. I watch as the light of interest fades from the passport agent’s eyes slowly as he processes what I’ve said.

He sighs at me as if I’ve just told him that I’m here to count churches and statues. “That’s it? I was hoping for something illegal. This job is so dull,” he mutters the last sentence to himself. He rolls his eyes, stamps my passport, and slides it across the counter back to me. “Benvenuta a Italia, I guess,” he says, eyes already shifting away. “Next,” he yells before I can even scramble away.

I follow the signs to baggage claim. I’m so weak that when I finally see my suitcases, I struggle to get one off the conveyor belt and have to wait for the second one to do a full rotation on the carousel before I can grab it. I struggle to pull that one onto solid ground as well. No one helps me. I feel very alone.

I roll my baggage cart into the main terminal and come face-to-face with a small crowd of people milling around the entrance to the main airport terminal. In my mind, I know these are people waiting for their loved ones to arrive, but they remind me so much of the paparazzi that I freeze as spikes of fear shoot up my spine. Ryan’s not here for me to hide behind or to give me cover to duck out of the way. Zoe’s not here to throw a drink at anyone who gets too close. I don’t even have Shae to grab my hand and endure this with me. There’s only me, and being alone sucks. I haven’t been alone since I started dating Ryan six years ago, and before that, I’d always had Zoe and Shae.

Thinking about Zoe is a mistake; it only deepens my paralysis. Even though she and I are polar opposites and fight constantly, she’s never hesitated to put herself between me and the world, and I’d stupidly let Ryan come between us. And now she’s half a world away. She didn’t even come to the airport to see me off, not that I was particularly coherent when Shae and I met up with my mom and Aunt Caroline. I kept waiting for her to show up for me while I cried and changed out of my wedding dress in a bathroom stall that smelled so strongly of industrial-strength disinfectant that my eyes hurt.