The list he sent me was long. Names of the dead he said. He went on a whole tangent about how they were his new enemies and didn’t even pay me extra for wasting my time. He could keep his maniacal villainy to himself, I didn’t care if he considered them friends let alone foes. They were on the list and that’s that. Truthfully though, if you don’t mind me getting a little personal, I never liked killing. Its more of a hobby than a passion. If the money wasn’t so good you’d see me in a different profession, but here i can get a few thousand a head, not bad if i get 2 jobs a day. This list alone would keep me set for the next year at least. The only problem was who the targets were. Big names spread across my screen and only the last was unrecognizable. I went down the list all the same.

Over the span of 2 weeks i made some look like freak accidents while others were simply the unfortunate result of allergies. As for the last name, i had to do research on this one. I looked up the name expecting another billionaire that i happened to never hear of but the only thing that came up was a well off elderly woman and her dozens of grandkids. I called my contact and asked him to verify the information. He answered seemingly drunk but present enough to tell me i was looking in the wrong place. No, he said, no no its a kid. I hung up on him. My policy was no kids, everyones policy was no kids, but still curious i looked for the child anyway. She was named after her grandmother and it was easy to find her in the lineage. And it was even easier to identify her as the kid i gave up.

Don’t look at me like that, it was a long time ago and her father was absent, i couldn’t do it on my own. After she was born i tried, i nursed her for 6 months but times were getting hard and I couldn’t afford my baby the life she deserved. So i left her on the doorstep of a good couple, a rich couple, and i forgot all about them. Not her, never her, i will remember that face until the day i die, but her new family i had not recalled. It seemed that their last name had changed after 8 years. Still I continued my scroll through their social media pages not caring about them as I watched her on my screen with more longing than i thought was possible. She was doing soccer now, and she was bad at it. I laughed while i watched videos from her mothers page of her missing the ball and pouting on the bench after getting switched out. Then I’d go to the next post and she’d be smiling, still in her uniform with ice cream in her hand.

She looked happy, and that was enough.

I closed the tab and got myself prepared for bed, ignoring the constant ring of my phone. The deal was done in my eyes, I got my money for the other names, we were through. But another hour of his harassment finally made me hear him out. I yelled into the phone asking him what the hell he wanted and his reply sounded angrier than mine. If you, he huffed, out of breath, If you don’t do it i will get someone who will. I had been in this business long enough to know that there were people who had no code. He wasn’t lying, and now I couldn’t sleep. I slowly sat up and looked at my gear spread on my desk.

You, I said, are on my list.